If he took note of her burn scars, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed entirely unaffected by her body. A sexless mole of a man.

“I have our plane tickets,” he said. “We fly into Kiev and move from there.”

“We’re husband and wife?”

“Photojournalists for a Canadian travel magazine,” he said. “You can memorize the specifics on the flight.”

“Are we backstopped?”

“Yes. Several phone numbers deep, answering machines, our ‘editor’ on standby.”

She swept the ash into a tray and then distributed it into various urns lining a shelf against the wall—Fido, Spot, Max. Ah, Wisconsin, with your stalwart Midwestern values and anachronistic pet names. She loved it here. It gave her a glimpse of what a real life might have been like.

She ran her hands beneath a faucet and dried them across her firm, firm thighs.

“One more thing.” She walked up on Jaggers. Her breasts were level with his chin. Still he neither stepped back nor lost focus. “When we catch up to Orphan X, I get him alive first. Understood?”

He gave a faint nod.

“Okay.” She started for the door. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t follow.

“What?”

He gestured to the puddle of fabric behind her in the corner. “You forgot your clothes,” he said.

17. Beautiful Monster

17

Beautiful Monster

René despised the mirror. It used to be his friend. In his youth he could spend hours preening, admiring the line of his jaw, the strokes of his collarbones, the way his ass arced firmly into leg. He’d never been exactly handsome, but he could strike the right poses in the right lighting to make himself into something worth looking at.

His family never shared his interest in himself.

He turned now in the soft light of the master bathroom, regarding the two-inch deviation of his spinal column.

The slightest lateral curve. And yet it had changed everything.