“No,” I tell him. “We can’t stop. Ever. We have to keep driving.”
It’s late, and we’re all tired. It takes Noah’s last ounce of patience to calmly ask, “Okay. Where are we driving to? And what are we going to do when we get there?”
He’s got a point, and I’m too tired to disagree. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
“Megan?” I don’t even have to ask the question.
“If the royal family is after you, then we should be okay here. Adria is more into tourism than national defense. They don’t exactly have a bunch of satellites they can reposition on a whim to track us down. So … we should be okay,” she says again.
“And if it’s not the royal family?” Alexei asks what everyone else is thinking.
Megan gives a sad, almost hopeless shrug. “I have no idea what the Society is capable of.”
None of us do, and that’s the scariest thing of all.
Inside the barn, we find bales of straw stacked on one end and park the SUV on the other. It doesn’t take long for us to spread out—we’ve been too confined for too long. At least Noah loaded up some canned food from the safe house, and now he and Rosie are trying to build a small fire in a ring of stones just outside the barn’s double doors.
I watch them work together in silence, in peace. We’re all getting way too comfortable with life like this.
Noah catches me looking and grins. Then he stands and wipes his dirty hands on his jeans and sidles toward me. He turns to see what I see—Rosie and the flickering flames, a dark night under a blanket of thick clouds, lightning striking in the distance. Wordlessly, he settles in beside me, leaning against the SUV.
We feel the rain before we see it. The wind turns crisp in a second and water falls to the dusty ground in fat, wet drops. Dust bubbles up, then turns to mud before our eyes. The storm rages and the wind blows and I breathe in the cool, fresh air. For a second, I relax, lost inside the thunder.
Maybe Noah feels it, too. Maybe that’s how he finds the strength to say, “So I was going to ask how Alexei’s mom was, but …” Noah gestures outside to where Karina is standing, staring up at the dark clouds, rain streaming down her smiling face.
“She thinks I’m my mom. Or she thought that earlier. I don’t really know what she’s thinking now, to tell you the truth.”
Noah nods. “I can see that. About your mom, I mean. In every picture that I’ve ever seen, you look alike. I can see where that might be confusing to …” He motions to the woman who’s outside, dancing in the rain.
“I doubt she even knows what year it is,” I have to admit. “I dragged everyone across half of Europe, and she doesn’t know anything about my mom.” I look up at Noah. “She doesn’t even know Alexei.”
I’m pretty sure Noah curses in Portuguese, but then he eyes me. “Don’t worry about Alexei. He’s worried about you. He doesn’t care what happens to him.”
I look at Noah, cock an eyebrow, and he knows I’m not buying it. “Would you care if your mother didn’t recognize you? If she acted like you never existed?”
Noah stares into the distance. “I’m not Russian.”
I don’t argue with Noah’s logic. It makes as much sense as anything.
“At least now he knows she didn’t leave him—that she was sick and had to go away,” I say, almost hopefully.
Noah is spinning on me, though, a disbelieving look upon his face. “Is that really what you think?”
“What?”
Noah turns back to the woman who’s holding her arms out wide, turning in circles in the rain. “Maybe she went to that place because she was crazy. Or maybe ten years in that place made her insane. What do you think?”
He’s not asking my opinion about Karina. He’s asking about me. What would have happened if my dad and Jamie hadn’t decided to stop fighting with me—if they hadn’t gotten tired of reminding me day after day that I was the one who pulled the trigger? Would I have gotten better there? Or would my last sliver of sanity have slipped further and further away with every passing day? It’s something I’ve never really considered. And, frankly, it’s an answer I don’t really want to know.
Noah can tell. So he just nods again in Karina’s direction and asks, “Is she okay?” When I don’t answer, he turns back to me. “Are you okay?”
But no one really wants the honest answer to that question, so we just turn back to the rain and the woman dancing in it.
“What comes next?” Noah isn’t asking about tonight. He’s asking about tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. It’s the question, and everyone but Karina gathers around, listens.
“Tomorrow, I’ll drive you guys to the train station, and you’ll go back to Embassy Row.”
“What are you going to do?” Rosie sounds almost hurt—like I’m throwing a party and she hasn’t been invited.
“On the bridge that day, Princess Ann kept asking me if I’d found it—if my mom had told me where it was.”