Sin was not panicked. She'd expected this.
They had been found, and it wasn't shocking, despite the terror that had bloomed on Annika's face.
There had been no time to tell them about Ann Evalyn's demise, about nicking the woman’s carotid artery for the point of making a mess. About using her old trick of mixing blood, so that no one spot on the carpet was purely her own blood. Once there existed a hair of hers from a crime scene. Somewhere there would be a fingerprint.
With Owen Dunham out of the FBI, there was no one there to kindly steal or replace her evidence. So Sin had to keep it from being found in the first place. That meant putting Ann Evalyn Kimmel's blood onto the carpet, diluting her own. That meant using a kitchen towel to wipe down anything that might have left a trace, including Ann Evalyn, whom she'd fought bare handed.
DNA could be lifted from so many places. It took Sin an hour to clean her evidence, locate the woman's phone—dropped in the scuffle—and remove the chip Nick had planted. Then she remembered to find the second phone.
Still, it was a lot of work getting out of there and not bleeding more while she did it. Luckily Annika had now done a nice job of pulling together the edges of the hole, though she'd been reluctant to just glue the skin together as Sin insisted.
The bullets changed everything.
It was an attempt on at least one of them, if not all of them.
It meant they’d been found.
But there was no way anyone could get up here and get them all. Thus, the end of the bullets was the end of the issue—at least until they got out of the building.
It was more important to leave no trace, than to leave quickly.
It meant her go-bag came out. Guns, spare weapons and cleaning supplies. She handed one compressed stack of antiseptic wipes to Nick, hair sprayed his hair and sent him into the next room. Without being asked, Dunham held his hand out for the spray and followed suit, though lacking the ease and adding a heavy dose of fatalism.
Silently, even Annika took a disposable wipe and cleaned every surface in the main room while Sin stole her own trash. She wasn't worried about her own hair, she hadn't even pulled the wig.
It took twenty minutes to leave. Maybe that was too long, but it was necessary. The bullet was just a message, she had every confidence of that. But from whom?
Owen was ready to pull Annika right out the door when she pointed out—not in so many words—that they were safer with the assassin and the mafia don. Owen disagreed, pulling his own gun from an ankle holster, another from the bag he carried. He handed the smaller one to Annika. With no goodbye other than a nod, he pulled her out into the hallway and through a nearby door.
Sin and Nick weren't too far behind, taking a different set of stairs which were a tomb of echoing concrete. The ability to sneak down them without alerting anyone coming up was almost a near impossibility. Sin and Nick both kept guns in their hands but held down and away, ready for any random guest or hotel employee to pop into the stairwell. She had a ready story that wouldn’t arouse suspicion . . . Just in case.
Though she was alert for a battle, for Kaspar Kurev or the Mechanic or even a new face to pop out and try to kill her at a moment's notice, none of it happened. And she wasn't surprised by that. She wondered if the bullets had just been a message.
The "glass" in the hotel room windows wasn't glass. It was a thick polymer. Virtually bulletproof as a side effect of being high-wind pressure proof and idiot-trying-to-kill-himself-from-our-hotel-window proof. It was possible the bullets had never been intended to hit them, it had only been a way of saying "I know where you are."
So she would change that. They would move again.
She and Nick left the hotel going separate directions, Nick on foot, Sin in her car. He had less to carry, and she circled the city for a while, until she was certain she hadn't been followed. Then she headed to a motel on the outskirts of the city.
She'd been here before, with Lee.
They didn't check ID, didn't give a shit if she rented two rooms or ten. The place was a shithole, which meant it didn't require upkeep from her. So she'd gotten the room here about three days after she'd gotten to town, and for exactly this purpose.
Sin didn't contact any of the others. They would have to trust that she was okay, just like she would trust them. Opening phone lines now could ping where they were, what the new locations were. That could bring more trouble if the intent had simply been to divide and conquer.
Never one for praying before, she opened the space blanket and laid down on it, sandwiching herself inside, and found herself talking to any deity that would listen. She prayed for Owen and Annika, relative newbies at this game, probably the most likely to trip up. They should not get hurt for helping her. For Nick, who had something going on that he hadn't told her about. Sin was used to his secret meetings, but not to the heavy weight that settled around him. It had been there after Reese's death, but this was different. And lastly, always, for Lee.
Hold on, she thought, I'm coming.
She drifted into an uneasy rest.
Owen's heart had been close to beating out of his chest for about four hours. Annika was the calm one. And thank God, because if he was the one carrying their child it would have fled screaming for all the stress he was under.
Despite his raging heartbeat and labored breathing, all controlled by stark fear, he had nothing to feed his churning brain. Since they were holed up in a new hotel room after buying new, empty luggage to check in with, he didn't have any strategy to plan.
Annika laid back on the bed, nodding off with a paperback she'd picked up at the store where they'd gotten the luggage. She was so placid!
In a flash of insight, he saw her, nine-years-old and terrified, running through woods and clinging to a tiny boat on dark seas in a storm. She'd told him all of this. He'd always thought of her as brave, strong, smart, but he realized now that at a young age she had conquered a bone-chilling fear that most people never even came in contact with.
This was nothing to her.
This was helping a friend. Maybe this was payback. In the past she'd mentioned three different people, only one of whose names she knew, who had selflessly helped her and her mother escape Belarus. This was a woman who, as a mere child, had thrown herself on the mercy of an American consulate with legitimate cause to seek asylum.
He wouldn't have thought it possible, but his admiration for her went up.
A second flash came on the heels of the first, only this one was seven years too late. He suddenly understood why none of his good criminals seemed to care when he arrested them, why no one was afraid of him or the FBI.
He realized now, that anyone who was afraid of him was either a good, prison-fearing citizen or else knew that the FBI would expose them and they were afraid of their other enemies finding them. That was it. No one was afraid of Owen Dunham.
He was trained not to shoot. Not to kill. In fact, he was obligated to try to save anyone in his custody. While clearly, the other side was fucking, batshit crazy and had no compunctions about killing.
Just look at Sin. She said she'd taken care of the Ann Evalyn problem. Owen was pretty certain that meant Mrs. Kimmel was dead.
Just as he was thinking, once again, that no one was afraid of him, and with good cause, his phone rang. Nick.
"Yes?" No names, no ID. Vocal recognition was bad enough.
"I need to talk to you. I need your help." Nick's voice shook, just a little as he offered up the last word. "Please."
Holy shit. Maybe Nicolae Stelian was afraid of Owen Dunham. That was indeed a very scary thought.
It took an hour—an hour of watching Annika sleep with a peace he could not find for himself—before Nick managed to rent the room across the hall from Owen and Anni, and Owen headed over for this mysterious talk.
He left the door to his room ajar, and left the door to Nick's room open behind him. When Stelian raised his eyebrows, questioning the move, Owen didn't change his expression at all. Those were his terms. He had to be able to see Annika's foot on the bed, know when she woke up, if anyone came into the room or even checked it out. Paranoia was settling deep into his gut.
Nick invited him to sit, then proceeded to leave Owen with his jaw hanging open.
First, Nick pulled out a hundred dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Owen with the words, "I'm hiring you as my attorney."
"I'm not an attorney." He shoved the money away, only to have it jabbed at him.
"You went to law school."
"I passed the bar but never worked as a lawyer." It took him far too long to realize what Nick wanted. "Attorney-client confidentiality."
Only a nod in response and another attempt to hand over that one-hundred dollar bill. "I'm not a lawyer, you need a real lawyer."
The words were necessary, though Owen admitted to wanting to take the money and the information. He was curious as hell, and the relationship would protect him, too.
Nick agreed. "Anyone can represent themselves. I don't have to have a licensed, practicing attorney. Find a loophole."
"It won't stand up in court."
"It doesn't need to. It just needs to get us to a place where we can talk."
This time, Owen took the money and thought for a while. Twice while he was thumbing through his mental inventory, he checked through the open doorways, looking for Annika. He took another twenty minutes to write out a document regarding the loopholes and that all agreed. He wrote Nick a receipt, and Nick signed everything, before telling him. "You have to close the door."
Big. It was going to be big. Shit.
With a nod, he went across the hall and woke Annika, though he hated to do it. She couldn't be there with him—no attorney client privilege. But she needed to be protected.
He left her there on the bed, book in one hand, gun in the other, looking as content as she might at home. His heart turned over and he wondered for the hundredth time today alone just what he'd gotten her into.
Owen had no sooner closed the door than Nick began speaking. "I'm getting out. I need immunity."
Everything in him froze. Stelian was done? Owen asked exactly that.
A nod, a few words. Nick was smart. He wasn't handing over anything of value until he had agreement. "You're FBI—"
"Former FBI." The distinction was important to Owen and should be to Nick.
"Former, but still with connections into the Bureau. Still with the trust of the current Agency. If I come in on my own, I'm not safe. I come in with you, you get the accolades and I get a deal. I need a deal. Or I stay where I am."
"What are you willing to trade?" Owen knew how this worked. He was shockingly ready despite the fact that this came at him entirely out of left field.
"Names, dates. Anything and everything I have on the Kurevs. And old intel about crimes committed under my grandfather. I can close a lot of cases."
"You're a detective in the Atlanta area, you can close them yourself."
A smirk and a nod. "Only by exposing what I do."
Oh, Owen was so curious. He could know what was happening and not become liable for it himself. The temptation was overwhelming. But the truth was the truth. "I can't guarantee you immunity."
"I know. But you can keep yourself from becoming involved because of your own knowledge and you can also negotiate the deal for me, even though you can't write the paperwork yourself anymore. You know who to go to. You can speak for me."
All true.
Though the papers were already signed, Owen held out his hand in a gesture of good faith, for the first time thinking that maybe his initial trust of this man had not been misplaced. The handshake felt like something solidified and Owen opened his mouth only to have his phone ring.
Sin.
She'd gone to them, to Owen and Annika, and Nick had been there, too. Something was going down with Nick and Owen. Sin had interrupted an important conversation, but she didn't have time to stay and find out what it was.
Ann Evalyn was no longer a source of information. It was only so long before she’d be found anyway. Maybe even already. She'd considered more than once that Ann Evalyn’s demise triggered the bullet hole. There had been enough time that she could have been found and the order to say "hello" via gunfire could have been enacted. But Sin didn't think that was it.
She wasn't a big believer in coincidence, but shit was going down. Owen was scared. Annika wasn't but should be. And Nick was in up to his neck in something she didn't know about. So she interrupted and asked what they had.
Owen showed her the map, Annika chiming in about likelihoods and probabilities. Nick put in his two cents and she compiled a stack of post-it notes with addresses and names and scribbled notes on them. She would destroy them as she used them, rather than leave a manual for anyone to trace her steps. But there wasn't time to memorize them here. Her memory of the pictures Annika had pulled up for her might be enough.
She was headed out the door when Owen pulled her aside.
"We got DNA from the second person at the cabin."
Just the thought punched her in the gut and she fought not to let it show. "Who was it?"
She liked the past tense even as it came out of her mouth. Didn't make it seem as if the problem was still ongoing, even though it was.
"We don't know."
She was turning away at the pitiful response when Owen grabbed her arm. Sin reached for his fingers, prepared to peel them back and bend them so that he would literally jump away from her to avoid the pain before she remembered whose hand was on her. And before he remembered it was a bad idea to grab her. Neither of them mentioned it.
"But we did get a lot of information. It was a female."
That matched the fuzzy memory she had of the night. For a moment it hit her that so much time had passed. She wondered if Lee could still be holding on. How would he have lasted? But she pushed the thought aside so that she didn't give up. Not yet anyway. She couldn't.
In the end, she took a note from Owen, it was just a list, and while she wanted to tuck it in her pocket for later, the sticky part clung to her fingers. And when the silence of everyone wondering what everyone else was up to began to permeate her thoughts, she pulled up the note and looked. Slavic—recent ancestry. Curly, dark hair. Neg. BRCA. Neg Genghis relative.
What the hell good was that? Was she supposed to go around asking people if they were related to one of the most evil and successful conquerors in history? She raised her eyebrows at Owen and he only shrugged in response.
Oh well, if she had to deal in terms like "lactose intolerant," "sprinter," and "likely cilantro adverse" then that's what she would deal in. "Brown eyes" would be a winner, but no one in her business used their real eye color. Not anyone of consequence. But she nodded and thanked him.
She was wondering how to get out of this impromptu gathering with any grace. How to let Owen and Nick get back to their conversation without making a scene. Though she wore black sweatpants and a baggy red turtleneck under her thick jacket, she was armed to the hilt. The jacket had changed, this one had no holes, though the same couldn't really be said for the arm under the sleeve.
She'd seen the picture of Lee. Alive or dead, he'd suffered much more than the puncture of a previously unused kitchen knife. The cut didn't bother her; thoughts of her husband did.
She turned to go when Annika asked the question that would start a shitstorm she didn't want.
"Where are you going?"
Shrugging it off, Sin simply looked at the other woman like, What do you mean?
It didn't work. "You're armed to the hilt. You're off to do something of importance. What?"
"I'm after the Mechanic.”