Cora jumped, instantly alert, not that she hasn’t been painfully alert the entire time since coming to Denmark.
“There’s a man selling cigarettes to children!” she declared loudly. Gloria was known for being dramatic, it seemed to Cora that she was flamboyantly emotional about all things, but this caught her immediate interest.
In Miami where Cora had lived as a bounty hunter, she had gotten a whole drug wing of the local syndicate busted for doing just that. Only it had been methamphetamines instead of cigarettes, but potato-pitato, right?
“Where did you see such a thing?” Flora – the shop owner who always enabled Gloria if for no other reason than she was a great tipper – asked, aghast.
Cora could guess where she had seen it, just up the road there was a school. She diverted her eyes out the window, searching for this mysterious man passing out cigarettes to minors. She saw nothing, even though the school was in full view.
Typical, the loud witness had run their mouth and scared away the game before it could be caught. Rookie mistake.
“Right up the road! What should I do?”
Well, don’t bother going to the police. They’ll take your statement and file it into the trash-bin, Cora thought.
“You should go to the police,” Flora said. “They can set up surveillance.”
Unlikely, but maybe the police in Denmark were more reliable and more likely to follow-up on a complaint of this level. After all, Cora didn’t know anything about law enforcement in Denmark, but she’d had to deal with so much incompetence from police in Florida that she was skeptical.
“I’ve already reported him!” Gloria sputtered.
Sounds about right, Cora thought bitterly. If it were her, she’d apply her own surveillance. It could be boring, but it paid off when some jackass selling addictive drugs to children saw the inside of a cell for their dirty deeds.
“They said they couldn’t waste resources,” Gloria went on to whine and Flora gasped at the audacity of it. “I mean, what could be more important than the safety of our own children?”
What indeed? Cora wondered, heat blossoming behind her neck, a familiar desire to rise up and do something, put a stop to the madness, then an equally familiar feeling of helplessness chilled the heat of her passion. She couldn’t do anything about it. She had to lay low, for her life and Asher’s. So that The Company, no doubt hunting him for his desertion, didn’t find and kill them both.
She couldn’t do anything to help, the children would just have to be smart enough to say no. As if...
“There he is again!” Gloria shrieked and everyone, including Cora, turned their attention to the window.
He was short in stature, with a thick build hidden beneath a baggy sweatshirt. He leaned forward into a hunched posture and walked with a slight limp. His face was hidden by a ball cap and a beard, scraggly hair sticking from beneath his hat as coarse as straw. Cora took in as many details as she could in the two seconds it took for him to limp past the salon window. It was second nature now, an instant response to devour as many details about a person just in case she needed the information later on.
Without much thought, she got to her feet and jogged out the salon door after the perpetrator.
“Genevieve?” Flora called after her just before the salon door closed behind Cora. Once outside, she started power-walking a safe distance behind him, but still within her line of vision. She didn’t want to spook him and was confident that she wouldn’t. Men were hardly bothered by women following them down the street, most didn’t even notice, but this man peeked over his shoulder, looking at her from beneath his ball cap before picking up speed.
Cora blinked back her surprise and started walking a little faster after him. He broke into a jog, she broke into a jog, and so it continued until they were both sprinting down the decorated streets. He zigged into an ally and Cora zagged after him. For a man with a limp he was fast, it felt as if as soon as she rounded the corner he was rounding another and she would lose sight of him until she made the next turn.
Then, as she was starting to gain, he ducked out of sight again behind a sales cart being pushed into her way by a merchant selling white roses and huge heart-shaped balloons. She skidded to a stop just before colliding with the man’s cart and tried to look through the balloons rattling together in the breeze. Her perpetrator was gone.
“Shit,” she panted, realizing with a quick shiver that she was outside in Denmark, running down the trampled snow-covered streets in her thin tee shirt with the salon logo on it. She had been chasing a man through alleyways. What calls more attention than that? Sighing, she turned away from the trail her legs were itching to follow, and walked back to the salon where, as she expected, several women now gaped at her. Yep, she had gotten their attention and quite possibly ruined her and Asher’s new identity. Double shit.
She would have to tell him and they would have to move and start another mundane life somewhere else.
To hell with it, she thought bitterly as she plopped back down at her station with her arms crossed, if she had just exposed her identity anyway, might as well go all out.
Coraline Santos was back.
3
Love Unrequited
Gregor had told him that the Hotel D’Angleterre was the most romantic historical spot in all of Europe, so Asher scrounged together the little money he had earned and booked a room. Cora wouldn’t be expecting a fancy place like that. They had gotten so used to freezing rooms really only big enough for one of them, so Asher did not expect Cora to discover him before he was ready for her to.
He
