The Paris Vendetta by Shan Serafin

Author:Shan Serafin [Serafin, Shan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 38

Way up near the front of the train, she turned around. She’d kept walking until she was close enough to engage the main conductor on the far end of the platform, then, several key seconds after she’d heard me yell, she turned around and made a big, exaggerated, demonstrative gesture of telling me to hurry up, waving for me to “just come through,” then turned away.

I did my part to look frustrated by this, which wasn’t hard. “She has ’em,” I said to the guard. “My fiancé. She has both our tickets.”

The gate guard was holding me in place, yet the majority of the train cars had sealed their doors. Katarina then turned briefly to wave her arm to coax me to hurry as the conductor near her started arguing with her to get on board alone. The guard next to me, my guard, the gate guard, looked at my face, scrutinized my reaction, then looked toward her, scrutinizing her, then looked back at me. You could see it—the gears turning as he took a professional glance at the throng of passengers lined up for the next train—already a mess—then took an additional look at me, weighing the extent of whatever migraine I or my supposed partner represented to him, estimating just how much I might brutalize his workday even more, sorting through the logistic conundrum that Katarina had masterminded.

“Allez, Monsieur,” he said to me. “Allez. Go.”

And waved me through.

“Go,” he said. “Hurry.”

I sprinted. Katarina saw it, then disappeared into her car while I raced toward the forward conductor, who was now angrily shouting how I needed to race even faster. The ruse worked. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many permutations of trial and error it’d taken her to figure out the timing of something like this—hiding in Europe for a year, hiding in plain sight, dodging sex traffickers, weaving in and out of bureaucratic loopholes—but it worked, the ingenious tempo. She had to know exactly when the first notes of chaos would begin and when the last opportunities for exploitation would end. I boarded the train and sat down on the plush seat she nodded for me to take. The men from the mob? They could be anywhere. They could be in possession of tickets. They could be bribing the other conductor. They could be on board.

“Toward the window,” Katarina said to me quietly. She was motioning for me to turn my body so I’d be turtle-shelled away from the aisle, as in, more difficult to notice. I couldn’t picture da Vinci’s men getting aggressive with the station staff—not in public—not without creating a commotion—but at this point, how could I be sure? The train started moving within minutes of us getting on board, with us now seated in a four-chair arrangement, facing an older couple we’d soon learn were from Finland. Katarina leaned over, speaking even more quietly to tell me, “The train stops in Brussels and Rotterdam. We go to the food car when it does.

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