9. Madam Belova

The military enforces an early-to-bed, early-to-rise lifestyle, and Blaze hadn't shaken it since he'd retired just a few years before.

Besides, he liked watching the sun rising out of Lake Michigan from his pool deck with his morning hot chocolate. The silent, deep water reflecting the fiery sky soothed him, a restful hour before the city awoke with its car engine growls, sirens, and random bangs.

The first day on Sarah's farm, she'd retired for bedtime at nine after a hard day of reinstituting the farm's rhythms, and he'd crashed beside her in the guest room's firm bed and zonked straight out.

Waking up two hours later in the dark night disoriented him.

He woke with immediate operational alertness, registering all that had happened in the days before, but Sarah was missing from the bed.

The sheets where she should have been lying were cool, even in the Midwestern summer night.

Blaze rolled silently off the side of the bed, landing on his bare tiptoes and fingertips. His pistol was right where he had left it, just a few inches underneath his side of the bed, and its steel cooled his hand as he held his breath to listen to the summer wind sighing through the old wood of her ancient farmhouse.

He stalked forward, crawling over the worn-smooth wooden floorboards to the doorway and dark hallway beyond. Another pause to listen brought only quiet.

Muffintop the cat sauntered by him and nonchalantly stretched, sinking her claws into a braided rag rug and yawning.

Blaze had already proved that the cat's instincts were faulty, so her lack of alarm did nothing to qualm his suspicion that the White Russians had found them. He prayed to Aries, Mars, or any war god that might hear him that Sarah was alive and had not been transported off the property yet.

As he crept around the corner, all his senses on high alert, white light drew a thin line under a door at the end of the hall.

Those White Russian bastards must be interrogating Sarah in her tarot card studio, the soundproofing muffling their quiet threats and her gagged cries.

Blaze rose to his feet next to the door, his weapon aimed low and in front of him.

With one devastating kick, the side of his bare foot splintered the wood around the doorknob and smashed the door in.

He was already advancing, peering down the iron sights of his handgun and checking all four corners of the room for intruders by the time he realized Sarah was alone and wearing her silvery psychic costume, reading tarot cards. "What the ever-living fuck?"

"Darn it, Blaze! What are you doing here?"

A female voice whined from the phone suspended in the middle of a ring light. "Madam Belova? Is everything all right?"

Blaze removed his finger from the trigger and snapped the safety onto his gun, still holding it pointing down and away from Sarah. "What are you doing?"

Sarah clamped her hands on her hips and stared at him. "I need to finish this reading. Give me five minutes."

"This is against operational security. We discussed social media."

"I will talk to you about this in five minutes. Wait outside." Sarah turned back to the phone and a half-dozen brightly colored tarot cards strewn on a card table draped with sparkly fabric. Her voice was lower and vaguely Russian-accented as she said, "And now, Madam Belova will continue telling your future."

Blaze left her studio, carefully closing the door behind himself.

Of all the damn scenarios, Sarah succumbing to the lure of social media had not been on his radar. He knew that the likes and attention were as addictive as gambling, but he hadn't thought she would endanger them both for an electronic dopamine hit.

For five crazed minutes, Blaze's tactician mind ground through alternate operational scenarios, most leading to their deaths or worse.

Finally, Sarah opened the door of her studio and peered down at where Blaze sat on the floor, and then she flipped on the hallway light, a brilliant glare that made his eyes smart. "Barging in while I'm in the middle of a reading disrupts the experience."

Blaze contemplated the pistol he held in his hands. With its safety on, he could beat his own head in without endangering Sarah. "I need you to tell me why you went online."

She sat beside him on the floor. "Because I couldn't just ignore all those people who were begging for readings, and the farm needs the money."

In a small way, it was a relief that she hadn't been bratting to get his attention, but the recklessness of it astounded him. "You exposed our position for, what, a hundred bucks?"

"Forty dollars, actually."

His heart beat faster in his chest. "Your aunt knows you do these bogus psychic readings under this account. Surely, she set up an alert that notified her at the moment you went online. The gears in the White Russian organization are already turning. Hitmen have almost certainly been ordered to come here."

"She probably didn't even see me, and we need the money."

"Why on Earth would a temporary cash flow situation prompt you to betray our position like this?" he demanded.

"It's not a ‘temporary cash flow situation' to me. Last week, those hackers stole every little bit of savings I had. All the money the farm generates dumps right back into running it. You were cut off from your money by those people who hacked our bank accounts, too, so you can't even loan me some to get me by."

"But we would have figured it out."

"With your guests coming here next weekend for the Fourth of July, we have to be able to buy food and other items they'll need. We needed money. I'm getting us some money."

"Betraying our position wasn't worth forty bucks."

"Without access to our bank accounts, we need every dollar we can get our hands on to keep us afloat, to buy the feed corn for the chickens and hay for Charlie and HowNow, and especially if you want to buy steaks and whole chickens to rotisserie for guests."

"I wish you'd talked to me about this first. I was planning to call other friends, ones who aren't wrapped up with the White Russian mafia, to float me a loan of a couple hundred thousand until the hacking situation is resolved. I was deciding today who to call and planning to make the calls tomorrow morning."

Sarah jammed her hands together to make one huge fist. "Well, I wish you would've told me that. It must be nice to have rich friends who can just loan you bougie money at the drop of a hat. I sure as heck don't have any friends who could do that."

It had been a long time since Blaze had thought of money in terms of scarcity. "Was that tarot reading a private video like a DM, or did you announce yourself on social media?"

Sarah sighed heavily, and her shoulders dropped with defeat. Blaze dreaded her answer.

She said, "It was a live reading that anyone could watch. I did one lady's cards for money and then a general reading to gauge the temperature of the spirit realm, which is like a weather forecast for the future. So many people needed to hear that the cards are favorable, and everything will be okay."

"And were the cards ‘favorable?'" he asked, wishing like hell she hadn't gone online.

Sarah squinted her eyes at him. "I sure as heck said they were, and a whole lot of people have a tighter grip on their lives now. We have a community, you know. I started being Madam Belova after my parents died, and they got me through that time, financially and emotionally. There are a lot of desperate people out there, just like I was. It's important to give them encouragement and hope."

Blaze rested his head on the wall behind him. "So your aunt knows where we are."

"Well, she might not. I never have my location services on when I'm on social media, especially on livestreams."

"She'll recognize your studio from last time."

"When you tricked her into the Zoom call and attacked me?"

That was close to bratting, but Blaze wasn't going to follow the distraction. "Yes, Sarah. That time. And because she saw your robes and your studio on that call, she'll know they're the same this time. She'll know you're here at your farm."

"Maybe not. And besides, livestreams aren't recorded and posted. Once they're done, they're gone. And it's midnight in New York. She's probably asleep and missed it."

Blaze had no faith that Mary Varvara Bell would somehow miss that one of the people she was hunting had been livestreaming online. "Maybe so, but the odds are that this farm is now ground zero for the White Russians. We need to leave. Pack your bags."

"No."

Her quiet refusal didn't sound like bratting, but it did make Blaze want to run headfirst into the damn wall.