Page 25

Chan leaned across me and looked at Mila. “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I met Xander only two months after I moved to France to attend culinary school,” she said. “I know the main roads and landmarks, but I don’t even know how close we are to the city center of Paris. He blindfolded me when he took me to the catacombs. I thought he was taking me on a date.”

Talk about a bad date.

Panic clawed its way up my throat as Chan took a turn down a cobblestone alley, driving down the wrong side of the road. Then I remembered we were in Europe and they did that kind of thing here. Still, that did nothing to ease my fears as the arrow on the speedometer veered way too far to the right.

Of course, that was when Chan swerved into the other lane and I realized every other car was going the opposite direction. We really were traveling the wrong way.

So that was great. My brain was slowly catching up to the fact that the driver’s seat was on the left side of the truck, which meant the rules in France must be the same as the United States. It was only the United Kingdom that drove on the left-hand side. But Chan was expertly driving around the vehicles on the road like their honking didn’t bother him and his adrenaline wasn’t spiking in alarming doses. My nails were practically puncturing the leather seats, but there Chan was, cool as a capybara having a spa day. Well, okay, his jaw did look rather tight and his eyes were focused intently on the road, but I would have been screaming at this point if I’d been driving, so all things considered, I thought he was doing rather well.

Until he did the thing I least expected and pulled over, the truck fishtailing as he swerved into a spot between a car so small it could barely fit one person, let alone two, and a motorcycle.

“Both of you get down,” he said. “Under the dash.”

I furrowed my brows but wasted no time in following his directions. Mila and I unclipped our seat belts and huddled together, our limbs barely fitting in the small space.

When Chan was content our heads weren’t visible from the windows, he pulled back into traffic and started going the direction we’d come from, approximately twenty times faster than the speed of traffic. He took a few more turns until I was completely lost, then he pulled over again, waiting ten seconds before taking off.

He did this once more before I finally spoke up. “What are you looking for?” I asked, still huddled under the dash.

“CCTV cameras. Keep your head down.”

“What do cameras have to do with anything?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we be more concerned about getting as much space between us and Holt as quickly as possible?” Especially if there was a tracker in this truck.

One corner of Chan’s mouth tilted up, at odds with how tense the rest of his face was.

“I’m a strategist, remember?” He took another turn, the truck nearly tipping on its wheels. I imagined pedestrians running out of the way.

“I’m trained to think of every angle to a problem, not just the immediate ones,” Chan continued. “I might not be the best marksman or most skilled at hand-to-hand combat, but I can tell you what Holt’s going to do when he wakes up from his drug-induced coma. And that’s going to be tracking this truck and searching all the video recordings to see if we, or you, got out along the way. But now we’ve given him a daisy chain of trails he’ll have to track down.”

A muscle in Chan’s jaw flexed, and he swerved out of the way of something. Mila’s elbow rammed into my rib cage, and I grunted.

“We have a limited amount of time where we’re only dealing with Holt’s henchmen and not Holt himself,” Chan continued, eyes intent on the road. “They don’t call the shots, so they’re likely scrambling, trying to wake Holt, who won’t know if we’ve gotten out at any of these locations or paid someone else to drive the truck. I’ve made sure there aren’t CCTV cameras at any of these spots. By spending five minutes planting false leads, we’ve bought ourselves more time in the long run. Now we need to do the same thing picking out a different car we can hot-wire from a public place where multiple cars will be coming and going.”

Oh, goodie. Grand theft auto.

Maybe it didn’t count if you were stealing cars with a government operative.

“Great,” Mila said. “Because this floorboard is getting awfully crowded.”

Chan didn’t acknowledge her sarcasm. He simply swerved into another lane, coming to an abrupt halt. I tried not to notice the way his biceps flexed whenever he moved the steering wheel, but my head was stuck in this position, so it wasn’t like I could look anywhere else either. Might as well enjoy the view.

“This is our stop.” Chan put the truck in park, jolting me from my thoughts. “When we get out, stick close. Walk where I walk, and take the same path. Got it?”

“Um,” I said, waving a hand. “You’ll have to get the door. And possibly the paramedics to pry us out.”

With all the turns and sudden stops, it was like Mila and I had melded into one person, our limbs tangling together until we were so wedged beneath the dash I was worried we’d only exchanged one prison for another.

Chan pocketed the keys without a word. He was out his door and on the other side of the truck faster than when we’d run through the tunnels. Apparently he’d gotten a second wind. I was still on my first, and it was rapidly dwindling to a wisp.

I’d heard adrenaline lasts for only so long. When it runs out, you’re in a worse-off spot than you were before it kicked in. Right now I felt like my brain was operating like a hamster in a wheel. No matter how fast I moved, I wasn’t making progress.

I blinked and Mila was gone. When I turned my head, she was standing on the sidewalk beside Chan. Then he was lifting me out of the truck and setting me on my feet, pins and needles shooting down my legs as blood finally returned to my toes.

“Let’s go,” he said once I’d assured him I could stand on my own.

Then we were off, weaving our way through a busy open market square of Paris, the top of the Eiffel Tower barely visible in the distance.

Chan and Mila had taken all the weapons they could easily conceal, and left behind the assault rifles, but I still felt exposed under the open sky. After so long underground my senses were being attacked by too much light and sound at once.

I wished I could take it all in. As it was, I barely caught glimpses. Vendor booths were lined up on the cobblestone courtyard. Brightly colored umbrellas and trees shaded the people who milled around the street buying all kinds of fruit, jewelry, and clothing. There didn’t seem to be any kind of system that I could see. We passed a man making crêpes from a cart, and my stomach lurched violently. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.

All these people were going about their lives. Completely oblivious to what was going on underneath their feet. They didn’t know a convicted criminal had hijacked their beloved catacombs. Or that he was developing something in an underground lab that even the CIA didn’t know about.

It was up to us to stop him. To prevent him from hurting anyone else.

I was so focused on Chan’s feet I hadn’t been watching his hands. When he turned around, he held out a sweater and helped me into it. It was too warm outside to wear it comfortably. Likely some tourist had followed an article’s advice about packing layers and now was stuck carting it around all day. But I didn’t protest.

“Where’d you get those?” I asked, surprised to see Chan in a pair of sunglasses.

Chan grinned, pulling his arm into the sleeve of a jacket he hadn’t had previously. “Grabbed them off someone’s table when they weren’t looking.”

When I hadn’t been looking either, apparently.

He gave Mila a hat and told her to pull her hair through the hole. She’d already left her button-down in the truck. In a matter of a minute we looked like a completely different group of people. Chan gave us a once-over, then nodded, beckoning us to follow him once more.

Okay, I’d admit it. Seeing Chan take control like this? It was kind of sexy. If I wasn’t so concerned with staying alive, I’d be more than a little turned on.

We wound our way through the market until we came to a sort of eating area. Tables were set up every couple of feet, with colorful shop fronts situated just behind. Chan stopped, saying nothing. He watched a group in front of us, his eyes darting back and forth between the men like he was waiting for some secret signal. But he still didn’t say anything, and we didn’t move for what seemed like an eternity.

I didn’t know what we were waiting for.

Every second felt like a moment we should have been running. I could imagine Holt like a red dot on a screen, inching closer while we stayed stationary.

Mila opened her mouth to say something, but Chan silenced her with a look.

Then he finally seemed to have what he needed.

“Flirt with them,” Chan commanded, pointing to the group he’d been watching.

“What?” I asked, thinking I was mishearing. I was used to him mishearing me—but now I was sure I was the one who had things wrong.

Chan was already turning away, but he sent me a look loaded with meaning. “Flirt,” he repeated. “Like your life depends on it.”

Then Chan veered away, and Mila and I were standing alone.

She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Okay, this is where I know that man is blinded by love, because you obviously haven’t gotten enough sleep, your hair has seen better days, and with the way you look now, I think you’ll only scare them away.”

“Gee, thanks,” I deadpanned.

She laughed. “Hey, no judgment. I’m sure I don’t look much better.”

False. She still looked like she could walk the runway, and she was the one who’d been literally fighting the bad guys. I’d just been flailing around like one of those floppy-arm things that advertised car dealerships in the wind.

Mila fluffed my hair, and I told her she already looked flawless. Then we strutted over to the group of guys, and I wondered at all the strange turns my life had taken to lead me to this point.

I finally had a boyfriend—kind of? I mean, we hadn’t exactly nailed down the particulars, but I was pretty confident we’d moved past the fake-dating territory. But here I was about to flirt with a random group of tourists in Paris at his urging, after having escaped my demented father, who’d actually kidnapped me and was likely searching for me at this very moment. If he’d woken up from the sleeping gas I’d made in his underground secret lab.

Couldn’t make this stuff up.

“We overheard you guys talking,” I said. “You’re Americans?”

Wow, what an opener. Andee, you vixen, save something for the bedroom. The guy closest to me turned and gave me a once-over. Then his gaze shifted to Mila, and his eyes lit up.

“Yeah,” he said, tilting his chin up and giving Mila a nod. “What about you?”

There were eight men in the group, all of them around our age. The one farthest to the left wore a paper crown that read groom .

Ah. So this was some kind of bachelors’ trip. I thought Vegas was the place to go for that, but I guess if you had money, sure, a trip to Europe, why not?

I focused my attention on the redhead closest to me, figuring the groom-to-be wouldn’t be interested in a random hookup.

“Yep. So, uh, where you from?” I asked. And a better question would be, how long did I have to keep this conversation going? Because two questions in and I was already crashing and burning.

“Ohio,” the short one closest to the redhead replied, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder like he was about to steer him away.

“Ah,” I said, fresh out of witty comebacks or lines to keep them here.

Thankfully, that was when Mila stepped in. “We’re from Florida,” she said. “Have you ever thought about visiting for spring break? We could show you all the best beaches.”

The guy I’d been speaking to looked her up and down like he was already imagining her in a bikini. Like all of Holt’s employees, she was wearing camo pants. The tank she was wearing underneath the top she’d left behind was so thin Mr. Tourist didn’t have to imagine a whole lot though.

“I’ll bet,” he said. “You know, why take another trip? We have a pool back at our hotel.”

Mila dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Or,” she said, “I hear there’s a spot on the Seine river we can go skinny-dipping if we wait to go after dark. You guys look like you’re up for a good time.”

That got all of their attention.

I almost missed it when Chan moved back behind the group, his head briefly visible behind the short guy before he once again retreated back to another table, standing by a lamppost like he’d been there all along.

I blinked and returned my focus to Mila, but I’d missed part of the conversation. She was laughing and playfully hitting one of the guys on the arm, and okay, I didn’t really know Mila all that well, but I was also fairly sure she wasn’t normally the giggling type. But she could have fooled me. And she did fool these guys, who were listening with rapt attention to her story about how the TSA had confiscated her bikini because it’d been made out of liquid, like some kind of gel eye mask that didn’t really hide anything at all if she moved in certain ways.

I looked over their shoulders to see Chan signaling us with a tilt of his head. Grateful, I reached out and grabbed Mila’s arm.

“So,” I said, not so subtly widening my eyes so Mila would catch my hint, “maybe we’ll see you at the bridge. At sunset. Yeah?”

I sort of remembered Mila mentioning it when I’d been busy zoning out. The guys in the group nodded their enthusiastic consent, and I dragged Mila off, only panicking a little when Chan started walking away before we met up with him. Mila squeezed my arm and whispered for me to relax.

“He probably doesn’t want the group to see us with him,” she said. “Because you know they’re watching us walk away.”

“Watching you , maybe,” I muttered.

We turned a corner, and Chan was waiting for us, a grin overtaking his features.

“I never knew you were so bad at flirting,” he said, nuzzling my neck. “You always seemed like such a natural.”

“Maybe that’s because I liked you,” I shot back, cheeks turning red. Chan kissed the soft spot below my ear, and I forgot to be embarrassed.

He wrapped an arm around my waist as he steered me toward a line of parked cars on a shaded part of the street. Suddenly I felt overcome for a whole different reason. I’d just completed one Herculean task. Couldn’t I have one minute before being asked to participate in another? Especially something as illegal as stealing a car?

“Did I hear that correctly? Liked, as in past tense?” he asked, pulling back and holding his other hand to his chest. “I’m wounded.”

I playfully shoved him in the shoulder and focused on putting one foot in front of another. Chan was already walking so fast I had to hurry to keep up with his long legs.

“You two are the worst,” Mila said, rolling her eyes. “Can we just focus on getting out of here alive before you get all lovey-dovey on me?” She turned so she was walking backward, facing us. “Also, what was all that about? Back there with the bachelor party group?”

Chan released my waist to pull something out of his back pocket.

It was a phone.

I tried to analyze the emotion that was bubbling up in my chest. It’d been so long since I’d felt it, it took me a while to actually give it a name.

With a start, I finally realized what it was.

Hope.