Page 74 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold (The Blonde Identity #2)
Present Day
Las Vegas, Nevada
Alex
This time, Alex didn’t ask how he got the jet. She just crawled on board and then fell asleep, only to wake three hours later,
twisted up with King like a pretzel, her sister standing over them, taking pictures and saying, “They are sooooo cute.”
“Not a word I usually associate with Michael Kingsley,” Sawyer mumbled.
Alex had every intention of smashing the phone into a million pieces, but then King made a noise and pulled her tighter, and
that was the last thing she remembered until she felt the jet touch down in Vegas.
She also didn’t ask where the car came from. It was just waiting for them on the tarmac—a BMW 5 Series. She wanted to ask
if he was going to make her ride in the trunk for old times’ sake, but King was already sliding on a pair of sunglasses and
slipping behind the wheel, and Alex knew better than to tease him.
He was the guy from the shack again: dark beard, dark eyes—tired and battered and the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen.
She couldn’t even bring herself to smile when Zoe fanned herself and mouthed hot .
They were quiet on the way to the hotel, the questions floating all around them and pinging off the glass. All of them thinking
the exact same things:
King had (more than likely) brought the ring to Vegas.
He had (more than likely) taken it to his suite at the hotel.
The last time they’d seen the suite, there had been a giant hole in the window and two bodies on the floor.
King’s Vegas safe house was the epitome of blown . Alex was certain that, at some point, Merritt would have sent a team, and the team would have cleaned up the bodies and
the blood, but the suite had been, otherwise, unguarded for days. Anyone from housekeeping to MI6 could have torn the place
apart by that point. There was no telling what they’d find when they got there.
“If they’d found it...” Alex put a hand on King’s leg.
“Tyler wouldn’t have still been looking for it,” he filled in as they zoomed up to the hotel and climbed out, tossing the
keys to a valet.
No one said the rest of it: that Tyler might not have been the only one who was looking.
When they finally made it to the hall outside the penthouse, King stopped with his hand on the door. He glanced at Zoe. “I
don’t suppose you would just—”
“He’s going to tell me to wait here, isn’t he?” Zoe asked her sister.
“No. He’s not. Because King is too smart for that, isn’t he?” Alex asked pointedly. Sawyer scowled, but Alex just reached
for the door and pushed it open. She didn’t know what they were going to find. She didn’t know where they were going to look
or how long it was going to take. She just knew—
“It’s about time.”
That voice.
The four of them jolted to a stop, and, for a moment, all they could do was gawk at the woman with the white hair and knowing
eyes and bottle of champagne. Pop. The cork went flying, but still, nobody moved.
“I took the liberty.” Merritt poured a glass, then took a sip.
“Excellent.” Then she removed the silver dome from a tray of fruit and treated herself to three ripe grapes.
“Hope you don’t mind I took the liberty, Michael.
” She settled onto the long couch. “When I placed the order, the concierge offered to send that up as well.” There was a small velvet box in the center of the table.
It was ring-sized and ringlike and just the sight of it brought to mind bended knees and white veils and really excellent cake.
“The jeweler did a lovely job resetting the loose stone.” Merritt reached for a tray of croissants and peeled off one fluffy
strip. She seemed so casual. So cool. A touch smug, because it hadn’t been a contest, but she’d won all the same.
“Jeweler?” King said, then he seemed to process the rest of it. It was strange, watching Michael Kingsley’s mind work slowly.
“Wait. How did you know about the stone?”
“Oh.” Merritt made a sound that could almost be described as a giggle. She sounded light and free and twenty years younger.
“Because I’m the one who broke it. Banged it against a banister. Clumsy of me.” She took a sip of champagne.
King and Alex had seen the photograph. They knew that ring had once graced Merritt’s finger, but there was still so much they
didn’t know.
“It was at a jeweler’s?” King sounded amazed. “All this time... Did they...”
“Figure out that this ”—Merritt reached for the box—“is a Soviet-era camera containing film that could compromise one of the most closely guarded
secrets of the Cold War?” Merritt pulled out a ring that was even more beautiful than Alex remembered. Then she raised an
eyebrow, as if silently daring them to guess, but the words from Amalfi were already ringing in Alex’s ears.
“ Viktor Kozlov’s nuclear option, ” she whispered.
“It was indeed.” Merritt looked down on the little piece of platinum like it was an old friend she thought she’d never see
again. The rest of them looked at it like it was a monster.
“It’s a camera?” Sawyer asked. “Is the film still in there?”
Merritt nodded. “It is.”
“Could it still be developed—after all this time?” King asked, but Merritt had to cock her head, uncertain.
“Possibly. If done carefully.”
“Do we even want to know what’s on it?” Alex asked, because she knew better than to pull at a string that might make your life unravel.
Spies should have been the most curious people in the world, but they weren’t. Because they knew better. Secrets aren’t just
about keeping things shielded—they’re about keeping people safe, and so Alex waited for Merritt to slip the ring into her
pocket—for her to declare that it was need-to-know and no one in that room had any need at all. In fact, at that moment, Zoe was as much a spy as any of them. Sawyer, Alex,
and King had all left the life.
There was absolutely no reason for Merritt to look at King and say, “Guess.”
“Missile sites!” Zoe blurted, because Zoe couldn’t help herself. “Launch codes! Double agents!”
“Very good, Zoe.” Merritt turned to her, and a slow, approving smile spread across her face. “It’s nice to finally meet you,
by the way. I’m a big fan of your books.”
And then Zoe blushed and leaned against Sawyer’s side, but Merritt was already turning back to King.
“Everyone knows that the Cold War was the golden age of tradecraft. It’s no secret that the KGB’s main priority was infiltrating
US intelligence organizations. What very few people know is that they did it. In fact, one of the KGB’s best agents got so
close to the CIA’s station chief in Berlin that she married him.”
“No.” King was shaking his head.
“Your grandmother was a spy, Michael. She was a phenomenal operative. And she was Russian.”
“That’s a lie.”
Merritt laughed. “It is very much the truth. If you don’t believe me, we can get this developed.” She held up the ring. “It
was hers, you know. She loaned it to me on a few occasions.”
“How do you know?” King demanded, but Merritt simply smiled.
“Because she told me—when she turned.”
“She was a double agent?” Alex had never heard King’s voice shake.
Merritt was too cold—too still. Like this was a conversation she’d rehearsed in her head a million times—lines in a play that had been running for too long and she wanted to go on autopilot, hit her marks, and wait for the curtain when she said—
“She was Nikolai.”
King looked like he wanted to hurl a chair through a window. He wanted to roll up in a ball on the floor. He wanted to scream,
and he wanted to cry, and he looked like it might split him down the middle, he was so torn between the two ends of the spectrum.
“Is it...” His voice cracked.
“It’s why they killed her.” Merritt’s voice was flat and even. “The Russians.”
“So the note in the mailbox...”
She looked into the distance, like that was a question she’d asked herself a million times. “That was them saying goodbye.”
A heavy weight settled over the room. Merritt walked to the windows as if she could see all the way across the desert...
across the ocean... across time. “She loved your grandfather, so she turned, Michael. She never gave Moscow a thing. In
fact, she fed them a number of well-placed lies through the years. But I knew her picture would be on the ring. I knew it
could come back to haunt her someday if it ever got into the hands of the wrong people.”
“Someone like Viktor Kozlov?” Alex guessed.
Merritt gave an approving grin. “Kozlov didn’t know what the ring was, precisely, but he knew it belonged to her. He knew
he could use it to hurt her husband. And her son...” Merritt studied King. “ And grandson. Kozlov wanted a double agent so badly, he could taste it. He would have used that information to blackmail your father, Michael.
He was going to use it to blackmail you, and so I sent you to burn it .” Her voice was louder, stronger, when she snapped, “Why didn’t you burn it?”
“You’re right.” King was shaking his head. He looked tired and confused and resigned to some fate they couldn’t even name
yet. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on the thing.”
Alex had never seen him look so furious—not at Merritt or Alex.
But at himself. He looked like he could turn the ring to ashes with a glance.
But that didn’t matter because Merritt was already triggering a tiny clasp and pulling out an even tinier roll of film that was so old and fragile it dissolved the moment she dropped it in the glass of bubbly.
For a moment, they all just stood there, watching Viktor Kozlov’s nuclear option melt away.
“So, wait... that’s it?” Zoe asked. “It’s over?”
“Yeah.” King studied Alex for a long time, a look on his face she couldn’t quite read. “I guess it is.” And then he turned
around and walked away, and Alex stayed perfectly still for a long time, wondering what had just happened.