of a deserted garage or warehouse nearby where András could exercise his special talents to the fullest.
Val put the computer on the passenger seat very carefully. As if it were a wounded person who could not be jarred. His hands felt numb.
On autopilot, he grabbed the car keys and pushed open the car door. He stumbled out onto the rocky beach and kept walking, all the way to where it sloped down to the rocky little coves.
He fell to his knees. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. He was cut loose, spinning in space.
Memories played in his mind. Games of chess in the twilight, cups of tea. Philosophy, lectures and arguments and admonishments that made him roll his eyes and scoff, secretly enjoying the attention. Bach and Chopin, Dante and Socrates and Galileo. Van Gogh, Picasso, Rembrandt. The world Imre had shown him. So beautiful, outside that squalid hole he was mired in like a fucking tarpit. Beautiful, even though Val could never quite reach it. Like a mirage in the desert, forever taunting him.
The pebbles roared with each wave that slapped the beach. He realized that he’d come to the place Domenico had brought him when he’d been infiltrating the smuggling ring and fucking Donatella.
The honeycomb of smugglers’ caves.
Tourists came from all over the world to stroll the beach, sip cappuccino, and take boat rides inside the glowing, flickering lakes inside those mysterious caves. No idea of the cruelty and violence and greed that always lurked just out of sight behind the mask of beauty.
Imre. He started to cry, covering his face, shoulders jerking. He felt like the twelve-year-old boy he had been when Imre had befriended him, and showed him what trust looked like. How kindness felt.
The first time he had understood what kindness even was. He had never known it before, not really. Val’s own mother had not been cruel—but she was broken, weak. Too degraded by drugs and disappointment to trust. Too lost in despair to be kind.
He had loved her anyway, desperately, but he knew even then that she was broken. Kindness required strength and courage. Coherence.
These types of thoughts were so unfamiliar to his mind, it almost hurt to think them. Like eyes opening up for the first time, squinting and awash with tears, unable to bear the brilliant light.
Tamar was the strongest, most courageous woman he had ever known. Strong enough to trust. Strong enough to be kind, too, whether she knew it or not. Kindness from her would be something real. Something he could touch, grab on to. Something he could live in.
He had a dizzy sense of being adrift, swirling, with no oars, no sense of direction. He had to find a course to set, fast. To save the last chance he had for a real life. Him and Tamar and Rachel. They could run together to the ends of the earth. Disappear like smoke.
Anything so that Imre’s desperate last move would not be in vain.
Get Tamar. Get away. He was equal to that with the resources he had, if he moved his ass, made his weak knees, his jelly-like thighs move. If he could stop the tears.
There would be time enough for tears later at that haven at the ends of the earth. With his family around him.
His family. His heart felt like it would burst. Ah, Imre.
He rubbed the tears out of his eyes again, and that was when he saw them, gleaming in front of his face. Highly shined, pointy-toed, hand-tooled black Italian leather shoes. Well-tailored pants draped over them. A long black cashmere coat, flapping in the raw sea breeze.
Val’s gaze traveled up, saw the big, silenced pistol. Big shoulders. Thick neck. Sealed, hard mouth. Black snake eyes.
András. There were five other men with him. Large, bulky men. Italian, and local, from the looks of them. They shifted into position around him.
“You’ve been called home,” András said. “Where’s the woman?”
He started to rise to his feet. The pistol swung up, aimed at his face. He sank back down. In his peripheral vision, tourists wandered on the beach, too far away to blunder by and help or be witnesses. One of András’s men held a tracking device.
A tracking device? How had they tagged him? How?
Two thoughts blazed in his head. Contradictory thoughts. The first was that finally, he was free to die after Imre’s gift. Tamar was smart enough, crafty enough to slip away and save herself on her own.
The second was that they could not kill him outright—yet. Not without prying her position out of him first.
So fuck the guns. He’d trained hard for years in the art of fighting from a crouching or kneeling position. Fighting six men on their feet from that position was problematic, but who cared. He had nothing better to do. He was free to die if he damn well felt like it.
No. He thought of Tamar, and suddenly, he did not feel like it.
His lower body exploded upward, balanced on his hands, boot heel connecting with the chin of the man nearest him, crunch. The man pinwheeled backward and fell to the ground, gurgling. Val’s other leg whipped around like a lash and hooked the legs of the next man, dragging him down with a vicious jerk.
Action detonated something inside him, the anger and fear and humiliation of the past days abruptly channeled into berserk madness. He got in a vicious punch to the point of the man’s nose, which loosened his grip on his gun, which Val wrenched loose and out of his hands. He swung it up, shot the man point blank in the gut.
Another man was diving for him. Thhtp, he got one into the thigh, knocking his legs out from under him. The man toppled in Val’s direction. Two heavy bodies weighing him down to the jagged rocks.
He struggled, heaving, breaking loose just in time to roll away from a kick from András that would have cracked his spine. He caught it on his hip, let its energy keep him rolling up onto his feet.
He kept the pain at bay as András came on with a growling shout. Parried a slashing blow to the neck, trapped András’s wrist in a tendon-twisting hold, spun him around and sent him flying into one of his men, who tripped and fell on his ass.
András sprawled on top of him, roaring with rage.
Go. This was his cue to run and test the hopeful theory that they could not shoot him, not without Tamar. Not fatally, at least.
Two shots rang out. Neither hit him. András howled in his thickly accented Italian. “No, dickhead idiot! Hold your fire! We need him alive!”
He slipped, rolled, slid down the steep rocks to the drop-off to the little cove beach where Domenico had showed him the belly-crawl entrance to the cave—and stopped, teetering on the brink.
That entrance had been accessible at low tide. At high tide, on a cold, blustery winter’s day with the sea wildly agitated, that little cove was deep beneath a seething, heaving bowl of frigid foam.
He leaped.
The living room was full of people, but no one seemed to be able to speak. The words had all been said and repeated, over and over. Now they were locked in a nail-chewing, coffee-sipping, miserable silence.
Sveti stared down into the cup of cold herbal tea, rocking
