PART TWO
Chelsea pulled herself out of a doze as she felt the now-familiar slowing of Johan turning into a parking lot, the shudder through the body of the third car they had been in over the course of as many days. She had no idea where they were—and for a while, anyway, she had been telling herself that it didn’t matter where they were. She had abandoned her job, her home—her entire life.
The day after Johan had whisked her out of her apartment and into a life on the run, he had told her quite simply that there was no choice but for her to throw away her cell phone. “If you want to smash it first, that would be even better,” he said as they stood at a gas station, waiting for the tank to fill.
“Why do I have to do that?” she asked him—and two competing ideas filled her mind. If she trusted Johan’s assertion that the CEO of the company she worked for was after her, then her phone was like a big, flashing electronic beacon, charting her movements. But were the thugs that were supposedly after her technologically savvy enough to find a way to track her phone? And if she didn’t trust Johan’s assertion, then throwing away her phone would mean getting rid of one of the last methods she had at her disposal to call the police, to get herself free of him.
“They may be able to track you with it, Chelsea. I don’t know for sure what their capabilities are.” He held her gaze for a long moment. “They were able to find your apartment and trash it looking for your computer. They may have already found the hotel we stayed at last night. Anything that can give them an edge is something you don’t want to hold onto.” Chelsea fought down a sense of unease; after all, she had seen the documentation, hadn’t she? She had seen the emails and text messages between Rosen and whomever he had hired to come after the people who might be able to testify against him. But could she trust what she had seen?
“Okay,” Chelsea said finally, taking her phone out of her purse. Johan nodded solemnly and glanced around the gas station, as if he thought that the people tracking them might appear in a flash to prevent him destroying their ability to follow. He let her phone fall to the ground and then, looking as if he was doing nothing more than crushing an insect, brought his heel down on it. Chelsea grimaced as she heard the crunch and clinking shatter of the screen, the grit of it grinding against the cement. “But what about your phone? If they’re after us, they’d know I’m with you, wouldn’t they?” Johan had smiled slightly, taking his phone out of his pocket and showed it to her; it was strangely different from her own iPhone, sleeker, black and oddly almost dangerous-looking.
“This is not commonly available on the market,” he told her, unlocking the screen in a series of movements her eyes couldn’t quite follow. “It’s encrypted. It’s specifically designed to be as difficult to hack as humanly possible—though, of course, with enough time and effort anything can be hacked.”
Johan slipped the phone into his pocket as the gas pump stopped. He extracted the nozzle from the tank and hung it up on the stand, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “It also has an interesting feature: a non-static phone number. Every time I get a notification about what’s going on, it comes to me through a different contact number—which makes it that much harder for the people coming after you to track us down.” Chelsea had had to accept this idea, as strange and science fiction-like as it seemed. After all, presumably Johan was in contact with someone; she had heard the tail end of conversations he had with his contact—whoever it was—apprising him or her in a series of short, terse sentences about their progress. But who was he in contact with? She couldn’t quite fight down the lingering suspicion that she might have let herself into an enormous trap.
But then, Chelsea thought as she looked around her in the car, if Johan was trying to take her to people who would go on to murder her, why would he keep the ruse going up for days? “If I didn’t know that the CEO of my company was trying to kill me,” she said, stretching against the back of the passenger seat, “I would almost feel guilty for missing so much work without much notice.” Johan had decided that it was pointless to keep up the ruse of being home sick shortly after she’d let him destroy her phone. After all, if the thugs pursuing her had trashed her apartment, it was easy to believe that her boss was either in on the situation, or had been told that she wouldn’t be in the office anymore.
“You’ve always been somewhat of a good girl, haven’t you?” Johan asked her with a slightly leering smile. “Always at work on time, staying late when you have to, carrying your weight?” Chelsea raised an eyebrow at him, frowning.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest as defensive irritation crept through her body. Johan laughed, shutting off the ignition and lightly jiggled the keys in his palm.
“I think deep down you’re different,” he told her. “There’s another Chelsea—one you don’t let out often, and you probably should.” Chelsea’s eyebrows knit together as she stared at him in confusion. “I can see it in you when you get irritated with me,” Johan explained. “There’s a hellcat in you that you keep on a really tight leash. A woman who could shoot a man if she thought she had to. Or beat the shit out of him.”
“And yet you’re not the slightest bit afraid of me,” Chelsea observed, tightening her arms across her chest. In fact, she thought wryly, Johan had—over the course of their few days together—demonstrated just how little he was afraid of her, just how powerful he was, picking her up and carrying her, pinning her to the bed, lifting her into his arms and holding her tightly.
“You have yourself under tight control,” Johan said, shrugging. “It’s when you finally give into that—that Valkyrie you’ve got buried inside of you—that’s when I’ll be afraid.” Chelsea laughed, shaking her head at the image of herself as a Valkyrie.
“Let’s check in, already,” she said, glancing around the parking lot of yet another hotel. “I feel nervous out here in the open.” Johan nodded and opened the driver’s side door, unfolding himself from the seat as Chelsea unbuckled her seat belt and climbed out of her side. As they walked towards the ornate, opulent entrance of the third—or was it the fourth—hotel that they would be staying at, it occurred to her to wonder at the fact that they had yet to spend the night at a Motel 6, or a Howard Johnson—not even a Hilton. All of their overnight stays had been in impossibly luxurious hotels, in suites that would have boggled her mind if she had ever given serious consideration to places to stay before her life on the run.
Where was Johan getting the money for the expensive hotels? How was it that he managed to have access to a different, beautiful car whenever they needed to change vehicles? If she had ever imagined what life would be like on the run, Chelsea would have pictured dingy, dirty hotel rooms close to the interstate, places where the front desk clerk didn’t look up as he took the money and handed over the key. Certainly, she would never have imagined a plush, comfortable suite at a hotel that had a spa on the ground floor and a menu of exotic choices, an entrance flanked with burbling, whispering fountains and lush, meticulously-cared-for plantings.
Chelsea stood back as Johan conducted the business of checking them in, giving a fake name to the desk clerk. She glanced around the lobby, taking in the marble floors, the cedar-lined walls, the real leather of the furniture nestled in cozy, conversational clusters. She had no idea if they were even still in her home state; she had no idea what the name of the city they were in was. “Sweetie,” Johan said calling her attention back to the present. “Did you want to go right up to the room, or browse some of the shops?” Chelsea shrugged.
“We can come back down later,” she said, giving him a warmer smile than she felt. The clerk handed over the keys—real keys, not just a key card, Chelsea noticed—and went back to whatever he had been doing before they walked in.
Johan took her hand, giving it a light squeeze, and led her to the elevators. “I told the guy at the desk that since we were only here overnight, we didn’t bring anything in the way of luggage,” he said quietly. “We can go get our things later when the shift changes.” Chelsea nodded, still mulling over the opulence of their surroundings, confused at the strange level of comfort that had come along with her life on the lam. She stepped onto the elevator, not quite able to ignore the lingering touch that Johan’s hand left at her hip as he steered her forward. One thing that she could very easily believe was the amount of time they had spent having sex, over and over again, over the few days she had been away from her daily routine. It was—as Johan had pointed out their first night together—both an excellent form of stress relief and a good way to kill time. And it serves the added bonus of making me compliant, she thought wryly. The possibility that Johan was using sex to keep her in a state of ready belief for whatever he chose to tell her about her predicament had crossed her mind more than once. It was difficult not to believe that someone had your best interests at heart when they could make love to you like a house on fire.
The elevator chimed, announcing their arrival at the floor that Johan selected, and he took Chelsea’s hand once more, steering her off of the car and down the hallway. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day,” Johan told her lowly, his hand on the small of her back, giving Chelsea a very clear picture of just what he had been thinking about specifically. She smiled in spite of herself, feeling her heartbeat quickening in her chest, her body beginning to heat up. Questions about their lavish lifestyle started to trickle out of her mind as Johan unlocked the door to their suite, leading her through it in quick steps and closing it firmly behind them. Chelsea took just a moment to appreciate the sight of hardwood floors, a small gas-powered fireplace, deep and comfortable living room furniture; she hoped that she would never quite lose the pleased shock she felt at the splendor of the rooms they had at their disposal, even if she questioned the source.