Page 53 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Taking my jacket off the back seat and my bag from the passenger seat, I leave the photographs inside and out of sight. I walk casually toward the market like I belong here.

The man on the coastal path halts and changes direction.

I do not look at him.

The smell of fresh tomatoes, briny olives in large containers, and something sweet being fried somewhere at the far end of the stalls permeates the air. Three women of roughly similar age stand near the vegetable display, their baskets at their elbows, attention moving between the produce and each other.

I step towards the older one, with a deep blue headscarf, basket containing enough for a household. Her eyes, when I approach, are open and kind. Trusting.

She’s safe.

“Excuse me,” I say softly, switching to slow, careful English with my phone held out showing a translation. “I’m sorry to ask—could I borrow your scarf? Just for a few minutes. I’ll pay you for it, please.”

I hold up the amount in euros that I had in my jacket pocket, which is probably more than the scarf cost. I look at her beseechingly, a woman asking another woman for help.

She looks at my face, down to the money in my hand. Then her eyes refocus on something in the distance, no doubt looking at the two men who must have followed me into the market, pretending to examine fruit so badly that an old woman can tell.

Her hand covers mine as she takes the money, unwinding her scarf to hand it to me.

I quickly wrap it around my head and shoulders the way I have seen women here do, hiding my brown waves messily.

I buy tomatoes I do not need from the stall directly in front of me, accepting the paper bag from the vendor naturally. I tuck it under my arm, turning to disappear into the interior of the market where the canopies overlap.

My pulse is an unpleasant beat in my throat until I come out the other side on a different street.

The morning market sits between two harbor roads and exits onto the eastern one through a gap between stalls not visible from the coastal path. I move along the harbor wall at a natural pace.

Only then do I raise my thumb up to hail a taxi; I’m finally at the harbor, with my bag and my borrowed blue scarf.

“To the airport, please,” I type into my phone, translating it into Greek to show the it to the driver. He nods, and off we go.

Until the plane lifts from Naxos airport, I don’t relax. It’s only when the seatbelt icon has lost its coloring do I press my back into the seat, closing my eyes to let the last twelve hours wash over me.

Wrong location. Tracked. This means it was a possible misdirection from the beginning.

The scarf is still around my shoulders as Greece becomes a receding coastline below the ascending plane. Why does it still feel like the walls around me have been moving while I thought I stood still?

I have been running out of safe places since Dubai.

It’s a sobering realization.

It’s been more than just the Irish syndicate pressing from the outside, not just the warnings in the messages, but the far more alarming possibility that the information I have been following has not been leading me toward my parents at all.

It has been leading me somewhere else entirely, doing the walk of terror for someone else.

The Aegean disappears beneath the cloud cover. I pull my notebook from my bag and open it to the next clean page, scribbling slower than I’m thinking, but faster than my hand wants to go.

Whatever comes next cannot be the same thing that lands me stranded outside the wrong stone wall in the morning light of an island.

I may not be broken yet.

Chapter 20 - Mikhail

The ding of the elevator comes through before the security feed even shows her.

Her shoulders are curved inward, carrying too much weight for many hours over too many time zones. Her bag is over one shoulder, jacket in her hand, brown hair frizzy.

Around her neck is a blue headscarf I’ve never seen on her before, which alone ticks me off slightly more than I already am.