Page 86 of Mile High Ruin

“I don’t want to know what that means.”

“It means you are unnecessarily embarrassed.”

“I was moaning.”

“Yes.”

My face burns. He looks far too pleased by that.

“Don’t say it like that,” I tell him.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re proud of yourself.”

“I am.”

I cover my face with both hands. From the front, Marek says, perfectly calmly, “For what it is worth, I’m concentrating on the road.”

I want to die.

“Marek,” Vadim says.

“I said nothing.”

“You just spoke.”

“I was attempting to reassure Miss Mercer.”

“You made it worse.”

“I suspected I might.”

I sink lower into the seat. “This is humiliating.”

Vadim takes one of my wrists and pulls my hand away from my face. “You are too easily embarrassed.”

“You don’t embarrass easily enough.”

“That may also be true.”

The ridiculousness of the exchange almost makes me laugh.

Almost.

Then the events of the last several hours begin catching up with me again.

I glance out the window. Bucharest moves past us beneath a dark sky, streetlights flowing across the glass in long bands of gold. It still feels impossible that I’m here.

The hospital discharged Vadim less than an hour ago after the doctor repeated approximately fifteen times that the wound was superficial but needed monitoring. I had assumed I would go wherever the flight crew was supposed to stay. Except the crew hotel arrangement seems to have disintegrated somewhere between the captain attempting to assault me and dying on the runway.

Camille left separately with ground staff to give a statement and arrange alternate crew accommodations. I should have asked for her number.

Why didn’t I ask for her number?

I know nobody here. Not one person. And my return flight isn’t until tomorrow. When Vadim told me I was coming back to his hotel with him, I argued for approximately ninety seconds before recognizing that I had no better plan.

So now I’m in the back seat of his car, in a city where I don’t speak the language, going to a hotel I have never seen with a man who admitted less than two hours ago that he is not merely a businessman.