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Was he taking my picture? Or am I seriously cooked in the head?

This is where Darya would laugh at me and tell me that of courseI’m cooked in the head, but that doesn’t mean I’m not fabulous anyway.

God, I miss her.

Maybe that’s the other thing that’s changed, I think as I go to the kitchen and bring out two chicken parmigianas for the gray nomads, who of course waited until the very end of lunch service to order, thus pissing off our backpacker chef, who is waiting to join his mates in the bar and spend his own savings.Darya is married to Roman now. And even though I didn’t want that to change things between us, it has.

Darya is the only real friend I’ve made in all the years since I left Australia. The only person I’ve truly connected with.

Maybe I always knew she was on the run, too; it takes one to know one.

I knew her as Lucia Lopez when we met. It was only after she fell in love with Roman that she stopped hiding her real name, Darya Petrovsky. As it turned out, she was hiding a lot, including the fact that her father was once the most powerful bratvapakhanin Miami. Now her brother, Alexei, runs the Miami business, and Darya is happily married to Roman, who is even more powerful than her father was. Roman runs an international empire from his Hale Property office in Malaga. Hale is just a front for Roman’s real business, obviously, although apart from the Naryshkin treasures, I know verylittle about what he does except that it involves some cryptocurrency platform that has, apparently, elevated his business from the usual girls, gambling, and drugs of the bratva and turned him into a multizillionaire. All I really know for certain is that Roman’s business is the reason Dimitry never goes anywhere without multiple weapons.

Now that she’s married, Darya is rarely in Malaga anymore. She prefers their country finca up in the mountains to Roman’s city penthouse. I can’t blame her. I love the mountain finca almost as much as she does, and it’s safer for her, especially now that she has a baby coming.

A baby I probably won’t ever get to meet.

But the truth, though I would never have told her, is that Darya’s retreat to the finca left a hole in my life not even Dimitry could fill. Somehow, so long as it was Darya and me against the world, I wasn’t alone. My secret life was still somehowfun.But the moment Darya left Lucia behind and became Roman’s wife, suddenly my own subterfuge was thrown into glaring, stark relief.

I told her as much of my story as I felt comfortable doing.

I told Dimitry more of it. Nearly all of it.

But not about the man whose face I never should have seen.

A man Juan Cardeñas promised me he would kill.

I didn’t mention that Juan never told me whether he did or didn’t kill the man I never should have seen.

Crucially, I never told Dimitry that if Juan really is dead his son Rodrigo won’t ever stop looking for me.

Or that there is a very good chance there is someone even more lethal than Rodrigo out there who still wants me dead.

Telling Dimitry any of those things would have meant a war.

And no matter how much he loves me, a war with the Cardeñas cartel is the last thing he, Roman, or Darya need. I won’t be the person that brings that to their door. And in theend, that was what it came down to. I couldn’t run again, and certainly not from Dimitry.

There’s nowhere I could go that he wouldn’t come looking for me. And Dimitry knows how to find what he’s looking for.

I couldn’t stay.

Not unless I was prepared to either keep lying or send Dimitry into war on my behalf.

That left going home. Choosing my family was the only trump card I had. The only place where Dimitry would respect my privacy and let me run to.

So I came back to Leetham, determined to make the best of it. Hoping against hope I’d fall in love with my old life, which, I naively thought, might just solve all my problems.

Might make me somehow forget how much I love Dimitry, and Darya, and my little apartment in Spain that smells like paint and passion.

Needless to say, I was so fucking wrong it’s laughable.

I glance over to the corner of the bar, but the bikers are gone.

Sighing with relief, I take my apron off. I give the night shift barmaid a quick brief, which doesn’t amount to anything more important than the fact that we need more ice, then head out to unlock my bicycle. I glance around, but there’s no trace of the bikers.

Hopefully they’ve decided to finally leave town.

I head out past the few scattered buildings that make up Leetham’s main street, then take the right-hand turn down Chalmer’s Lane. The narrow, potholed road is named after my family, who’ve farmed the country on either side of it for over a century.