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CHAPTER ELEVEN
ROWAN WOKE TO a warm and touch-happy man in her bed and didn’t mind his presence at all. Not the circle of his arms or his sleepy good morning. Not the way he kept one hand on her stomach even as he rolled over to check his phone.
‘What time do you have to be at work?’ he mumbled.
She muttered something about six o’clock and pulled his phone towards her so that she could see the time more clearly. She groaned—six o’clock being forty minutes away and all.
‘I’ve got to get up. What time are you and the gang heading back today? Because you’re welcome to stay here this morning. Just lock up on your way out.’
‘You know what I remember best about my mother?’ he said as he pulled her to him and placed a kiss on her temple. ‘Whenever my father had to leave for work, be it for a day or for a fortnight, she always got up and saw him off, and he always left smiling. Even back then I liked her priorities.’
Rowan remembered back to those days in far-flung countries when her parents hadn’t even bothered to tell her where they were going. She’d simply wake to an amah or the housekeeper telling her they were gone. Could be why Rowan liked her job so much nowadays. Knowing where people were and what they were doing just flat-out worked for her on a psychological level. That kind of information was important to her. It made her feel secure.
‘Was she a stay-at-home mum, your mum?’
‘Depends on your definition. Companies used to come to her with their figures for analysis. She was a mathematician—an incredibly bright one. I think that’s where we all got our smarts from.’
‘She sounds like a remarkable woman.’
‘Life is full of them.’ He turned his head, his eyes as penetrating as any laser. ‘You’re one.’
‘Trust me—I am not that smart.’
‘You’re a driven, focused, impressively networked problem-solver. And you know I’m more than halfway gone on you. And now we need to get out of this bed before I derail all your good intentions when it comes to you being on time for work.’
Rowan slid out of bed with a light in her heart. She shared her toiletries and her shower with him and smirked her satisfaction when he emerged, hair still spiky and wet, smelling faintly of ginger and roses. She ground beans and made coffee with the sinfully expensive machine that had been a fortieth birthday present to herself, and watched his eyes glaze over when he lifted the steaming black brew to his lips.
This man practically turned into a biddable little lamb in exchange for a morning cup of coffee.
Something to remember.
By the time he was on his second cup she was almost ready to walk out through the door. ‘You’ll lock up behind you?’
He nodded and set the cup down. ‘So … Me coming here to see you during the week. You coming up to the beach house when you can. Is that going to work for you? Because if it does … if you want to try to build some kind of ongoing relationship with me … I’m all for it.’
‘An exclusive relationship?’
‘I don’t share.’ His eyes flashed hot with temper. ‘We do this and you’re mine and no one else’s. And I’m yours.’
‘Yes.’
She wanted to crawl into his lap and stay there for a week. Gorge herself stupid on him and let him feast on her. She wanted this man and all that he was offering. There would be spats with him, because he wasn’t a malleable soul and neither was she. There was a good chance that she would want more than he could give.
But she contented herself with kissing him slow and sweet and savouring this moment of pure happiness. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, I think that would work.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON WEDNESDAY THE following week Jared got a phone call from Damon. He and Damon didn’t really do social calls, so his brother’s quiet ‘Hey, how you tracking?’ caught his attention, regardless of the innocuous words.
‘Yeah, good. Better than I was.’
‘And your ribs? They’re good now too?’
Okay, now his brother was getting weird.
Jared strode past the pool on his way to the big double doors that led out onto the deck overlooking the ocean. ‘Yeah, they’re fine. What’s going on?’
‘You at the beach house?’
‘Yeah. Why? You need it for something?’
‘Need you to get something out of the safe for me. I’ll call you back in five minutes.’
‘Better make it ten. I know that safe, but damned if I can remember the password.’
‘You break it—you buy it. Search your memory, brother. I know you have one.’
‘You always have to do things the hard way,’ Jared grumbled.
‘Good to hear you bitching again. I’ve missed it.’
Damon rang off.
Jared sighed, put the phone back in its cradle and padded down the long hallway to Damon’s study. He’d barely set foot in it since he’d been here. Mostly he used the kitchen, the pool and the beach that beckoned so brightly. He was taking it easy. Feeling his way in this new life and trying not to demand too much from the woman he wanted to be with.
Jared remembered the combination to the safe the moment he looked at it. His brain was good for stuff like that. He scooped up the phone, the computer and the power cords sitting in the safe and took them out to the kitchen and plugged them in. There was nothing else in the safe. This was it.
He made himself a rare roast beef sandwich—tomato, lettuce and pickle included—in the two minutes he had left before Damon rang again. His brother was excruciatingly punctual. If Damon said he’d call back in five minutes, he meant five minutes.
He was mid-bite of his sandwich when one of the ‘safe’ phones rang. Damon and his insistence on black market phones that couldn’t be traced … Mind you, they were useful.
‘You know that phone you left in Seb’s toiletries bag at the wedding?’ Damon began when Jared picked up, referring to their sister Poppy’s partner.
‘I thought that was your toiletries bag?’
‘Nope. It was Seb’s. Luckily he’s a sharing, caring kind of guy and he told me about it. I brought it home with me and I’ve been keeping it charged. I figured if you wanted it you’d ask for it.’
‘Thanks.’ Jared eyed his sandwich longingly before putting it down. ‘It has information on it that I didn’t feel like sharing.’
‘Someone called the phone last night.’
‘Say what?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Only one person ever used that number. And he’s dead.’
‘It’s Antonov’s kid, from what I can gather. I’m going to play the messages for you now. First one’s just a hang-up call—didn’t leave a message,’ Damon said. ‘The second one’s more interesting.’
Damon did something to the phone at his end and Antonov’s seven-year-old son’s voice came on the line.
‘JB? Jimmy? You said to call you if I ever got in trouble, so I’m calling,’ the boy said in his native Russian. ‘My mother doesn’t want me. She thought I’d come with money but there isn’t any. And my father’s friends don’t believe her, and she’s scared because they’re saying that my father owed them and now she owes them and they’re really bad men. She says I’m too sick and that I’m more trouble than I’m worth and that she can’t protect me. She doesn’t want me.’ The boy’s voice broke. ‘She never did.’
Jared slumped against the counter and closed his eyes against the wash of remorse that slid through him like poison. Antonov’s little boy had always been his weak spot when it had come to bringing Antonov’s operations to a halt. What would happen to the sick little boy with Antonov in prison and a mother who’d been nowhere in the picture and didn’t want to be? Only Antonov had died, which had changed the equation again. Celik’s mother had become the boy’s next of kin and Celik had been shipped off to her.
‘You still there?’ asked Damon.
‘Yeah,’ he rasped in a voice that wasn’t his. ‘I’m listening.’
‘This next one came in a couple of hours after the second message.’
Jared waited to hear what the boy had had to say this time.
‘You promised I’d be okay. I’m not okay. Please,’ Celik begged. ‘You promised my father that if anything bad ever happened to him you’d look after me. I heard you. Can you come and get me?’
The message ended and once again no one spoke.
And then Damon cleared his throat. ‘Did you really promise that?’
‘Yeah.’ His brother hadn’t been there. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I love you, man, and I know you move mountains—you’ve been my hero ever since I was a kid, think Superman—but how the hell do you intend to make good on that promise?’
‘I can make good on it.’ Jared’s hands might be trembling but he had to believe it. ‘Can you trace the calls?’
‘The calls track back to a canal house in Amsterdam, and all three of them came in overnight—my time. Truth be told, I didn’t check that phone for messages when I first got up. I didn’t even look at the phone until after lunch. It’s been silent. I’ve only being paying cursory attention to it.’
‘I never asked you to check for messages. I didn’t think there’d be any.’
‘So what’s your plan?’
‘Go and get him.’ Nothing else he could do.
‘You need any help with that?’
He was going to need a great deal of help with that. Not to mention some kind of real plan. ‘Don’t you have a pregnant wife to be with?’
‘Just saying that I’m right here if you need anything by way of information or assistance. I don’t have to be there in order to help you. Have computer will cyber-travel, man. If you’re planning a covert extraction … if you’re aiming to disappear the boy out from under everyone’s noses … don’t count me out. Count me in.’
‘I— Thanks.’
He’d always left Damon out of the loop when it came to the work he’d performed. He’d always left Damon out of the loop, period. If Jared were to hazard a guess he’d say that he’d always thought of Damon as too young and unpredictable to take part in any wild scheme he and Lena had dreamed up as teenagers. But his brother wasn’t that kid any more.
Courtesy of that damned psych report, Jared now had more than a passing acquaintance with the slights he’d bestowed on his younger brother over the years and the underlying reasons for them.
Damon alive. Their mother dead.
Resentment.
‘Yeah. I could probably use your help if you want in,’ he muttered gruffly. ‘Celik Antonov is a sweet kid. A good kid. He doesn’t deserve this.’
‘Do you have a plan for once you have him?’
‘Antonov has a sister. He set her up with an alias and enough money for a simple life twenty years ago and then he left her to it. No contact whatsoever until three months ago, when a Romanian woman contacted him about donating a kidney to his son. A kidney with a high chance of being a match for the kid. Her name was Sophia and Antonov had her on speaker phone. He cut her off. And then he broke down and wept.’
And then the story had come out.
‘Did she give the kid the kidney?’
‘She never called again.’
‘What makes you think she’ll take the boy?’
‘She offered him her kidney.’
‘Do you know where to find her?’
‘No, but I know she’s a schoolteacher in a small village in Romania and that she’s childless. Also that she was worked over by thugs when she was twelve and Antonov was eighteen. Antonov had got on the wrong side of some dangerous people and that was their warning to him. Care to do a bit of sleuthing?’
‘Sophia … schoolteacher … Romania … childless and her age,’ Damon replied dryly. ‘Good thing I’m brilliant.’
‘Ah, modesty. Guess it runs in the family. Call me when you have something.’
‘You taking anyone with you when you go to get him?’
‘Wasn’t planning on it.’
‘Will you tell Trig where you’re going? Or Lena? Anyone?’
‘Are you insinuating that I need to share more with the family?’
‘Yes. Save yourself a repeat of Lena going after you. Again. Because she will—and she’ll drag us all into it.’
‘Consider them told.’
Somewhere in the past two years Jared had lost control of his family entirely. Something to rectify. Eventually.
‘Hey, Damon?’ Jared considered his next question carefully. ‘I’m going to need a handler on this job. I need someone to plan ahead with. Someone to talk me through the options once I’m on the ground and steer me in the direction that’s safest for the kid … Would you do it?’
‘Are you asking me?’
There was something in Damon’s voice that sounded a whole lot like hope. Willingness—that was in there too. Need, even.
‘Yeah, I’m asking you. And I know exactly what kind of responsibility it entails, so if you don’t want—’
‘I’ll do it,’ his brother said gruffly. ‘Who better, right? It’s not as if I’d want anyone else doing it.’
‘Okay.’ Jared cleared his throat. ‘Okay, thanks.’
This family.
There was silence then, while their relationship settled into new territory, and then Jared took a deep breath. ‘This Amsterdam canal house? Where do I find it?’
‘I’ll send you directions. You going to ring the kid?’
‘You going to give me the number?’
The answer to both was yes.
Rowan hated it when someone else’s plan went awry and landed on her desk. She’d been keeping tabs on Antonov’s son from a distance, touching base with the officials responsible for placing the boy with his mother. So far she didn’t think much of their decisions. ‘Set and forget’ being their preference.
The child’s mother was a high-class courtesan who’d held Antonov’s attention long enough to beget him a child. He’d paid her handsomely for her trouble and she’d given up the child without a backward glance.
That was then.
These days Celik’s mother worked even more selectively, operating out of her own home in the middle of Amsterdam. She wasn’t a criminal, and she enjoyed a comfortable standard of living. She didn’t take drugs and didn’t drink to excess. On paper, sending Celik Antonov to live with his birth mother once his father was dead had seemed like an obvious solution.
Until one started factoring in the late arms dealer’s enemies and alliances.
The boy’s mother was smart, but she was currently beset by vultures she didn’t have the resources to deal with. She was out of her league.
It was time to do something.
Rowan sighed and reached for the phone.
She waited until the man that she and all the other directors answered to picked up. She needed to cover all bases with this one—her own base included.
‘Sir, I have the latest report on Celik Antonov in front of me. I’d like permission to bring Jared West back in on the case in an advisory capacity. He knows the child and he understands the situation. I’d like to run certain scenarios on relocation for the child past him.’
Her request was reasonable. She was just doing her job. But there was more to her request than that.
‘I also think Jared would want to be notified of this. It was his case. His fallout.’
And Jared would see it as his problem to fix.
There was silence on the other end, and then that dry, deep voice spoke. ‘Jared, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ She’d known that the use of Jared’s first name wouldn’t go unnoticed. She wanted full disclosure on this. ‘I’m intimate with him. This is the one case within my portfolio that I would share with him—with your permission.’
Rowan’s palms were sweaty. Not only was a child’s wellbeing at stake, so too was her fledgling romantic relationship. It wouldn’t sit well with Jared that she had fresh information on Celik that she hadn’t passed on to him. She needed a yes from Management on this.
‘Sir …?’
Could be there had been a whole lot of pleading in that one little prompt. Could be she’d just altered the course of her own career irrevocably.
‘Do it,’ he said, and hung up.
Rowan slumped back in her chair and ran a clammy palm down over her face in relief.
One down. One to go.
Rowan put a call through to Jared next, knowing full well that he wasn’t going to like hearing that the child’s situation needed a rethink.
But all she got was an answering machine.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JARED ARRIVED IN Amsterdam and made the city his own. Bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, creatively organised and full of water, the city appealed to him. The watercraft weren’t like the ones he’d grown up with, and the canals were a rats’ maze, but the place was beautiful and free-wheeling and it appealed to him on a visceral level.
He’d have liked to see Celik grow up here in safety, but that wouldn’t happen so long as Antonov’s parasites kept after him. Celik’s perceived inheritance was the magnet, but the authorities had frozen it. No one could get to it. Not Celik’s mother—bless her non-maternal soul—not Antonov’s debtors, nor his creditors. That money wasn’t going anywhere.
Two years ago he wouldn’t have hesitated to go in and take the child, with no one any the wiser. These days his world was not nearly so black and white.
Undercover work had shown him the many facets of every situation. Likewise, Rowan’s approach to problem-solving took into account and tried to balance many different needs. Celik had a mother—a woman who had taken him in—and before Jared put any plan for the boy in motion he needed to talk to her and take her needs into consideration.
Jared wasn’t going into this guns blazing.
He thought Rowan would approve.
Getting to see Celik’s mother was easy.
Damon invented an obscenely wealthy, fully verified background for him and booked him an appointment. Two hours, four-thirty to six-thirty p.m., cash only.
Damon’s wicked sense of humour at work, but it gave him a cover persona and a trail leading nowhere should anyone decide to investigate.
Damon had invented another persona for Jared as well. In this one he was a highly skilled government operative, specialising in witness protection. It was this second persona that Jared had to sell to Celik’s mother in order for any of their plans to work.
He was here to lie, scheme, to light a fire and destroy a little property, and kidnap a child and possibly the child’s mother as well.
Every one of those activities should have given him pause.
And they didn’t.
Needs must.
He had a plan, finessed by Damon, and he was running with it.
At four-thirty p.m. exactly Jared entered a narrow street paved with cobblestones and walked towards house number twenty-three. The entrance door was flanked by flowerpots filled with colourful blooms. An ornate wrought-iron railing guided visitors up the three steps to the deep red door with its brass lion knocker. The house itself stood three storeys tall—one of Amsterdam’s historic ‘Gentleman’s Houses’, abutting one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Prime real estate, carefully tended and exclusive.
He rang the bell, and was surprised when Celik’s mother opened the door herself.
He knew what she looked like from the photos Damon had sent him. He’d been expecting polish and he got it. She was a very beautiful woman in her late twenties, with a face that had an innocence to it that couldn’t possibly be real, given her profession. But she had a kind of vulnerability—and her smile was sweet as she asked him his name and then stood back to let him in, waiting until the door had closed behind him.
She led him into a small sitting room filled with deep armchairs and elegant furnishings before asking him for more formal identification.
‘A driver’s licence, if you please, or a passport.’
He handed her the passport Damon had secured for him and she took a photo of it with her phone and presumably sent it somewhere, presumably for safekeeping.
Not a foolish woman, by any means.
‘Precautions,’ she said, with another sweet smile. ‘Should you become a regular patron, this part of the afternoon can, of course, be dispensed with. My name is whatever you want it to be this evening. Would you care for a drink?’
‘I’m really not here for what you think I’m here for.’
He pulled out the second set of credentials and handed them over and watched her innocent expression fade, to be replaced by sharp-eyed consideration.
‘I’m here in collaboration with Dutch and Russian officials. I work for an organisation that relocates certain individuals—if that’s what they need. I’m here to offer you and your son entry into a witness protection programme.’
Would she do it? He had a plan in place, just in case she said yes.
But neither he nor Damon had judged it likely.
‘No.’ He watched in silence as her pretty face contorted into a mask of pain and frustration. ‘Yes, I requested help, but this is not what I want!’
He and Damon had judged correctly.
‘Witness protection?’ she continued angrily. ‘Why should I give up my life here when this was never the arrangement? I bore that man a child, yes. A sick child that I couldn’t care for. The child’s father paid me to go away and stay away—and I did. That child upstairs was three days old when I walked away from him. I have the paperwork to prove it. I made no claim on him, or on any fortune he might some day inherit. I have paperwork for that as well. But does anyone care? No! “You’re his mother,” they said. “He’s your problem now—you deal with it.”‘
Not a lot of maternal instinct in that heart.
‘Look, he’s a sweet kid. He’s soft. He has this innocence …’ she continued. ‘How that happened, given that father of his, I have no idea. But I can’t protect the boy from who he is and what his late father owes. I don’t have access to the money his father’s business associates want. I don’t have the weapons they want. I was never in Antonov’s confidence. But these people … they don’t want to hear that.’
‘You fear for your safety?’
‘Yes!’
‘I’m offering you and your son a chance to leave this place and start afresh. Somewhere Antonov’s debtors won’t find you.’
‘Take the boy—yes. If he goes away my problems will disappear. Take him. Please. And leave me out of it. I have a life here—and it’s a good one.’
‘If that’s what you want …’ He’d been counting on it. ‘I require your signature and your co-operation when it comes to getting the child away from the property without being seen. Your son will have a new identity and a new life without you in it. One that precludes any contact with you in future years.’
‘Take him.’ She spoke with no hesitation. ‘Keep him safe if you can. Let him grow to become his own man—there’s freedom in that, and choice. He could go to school, make friends with other children. I tried to get him to make friends, but he’s too used to being with adults … he’s never been anything but home-schooled.’ She shook her head. ‘The child thinks he’s too sick for regular school. He’s not. He was home-schooled because of his father’s protectiveness and paranoia.’
‘Under the circumstances, I guess the paranoia was warranted.’
‘All I’m saying is that if he stops being Antonov’s son, Celik can go to school. He can choose who he wants to be.’ She looked sad suddenly. ‘He won’t get the chance to start over if he stays with me.’
‘You do care about him?’
‘No! Not enough to change my life. There’s a difference between wanting someone to have a chance and caring about them.’
‘Do you need more time to make a decision?’
She shook her head and turned away. ‘No. Take him now. Take him away. I don’t care.’
‘Do you like yellow tulips?’
Her gaze met his in the mirror above the mantelpiece as she poured herself a shot glass full of cognac and swallowed it. ‘They’re a little common.’
‘Once a year, on this date, you’ll receive a bunch of yellow tulips. A message, if you will, that your son is alive and well.’
Once upon a time Jared would never have thought to offer anyone that kind of solace. These days he better understood that some situations could be beyond a person’s capacity to deal with them.
‘You really don’t have to do that.’
‘I’ll do it once. Should you refuse the delivery, you won’t get any others.’
‘Will you take the boy with you now?’
‘Before six this evening—yes.’
‘You have my thanks.’ She shrugged, elegant, unapologetic, and whimsical again now that her life had been rearranged to her liking. She crossed to the window and drew the curtains aside. ‘They watch my house all the time now. Two from below. One from a house across the canal. There may be more.’
‘There are more. But I’ve got this. May I see the boy now?’
‘Take the stairs to the top floor. He’s in the room on the left. You can’t miss it. His tutor is with him.’ She shot him a wry smile. ‘It’s school time.’
Jared climbed the stairs, opened the first door to the left and watched the solemn-eyed little boy’s face light up with relief.
‘Jimmy!’
‘Hey there, champ. How’s it going?’ was all he had time to say before his arms were full of boy.
‘And you are …?’ enquired the steel-haired matron sitting at a desk filled with books.
‘Just passing through.’ Jared smiled his most charming smile and watched the older woman’s eyes start to thaw. He looked down at Celik next and shot the boy a grin. ‘According to your mother you have five minutes of school left before we can break you out of here and go have some fun,’ he said in Russian.
‘Schooling is important,’ the teacher said, clearly having no trouble at all understanding Jared’s somewhat thick northern Russia accent. And then she offered them both a smile. ‘But maybe today we will finish early, no? Maybe just this once.’
By the time darkness fell Jared and Celik were in the basement of the old canal house and Jared was busy removing the narrow window that sat just above the waterline from its hinges.
‘Remember what I told you.’ Jared crouched down and held the boy’s gaze. ‘We’re going through the window and then we’re going for a swim using scuba gear. It’s just like the snorkelling gear you used to use, only better.’
‘Like what you used when you checked the hull for bombs. You showed me.’
‘Exactly like that. But it’s going to be dark underwater and you won’t be able to see much.’
‘And I’m going to be clipped to you.’
‘That’s right. And we’ll only be this far under the water.’ Jared’s spread his arms about a meter or so wide and then shortened it to half that before lengthening the distance again. ‘So the moment you want to go to the surface you tug on my arm and up we go. Got that?’
The boy nodded.
‘And what does this mean?’ Jared continued the drill, commanding the little boy’s attention with his voice and eyes as he made the universal sign for okay with his fingers.
‘It means I’m okay.’
‘When we come up to the surface—and we will a few times—that’s the signal I want to see. It’ll tell me that you’re ready to go back under again. Okay? Make the sign.’
He held up his own curled fingers as an example. Celik made the sign and Jared nodded.
‘Good. Are you ready?’
The boy nodded enthusiastically, and Jared picked him up and stood him on the bench he’d placed below the window. They watched together as a long, many-seated, shallow-bottomed tourist boat stalled right in front of the little window. The pilot would slip overboard and then the boat would catch fire and provide them with some smoke and cover. Bless Damon and his remote management skills.
‘Remember when I told you that a boat was going to help hide us while we slide out the window and into the water? That’s the boat. And it’s going to blow up now.’
Celik’s eyes grew big and round.
Yeah, not a sentence a seven-year-old boy heard every day … Not even Antonov’s son.
The explosion was a good one. The boat went up in flames, accompanied by a roil of black smoke. Jared took the window out and hoisted himself through it and into the inky black water, and then motioned for Celik to come. It helped that the boy could swim like a fish and looked upon this as an adventure. It also helped that one of Antonov’s thugs had shown him as a six-year-old how scuba gear worked and had let the boy play around with it in a swimming pool before Antonov had put a stop to it.
The scuba gear he’d set in place earlier was still there. Less than thirty seconds later they were two feet underwater and swimming away from the blaze. Jared kept them close to the side of the canal and brought them to the surface beneath the shadows of the nearest bridge. He wanted to see that okay sign.
The kid was like an eel in the water, and when Jared gave him the sign the kid nodded vigorously, wrapped an arm around his neck and signalled right back.
So under they went again.
Two more times they surfaced, and soon enough came upon a row of houseboat hulls. Jared started counting them off. Six—and then a sharp right into an adjoining canal.
They were halfway through the turn when another boom sounded—a boom that shook the water. That didn’t bode well. Forward progress suddenly became a whole lot more difficult, with water flowing swiftly in the opposite direction, and Jared clung with all his strength to the canal wall.
That secondary explosion was neither his nor Damon’s doing.
Something to worry about.
Their last crawl along the side of the houseboat hulls took as much time as the rest of the swim put together, but eventually they surfaced again. Every muscle in Jared’s arms and shoulders was screaming with the weight of Celik and the drag of the water.
This time they’d surfaced next to a ladder that was half hidden between a houseboat and the canal wall. Jared wasted no time in getting the scuba gear off them and sending Celik up the ladder first.
‘There’s a towel waiting for you. Grab it and get warm.’
Moments later they were in the bowels of a comfortably shabby tourist houseboat and Jared was turning lights on.
‘Are we good?’
Celik nodded, his eyes bright and his hair sticking up in tufts. ‘Did we lose them? The bad men?’
‘Yes. Jump in the shower and get warmed up while I put some soup on. Then I’m going to tell you a story about a little boy who never knew he had an aunt. An aunt who loved him very much, even though they’d never met. An aunt who wanted nothing more than to meet this little boy named Celik and help him to grow up healthy and happy and strong. Do you like the sound of that story?
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