Page 63 of Gone Before Goodbye

But again, what are her options?

She runs past the Mona Lisa room. The door is closed again. Up ahead she sees three black-suited men running toward her. Reality hits. Doesn’t matter how much hand-to-hand combat training she has. There is no way she will be able to get past all three of them.

But also, there is no way she’s going to go down without a struggle.

She braces herself. But the three men veer away from her and run the other way.

What the hell is going on?

She sprints through the humid pool area and back into the medical wing. She checks Oleg Ragoravich’s room. Still empty. She heads down two more doors to Nadia’s recovery room. The door is closed. She knocks once, just out of habit, and reaches for the knob. She turns it and pushes in, worried now that Nadia will have vanished.

But she is there.

Nadia is in the bed, her eyes in that half-closed post-op way Maggie has seen a thousand times before. Maggie feels her heart beating wildly against her chest. She slows herself down, focuses on her breathing, steps into the room. No one else is here. Where the hell is all the support staff?

When Maggie closes the door behind her, Nadia stirs. Maggie waits. Nadia starts blinking open her eyes. Maggie sees the full water glass. She grabs a straw.

“Here,” Maggie says. “Sip this.”

She places the straw between Nadia’s lips. Nadia sips.

“How do you feel?”

“Groggy,” Nadia manages.

“That’s normal.”

Maggie has automatically switched into physician mode. She checks Nadia’s vitals and stitching. All normal. Nadia starts waking up. Maggie can feel her eyes on her. It’s always interesting to see how various patients react to their doctor. Some look away. Some watch with reverence or worry or even mistrust, as though trying to read what the doctor is really thinking versus what they are willing to admit out loud.

She hears someone run down the corridor past the door. A man shouts in Russian. Maggie doesn’t understand what he’s saying, but there is panic in his tone. Time is not on Maggie’s side here. She gets that. She locks the door and sits on the edge of Nadia’s bed.More personal this way, she thinks. Less intimidating.

“I want to ask you something.”

Nadia’s eyes are blue and wide and beautiful. “Is something wrong? Did the surgery—”

“No, no, you’re fine. The surgery went perfectly.”

Nadia just looks at her and waits.

“When I was doing your surgery…” Maggie isn’t sure how to ask this. She reaches to pull back the blanket on Nadia’s leg. It’s the wrong move. Nadia jolts, cringes, holds the blanket in place.

Just dive in, Maggie tells herself.

“You have a tattoo on your upper thigh.”

There is a brief flare in those eyes now. “You saw it?”

Maggie can hear the fear in Nadia’s voice now.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. My leg. It was covered. You were supposed to be working on my chest—”

“I saw it at the end,” Maggie says. “When the surgery was over. The nurse took off the Bovie pad.”

Nadia looks terrified.

“It’s okay,” Maggie says, trying to reassure. “I didn’t mean to…” She stops, tries again. “Could you tell me where you got it?”