Like all of Kozlov’s compounds, this one was a veritable fortress of guards and gates and fences, but it had been a late night and a long morning, so the house felt almost empty as Sawyer walked down the long hall toward the sound of . . .
Humming.
Just like Zoe, Sawyer thought as he reached the woman tied to a chair in the middle of the empty ballroom. She had a split lip and a black eye, but she looked as regal as a queen, even as he pulled the gag from her mouth and she kept singing, “I’m gonna kill you sloooowly. I’m gonna make it huuuuuurt.”
She’d do it, too, Sawyer mused, but the thought just made him smile. “You ready to get out of here?” he whispered.
“Fuck you.”
“Come on, Alex. Let’s— Shit. These are chains, Alex. They literally chained you to this chair.”
“Of course they did. If they’d used zip ties, I would have been highly offended.”
Sawyer looked up from the lock. “This would be a lot easier if your sister didn’t have my favorite pick . . .” He trailed off as he realized Alex was scowling at him.
“You do realize that as soon as you get me out of these chains I’m going to strangle you with them?”
And, suddenly, Sawyer wasn’t smiling anymore. It had been over a week since he’d started chasing, worrying, wondering . . . “I don’t know why you stopped trusting me, Alex, but we’re on the same side, remember? Would I be getting you out of here if I’d turned?” She honestly had to think about the answer, and Sawyer saw that for the opening it was. “Why’d you do it, Alex? We were supposed to get the drive together. Why didn’t you wait for me? Why’d you run?”
“I heard Kozlov and Sergei. They knew I was CIA.”
“So”—he started to snap, then realized—“You thought I told them.” Sawyer felt the words like a blow.
For the first time, Alex looked sheepish. “I didn’t know if I could trust you or not,” she admitted. Right before her gaze turned as sharp as a blade. “And then you showed up with my little sister and I stopped wondering.”
But something about the words—the indignant look in her eyes—made him chuckle. “Little sister? You’re twins!”
“I’m thirteen minutes older,” Alex said with more superiority than a woman chained to a chair should ever be able to muster. “It was a decent plan, I’ll give you that. Bring her to Europe. Slip her the card. Get her to be me at the bank.”
“I didn’t bring her here! I didn’t even know she existed until I found her half dead in Paris and thought she was you.”
“You used a poor, defenseless woman—”
Sawyer couldn’t help himself—he laughed, far louder than he should have before dropping his voice. “Your sister is many things. But defenseless?” He raised a brow. “Really?”
“What kind of psycho pulls someone like her into something like this?”
Suddenly, Sawyer didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “Someone like her? What does that even mean?”
He watched Alex morph from angry to confused to . . . heartbroken, the look in her eyes all but screaming do you really not know?
“She was two days old and weighed three pounds the first time they cut open her heart. They did it again six months later. And one more time before the age of four. Zoe can’t run. Zoe can’t fight. Zoe gets winded going down escalators.”
He heard the words. He knew they were true, but in his mind, he was tracing those scars in the firelight. He knew what they tasted like and where they led. Except he hadn’t known where they’d come from or why they were there. He kept waiting for this new information to change those old wounds in his mind somehow—to change her—but if anything, it just made him angrier.
“You have no idea what your sister is capable of.”
“And you do?”
Sawyer couldn’t help but think about the woman who had jumped off a bridge in Paris, shaken off a Russian assassin on the Shimmering Sea. She’d tossed a CIA agent off a moving train and performed minor surgery on him by firelight. Yeah, he knew Zoe. He knew Zoe. And he—
“You may think she’s expendable, but—”
Sawyer saw red. “Don’t call her that. Don’t ever call her that!” Sawyer roared, looking down at eyes that were just like Zoe’s, only harder, sadder.
“You don’t know her,” she told him.
Sawyer was wrong. They weren’t Zoe’s eyes at all. “Then neither do you.”