Alex's neck still stung where the letter opener had broken the skin. The safe house—a modernist villa fifteen minutes from Monaco—hummed with tense activity as Interpol agents secured the perimeter. He watched from the balcony as they patrolled the grounds, their shadows stretching long in the pre-dawn light.
"You should let me clean that properly," Sonia said, appearing beside him with the first aid kit she'd found in the bathroom.
He didn't resist when she dabbed antiseptic on the cut. Her hands were steady now, unlike the trembling fingers that had tended to him in the panic room hours earlier.
"That was reckless," she murmured, her voice carrying both admiration and reproach simultaneously. "Holding a blade to your own throat."
"It worked, didn't it?" Alex's gaze remained fixed on
