Chapter 67 Marlena
The safe house was small and quiet and I'd been hiding there for three days when the news broke.
Katya had set it up for me in a town so tiny it didn't even have a proper name, just a cluster of houses near the Austrian border where nobody asked questions and the nearest police station was an hour away. The house had one bedroom and a kitchen that smelled like old wood and windows I kept covered with sheets because I was afraid to let light in.
I was watching the news on my phone when I saw it.
The headline flashed across the screen in big letters and my stomach dropped so fast I thought I might be sick. Nikolai Volkov escapes from FBI custody. Manhunt underway across Europe.
Then my face appeared next to his.
Not a recent photo but an old one from the wedding, me in that white dress looking at the camera with something in my eyes that might have been hope back then but looked like stupidity now. The caption underneath said "Marlena Rousseau, known as The Forger Bride, wanted for questioning."
The Forger Bride.
That's what they were calling me now, like I was some character in a story and not a real person whose life had been ripped apart and put back together wrong too many times. I scrolled through the articles and they all said the same thing, that I was Nikolai's accomplice, that I'd helped him traffic weapons using my art, that I'd married him knowing what he was and helped him escape justice.
My face was everywhere.
On news sites and social media and forums where people I'd never met were discussing whether I looked guilty or just stupid. Someone had found my old photos from Paris and posted them with theories about how long I'd been working with Nikolai. Someone else claimed they'd seen me at the airport in Prague. The comments were vicious and certain and completely wrong but it didn't matter because the story was already written and I was the villain in it.
I turned off the phone and threw it across the room and it hit the wall and clattered to the floor.
I'd lost everything now, not just Luka and my mother and the baby but also any chance at a normal life, any possibility of disappearing into some quiet corner of the world and rebuilding myself into a person who didn't carry all this damage. The world knew my face and my name and a version of my story that wasn't true but was close enough to the truth that I couldn't argue against it without making things worse.
I was scared in a way I hadn't been even in the catacombs, because at least there I'd known who the enemy was and what they wanted, but now the enemy was everywhere, millions of strangers with opinions and cameras and the absolute certainty that they knew who I was.
I was also angry, furious at Nikolai for escaping and making me part of the story again, furious at Damien for starting this whole thing with his fake evidence, furious at myself for every choice that had led me here.
I paced the small house like a trapped animal and didn't eat and barely slept and waited for something to happen that would tell me what came next.
The knock came on the fourth night.
It was soft, just three taps on the door, and I froze in the middle of the kitchen with my heart suddenly hammering because nobody should know where I was, Katya had promised me that, nobody except her knew about this house.
I grabbed the gun from the counter where I'd been keeping it and moved to the door quietly, pressing myself against the wall beside it and calling out "Who is it?"
No answer.
Three more knocks, same rhythm, patient and deliberate.
I looked through the peephole with the gun raised and ready and saw him standing there in the dark.
Nikolai.
He was alone and dressed in dark clothes and his face looked tired and older than I remembered but it was definitely him, and for a second I couldn't breathe at all because seeing him there on my doorstep felt like something from a dream or a nightmare and I couldn't tell which.
I unlocked the door and opened it slowly with the gun still in my hand and he looked at it and then at my face and didn't move.
"Marlena," he said quietly.
I didn't lower the gun but I didn't raise it either, just stood there in the doorway looking at him while my brain tried to catch up with what was happening.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"Katya told me where you were," he said, "I asked her to, I needed to see you."
"You escaped," I said, and it came out almost like an accusation, "the whole world is looking for you and you came here."
"I know," he said, "I'm sorry, I'm putting you in danger just by being here but I had to see you, I had to ask you something."
I waited and he took a breath and said it plain and simple with no performance behind it, just the truth laid out between us like broken glass.
"Come with me or turn me in forever."
The words hung in the cold night air and I felt everything at once, joy that he was alive and standing in front of me, anger that he'd escaped and dragged me into this mess again, fear of what would happen if I chose wrong, confusion about what choosing right even meant anymore.
I thought about everything we'd been through, the contract and the lies and Monaco and the baby we lost and my mother dying in the catacombs saving my life. I thought about how he'd used me and hurt me and destroyed almost everything I loved but also how he'd held me in that hotel room like I was something precious and how he'd carried me out of the collapsing tunnels when I couldn't walk. I thought about how Marlena had protected him when she could have sent him to prison and how he'd looked at me sometimes when he thought I wasn't paying attention, like I was the only real thing in his whole fake world.
I thought about spending the rest of my life running and hiding and never feeling safe, but also about the alternative which was spending the rest of my life without him and wondering if I'd made the wrong choice.
I lowered the gun and set it on the table inside the door.
"Yes," I said.
He didn't move for a second like he couldn't believe what I'd said, and then he crossed the distance between us in two steps and pulled me into his arms so tight I could barely breathe.
I held him back just as tight with my face pressed against his chest and my hands fisted in his jacket, and he was shaking or maybe I was shaking or maybe we both were but it didn't matter because for the first time in weeks I felt something other than empty.
"I'm sorry," he whispered into my hair, "I'm so sorry for everything, I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you if you let me."
"I know," I said, and I did know, I could feel it in the way he held me like he was afraid I might disappear, "I know."
We stood there in the doorway holding each other while the night got colder around us and somewhere far away sirens wailed but they weren't
coming here, not yet, we still had time.