“Call them now, and then we have to ditch your phone. Tell them to cancel their visit.”
She pulled out her cell and left her parents a voice mail, and then he took the phone from her. After removing the SIM card, he tossed it and her phone out the car window.
“Wait—”
“I promise I will get you a new one, kiska.” He caught her chin and turned her to face him. “You need to trust me. Do you understand?”
He waited for her to nod. Then he pulled his cell out of his pocket. He had missed a call from Leo, and there was a voice mail. His heart stuttered to a stop as the first words he heard were Code 78.
“What’s a Code 78?” Elena asked. She was sitting close enough that she had heard the message.
“It is need-to-know.”
“Does it have to do with me?” Her voice was pitched sharply.
“Yes.”
“Then I need to know!”
He really couldn’t argue with that, but now was not the time. He needed a minute to process what that meant. It was a code that he had been told would never be used. His father had only mentioned it a handful of times when Dimitri was younger. The only reason he even remembered it was because of the flights of fancy his mind would take, imagining a world where such a thing was possible.
He restarted the car engine and chose his route out of town carefully, going north on the PCH. “It’s not safe to talk about it.”
“We’re in a car, completely alone. No one will hear.” Even though the Pacific Coast Highway tended to be crowded, it wasn’t like they had the windows down.
“Kiska,” he warned, unable to stop a bit of a growl escaping his tone.
“Please,” she begged, and her hand fell on his right forearm. The touch grounded him, and he remembered that she was more than just involved in his life now—she was at the heart of it, in more ways than one. She was more precious to him than he could even rationalize, and he’d nearly lost her. Elena deserved the truth.
“Code 78 means someone like me must protect someone like you.”
“But you already were . . .”
“This is different. This is the reason I am what I am. It means you are special.”
She tightened her hold on his arm. “Special how?”
“It’s your blood. Something in your blood makes you special. I can’t say how until I speak to Leo. He tested the sample I sent, and—”
“What?” Elena gasped. “My blood? How . . . ?”
“When you cut your head that first day at the house. I sent him the cloth I used to clean your wound.”
“You just mailed someone halfway around the world a sample of my blood to run tests on? That’s not okay, Dimitri.” She let go of his arm. “That’s pretty damn far from okay.”
“I know you deserve your privacy, but this . . . this is bigger than your privacy.”
“What could possibly be bigger than my privacy?”
He glanced her way with a grim look. “The very fate of Russia.”
She was silent a moment, biting her bottom lip. She had no idea what he meant when he said that, but she would soon enough.
“So it’s really not about Vadym?” She looked like a small, frightened child. He wanted more than ever to pull over on the side of the road and tug her onto his lap and soothe her.
“No, I thought it was, until Code 78.”
She was silent a long while. The miles flew past as he got them onto the open road.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“Colorado.”
“Why there?”
“It’s ski season. We need crowds. Other agents will expect us to go into hiding somewhere small. We won’t.”
“Won’t we be at risk of being seen? We could be in the background of hundreds of vacation photos. I mean, don’t they have image-recognition software?”
“You are right.”
“So why there?”
“Leo’s software acts faster than Russia’s. It will find any photos online of our faces and delete them before they are found by the enemy.”
“The enemy,” she said, her tone heavy with disbelief.
Dimitri hated that she was going through this now, and it was only going to get worse. Once Viktor failed to report to his handler, the Russians would know Elena had protection. The Kremlin would soon know him for what he was, a guard in the White Army. He would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, and so would Elena.
She yawned and cradled her head in her arm as she rested against the passenger-side window. “Are we stopping soon?”
“In half an hour. I will need coffee so I can drive another few hours.”
She lifted her head to stare at him. “Dimitri, you can’t keep driving that long. You didn’t get any sleep. We should stop at a motel or something.”
“It’s about three and a half hours to Vegas. We will stay there and then keep going.”
“Vegas . . . ,” Elena sighed, half listening, putting her head back in the crook of her arm.
“Vegas indeed,” he echoed with a heavy sigh. It was going to be a long four hours.
Elena got out of the car to stretch her legs three hours later. Dimitri parked their car in the back of a very clean little motel with a small flashing sign that said “Aces Wild.”
“What? We aren’t going to stay at the Bellagio?” she teased. The stress and exhaustion were starting to make her feel rather slaphappy.
“No. We can’t be around cameras yet. Leo will have dropped everything to leave Russia for a Code 78. He won’t be able to help us until he’s here on US soil.”
“Leo’s coming here?”
“And he will most likely bring Maxim and Nicholas.”
“So I get to meet your family, I guess?” She was strangely excited, but also intimidated at the thought of meeting three more men like Dimitri.
He chuckled, but his face was still weary. “Yes, my family.” He motioned for her to follow him into the office of the motel.
The attendant, perhaps close to her age, was watching a TV show
