Page 89 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“There was a note in the mailbox.Spokoynoy nochi.”
“Michael...”
“Good night,” he translated—not because Alex didn’t know but because those were the words that haunted him. “I was ten years old. We’d just moved to the States. My grandfather had passed away, and my grandmother was living with us. Dad was out of the field, but there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t work out of Langley. The Agency put us in transitional housing and... we were out.We were getting out.The Cold War had been over for decades, and we had nothing to do with the Russians, but then... Dad decided to write a book. About Nikolai. It was nothing more than ghost stories, or so we thought, but... He must have gotten too close to something the Russians wanted to hide.Or someone.” He stopped and looked at her, piercing and stoic. “It was meant for him—the bomb. It was meant for my father, but it killed his wife and his mother, and the guilt... I lost him too.” He looked out the window. “It just took him a lot longer to die.”
“Michael...”
“He loved my mom too much, and it broke him. He became... obsessed. The world’s foremost authority on someone who doesn’t exist. But now...”
He looked at her through the shadows, found her gaze, and held on tight.
“Now Nikolai wants us?” she guessed, but he just shook his head.
“Now Nikolai wants that ring.”
“And so...”
She’d never seen him look so hard—so lethal. “Now we go get it.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Six Years Ago
Berlin, Germany
Alex
Alex didn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa, just a faint, dreamlike memory of floating through the air. Of strong arms and the brush of warm lips and an almost silent whisper.
Sleep well, sweetheart.
But it was probably a dream.
The man sitting beside her on the bed, however, was very, very real as Alex came awake too quickly.
She started to bolt upright, but a big hand pressed her down, a gentle reminder not to move and not to fight. That there are some stitches in life you shouldn’t tug at. One glance at King’s face told her it wouldn’t take much to make them both unravel.
“What...” Her throat was raw, and the sky was dark, and she didn’t know why he was sitting there, fully clothed, instead of lying on the bed beside her.
“What time is it?”
He didn’t own a clock. She supposed it was because he didn’t need one. She usually didn’t either. Her internal alarms were finely tuned and tightly wound, but somehow, in the last few days, the second hand had stopped ticking. Time was never on their side.
“Michael... you’re scaring me.” The old Alex would never have admitted it, but that was before the bullets and the blood and... “What is it?”
“I’m out,” he said to the shadows, and Alex’s sleepy brain couldn’t think of anything except—
“Of the closet?”
“No.” Was that a chuckle? She couldn’t tell. She just knew that the room got suddenly colder when he said, “The Agency.”
She’d misheard him. He was speaking a language she didn’t know.
“What did you just say?” She propped herself up as much as she could with a gunshot wound, but right then she barely felt it.
“I’m leaving the Agency. The life. I’m done.”
“I...” Alex couldn’t make the words make sense. There were so many thoughts swirling around in her mind, but for some reason the thing that came out was, “I can’t believe you’re telling me this while I’m half dead and half naked.”
