The Romanov Legacy by Jenni Wiltz Read Free Book Online Page A

the
glass and reflected into her eyes.  “Get down,” he said.  “They found
us.”
    Natalie scrunched down in her seat as Constantine lowered
his window and pulled the gun from his waistband.  “What are you doing?”
she cried.
    “Hold on!”  He pulled the emergency brake and jerked the
wheel, sliding across Market Street toward Montgomery.  As the car tracked
perpendicular to the four-lane street, Constantine shot at the car behind
them.  Natalie heard glass shatter and tires squeal, and put her hands
over her ears. 
    Constantine zoomed up Montgomery opposite the one-way flow
of traffic.  He swerved to the right to dodge a honking cab and Natalie’s
head bounced against the glove box.  She groaned and popped up in time to
see the car plow toward a “No Parking” sign.  “Where are you going?” she
shrieked.
    Before he could answer, a bullet shattered the back
window.  Natalie screamed and ducked back beneath the glove box while
Constantine shot back.  She felt the car lurch to the left and tried to
place their movement on a mental map.  Columbus , she thought, as
the smell of garlic began to fill the air and car bounced over
deeper-than-usual potholes.
    Every jolt made Belial bounce and inky tentacles of pain
began to creep out from under the shadow of the vodka.  Between the pain
in her head and Constantine’s frantic turns, she lost track of their
location.  Her stomach roiled in revolt with every swerve.  By the
time the car dropped back to a legal speed, she felt the contents of her last
meal rising through her esophagus.  “You can sit up now,” Constantine said
finally.  “We lost them.” 
    “Good timing.  I’m about to lose my dinner, too.” 
She leaned her head onto the cool window glass and breathed deeply the way Beth
had taught her, in through her nose and out through her mouth.
    Constantine turned right onto Vallejo and snaked through a
small labyrinth of one-way streets.  The last ended in a dirty cul-de-sac
surrounded with peeling gray row houses.  He put the car in the garage
belonging to the smallest house. 
    Sagging power lines criss-crossed the sky above like loosely
woven cambric.  Broken glass and piles of burned garbage littered the
stoop.  The windows and doors were covered by rotting metal bars. 
Half the porch floorboards and even more of the roof appeared to be missing. 
“This is the safe house,” Constantine said.  “We stay here tonight.”
    Natalie gulped and followed him up to a tiny wooden door in
the left side of the building, an old tradesman’s entrance.  The flimsy
lock yielded to his pressure and he hurried her inside.  They shuffled
down a hallway and then he flicked a switch.  A dim bulb crackled to life,
unfettered by a housing or shade, and illuminated a rectangular room with a
small galley kitchen and a door that presumably led to a bathroom. 
    Two twin beds covered in rotting green chenille jutted out
from the far wall.  Matching curtains hid the lower halves of two small
windows while spider webs obscured the rest.  A rounded refrigerator and
Depression-era stove kept company with a rusted dining set upholstered in
peeling vinyl.  The walls were a grimy shade of beige, somewhere between
old lace and used teabag.  Everywhere Natalie looked, she saw upturned
cockroaches in various states of decay. 
    Constantine hurried through the room, checking the door and
window locks.  “I wish I had someplace better for you.  Our prime
minister revoked the agency’s permission for action services, so whatever we
keep abroad has to be unnoticed and undesirable.”
    “I don’t care,” she said.  “I just need to lie down.” 
She sank onto one of the beds and a mushroom cloud of dust enveloped her. 
Belial fluttered his wings as if he could sweep it all away.  The pain of
it tore through her temples and she gasped helplessly.
    Constantine dropped his bag and hurried to her side. 
“What is it?  What’s