“Shh.” I kiss the top of his head, inhaling his strong, virile male scent. “Even if I’m not here, I’ll still be with you. That’s my promise. Always remember it.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he says in a thick voice.
“No more secrets, remember? We have to be honest. We have to accept death is a possibility, a very strong one.”
Yan pulls away to look at me, his handsome features desolate. “Marry me.”
“What?”
“Marry me,” he says with heated certainty. “Tomorrow. Here.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat. “I’m touched, but…”
“But what?”
“I don’t want to make you a widower.”
“Maybe you won’t. I could die long before you. I could get killed on a job.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Don’t you see? What matters is now. I want you in every way. I want you to carry my name for however long we have. Time isn’t what matters. A year or fifty isn’t what counts.” He takes my palm and places it over his heart. “It’s what’s in here. It’s not how long. It’s how much.”
I try to blink my own tears away as more pureness and unequalled beauty, much more than I deserve, fill my heart, my soul, and all the hours left of my life.
“We’ll always belong to each other,” he says. “Now. Tomorrow. Until we’re both gone.”
My tears flow so fast I can’t control them any longer. I can only look at him as my heart bursts with love. The numbness I carried for decades is gone, washed away in the tsunami of emotions assailing my mind. With one touch, he made my body come alive. With his words, he did the same to my soul. Instead of being cold and empty, I feel.
He makes me feel so much.
“What do you say?” he asks, hope breaking through the darkness in his eyes to shine like a light on our bleak situation.
“Yes.” I smile through my tears. “Yes, I want to be Mina Ivanova.”
Forgetting about my injury, he takes me into his arms and squeezes until it hurts, but I don’t mind the pain, because he’s cut the string that tied down my heart, letting it float up like a red balloon in a bleak sky. But not all of it is bleak.
Mortality makes it bleak.
Love makes it miraculous.
37
Yan
Thanks to Dr. Adami’s thoughtfulness, a bed was brought to Mina’s room for me. Mina naps frequently due to her pain medication. It’s also her body’s natural way of recovering. She needs her rest. I like that I’m able to sleep next to her, even if our twin beds put a small distance between us. I can’t bear not to be at her side, not even for a second, but there’s much to do. When she falls asleep after breakfast, I make my way to the basement where Anton and Ilya are working. They’re not only keeping an eye on our surroundings, but also taking care of something else. Something extremely important.
“Any news?” I ask as I push open the door.
The room, one of the bigger storage spaces, is fitted with metal shelves stacked with linens and cleaning products. Despite the bare concrete floor and walls, it’s warm, courtesy of the electrical heater Adami provided.
Anton is sitting behind the desk he’s dragged inside, studying his laptop monitor. Ilya is poised on the edge of the desk with a packet of potato chips clutched in his hand.
“Nothing yet,” Anton says. “Our virus is piggybacking on Interpol software. If Nagy shows up at an airport or train station, we’ll know about it.” He scratches his head. “The problem, of course, is that he’s a disguise genius. He may be right in front of us, and we won’t know it.”
A problem that irks me to no end.
“He’ll come for us eventually.” Ilya stuffs a handful of chips into his mouth. “We just have to be ready.”
Not a chance I like to take. By now, Nagy knows that Kiss, as well as Dimitrov and his team, is dead. He knows we know the extent of his deceit. He knows he’ll never be safe again. No man wants to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. He may run until the dust settles, but Ilya is right. At some point, he’ll come for us. That’s what any assassin would do, especially one who knows we have a score to settle—and whose life is worth ten million. The only way he can cancel that price on his head is by killing us.
“What about friends and family?” I ask.
Anton leans back in his chair and stretches out his legs. “He’s pretty much a loner.” He regards me thoughtfully. “We could draw him out.”
“How?”
His grin is all cream. “How do you catch a mouse?”
“No.” Absolutely fucking not. “We’re not setting a trap. I’m not risking Mina.”
“What if it’s far away from Mina?” Ilya asks.
“I’m not leaving her on her own. It’s too dangerous.”
“No,” Anton says, “we shouldn’t leave Mina, at least not all of us—and especially not now. But we can make him believe she’s somewhere else.”
I rub the back of my neck. I don’t like using Mina as bait, whether she’s actually there or not, but it could take years before we nail Nagy and I’m not prepared to wait that long. Every day is another twenty-four hours too long, another twenty-four hours Mina’s life hangs in the balance. “Explain.”
Anton interlaces his fingers over his stomach. “We get our connection to issue death certificates for us and put Mina up in a safe house.”
“Let me get this straight,” Ilya says with a full mouth. “We pretend to be dead and let Nagy believe Mina made a deal in exchange for immunity.”
“Exactly,” Anton says. “We put the safe house address in the system where Nagy will be able to hack it. Not too easily, mind you; otherwise, he’ll smell a rat.”
“So,” I clarify, “we lead him
