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“Come and see.” He ducks through the door and down the steps.
Gerasim blocks my retreat—as if Iwantto stay on this plane. I hurry out of the jet, sucking in the fresh air as I go. The sunlight stabs at my eyes and I raise my hand to shield them from the brightness. On impulse, I reach for my phone to check the time and find nothing.
Konstantin must’ve taken that while I slept.
When my eyes adjust to my new surroundings, I look around and find that we’re in the middle of an airstrip with just a single small control tower in the distance. The ground is painted with white lines. Not far away sits a pale green helicopter. The fringe of the field is shrubs and blue sky, nothing distinctive to tell me where I am.
“Where are we?”
“A few miles outside of Dubrovnik,” Konstantin answers.
I dig through my mental maps with rapidly rising panic. “And where isthat?”
“Croatia,” he says. “You asked me where my real home is. Well, here we are.”
Gripping the jet’s stairs to keep my balance, I let this information sink in as I wrack my brain for an answer on just exactly where the hell either of those places are.
Dubrovnik. Croatia
They soundvaguelyfamiliar, but for the life of me, I can’t reason out why.
All I can focus is on the fact that he took me to another damncountry!
“No one here will help you escape,” he says. “I don’t recommend that you try.”
“Why would I try to escape?” I ask as indifferently as I can. “You said if I play my part, you’ll let me go home with whatever I wanted. You promised.”
“I did.” Konstantin stares at me, and I swear he’s trying to read my mind. I’m secretly relieved that he can’t, because all I can think about is the kiss we shared just before I fell asleep. “Get in the helicopter. It will take us the rest of the way.”
Gerasim joins us on the pavement. “Need me to go with you, Kostya?”
I blink. “Kostya? I thought your name was Konstantin?”
Gerasim tightens his jaw, acting like he’s given something away he didn’t mean to. I tuck this tidbit away for later.
“No.” Konstantin raises his voice. “I need you to send word to Alla Antonovna about my engagement.” His hand circles my wrist, and my heart skips a beat at the contact. “Tell her that I’ve fulfilled all of the requirements for her to release the inheritance to me.”
“Understood.”
Engagement.The word hangs heavy in the air, and all of a sudden, I can feel the weight of our arrangement on my shoulders.
“Slow down!”
“Aren’t you eager to change into some clean clothes and have some food after the flight?”
“You think you can win me over with a meal?”
“It worked in Italy.” He smirks.
“Please, you didn’twinanything.”
“Is that why you didn’t stay?”
I stop trying to pull away and nearly lose my footing. He’s watching me over his shoulder with his dark eyebrows arched—checking my reaction. I can’t hide my surprise before he sees it.
“It really bothered you that I left,” I whisper. “Didn’t it?”
He flips around, rips the helicopter door open, and brings us both inside. I topple into a cramped chair with a wince. He says something in a different language to the man in the pilot’s seat. It sounds like the same language he used on the balcony just before we parted ways in Italy.
