Claim Me

Chapter 4

4

Yulia

“Yulia Tzakova?”

My heart leaps into my throat as I spin around, my hand automatically clutching the knife tucked into my jeans.

There is a dark-haired man standing in front of me. He looks average in every way; even his sunglasses and cap are standard issue. He could’ve been anyone in the busy Villavicencio marketplace, but he’s not.

He’s Obenko’s Venezuelan contact.

“Yes,” I say, keeping my hand on the knife. “Are you Contreras?”

He nods. “Please follow me,” he says in Spanish-accented Russian.

I drop my hand from the knife handle and follow the man as he begins winding through the crowd. Like him, I’m wearing a cap and sunglasses—two items I stole at another gas station on the way here—but I still feel like someone might point at me and yell, “That’s her. That’s the spy Esguerra’s men are looking for.”

To my relief, nobody pays me much attention. In addition to the cap and sunglasses, I acquired a voluminous T-shirt and baggy jeans at that same gas station. With the shapeless clothes and my hair tucked into the cap, I look more like a teenage boy than a young woman.

Contreras leads me to a nondescript blue van parked on the street corner. “Where’s the vehicle you used to get here?” he asks as I climb into the back.

“I left it a dozen blocks from here, like Obenko instructed,” I say. I’ve spoken to my boss twice since my initial contact at Miraflores, and he gave me the location of this meeting and orders on how to proceed. “I don’t think I was followed.”

“Maybe not, but we need to get you out of the country in the next few hours,” Contreras says, starting the van. “Esguerra is expanding the net. They already have your picture at all the border crossings.”

“So how are you going to get me out?”

“There’s a crate in the back,” Contreras says as we pull out into the traffic. “And one of the border guards owes me a favor. With some luck, that will suffice.”

I nod, feeling the cold air from the van’s AC washing over my sweaty face. I drove all night, stopping only to steal another car and get the clothes, and I’m exhausted. I’ve been on the lookout for the sound of helicopter blades and the whine of sirens every minute I’ve been on the road. The fact that I’ve gotten this far without incident is nothing short of a miracle, and I know my luck could run out at any moment.

Still, even that fear is not enough to overcome my exhaustion. As Contreras’s van gets on the highway, heading northeast, I feel my eyelids closing, and I don’t fight the drugging pull of sleep.

I just need to nap for a few minutes, and then I’ll be ready to face whatever comes next.

“Wake up, Yulia.”

The hushed urgency of Contreras’s tone yanks me out of a dream where I’m watching a movie with Lucas. My eyes snap open as I sit up and quickly take in the situation.

It’s already twilight, and we appear stuck in some kind of traffic.

“Where are we? What is this?”

“Roadblock,” Contreras says tersely. “They’re checking all the cars. You need to get in the crate, now.”

“Your border guard isn’t—”

“No, we’re still some twenty miles from the Venezuelan border. I don’t know what this roadblock is about, but it can’t be good.”

Shit. I unbuckle my seatbelt and crawl through a small window into the back of the van. As Contreras said, there is a crate back there, but it looks far too small to fit a person. A child, maybe, but not a woman of my height.

Then again, in magic acts, they fit people into all kinds of seemingly too-small containers. That’s how the cut-in-half trick is often done: one flexible girl is the “upper body” and a second one is “legs.”

I’m not as flexible as a typical magician’s assistant, but I’m far more motivated.

Opening the crate, I lie down on my back and try to fold my legs in such a way that I’d be able to close the lid over me. After a couple of frustrating minutes, I concede that it’s an impossible task; my knees are at least five centimeters above the edge of the crate. Why did Contreras get a crate this small? A few centimeters deeper, and I would’ve been fine.

The van begins moving, and I realize we’re getting closer to the checkpoint. At any moment, the doors at the back of the van will open, and I’ll be discovered.

I need to fit into this f*****g crate.

Gritting my teeth, I turn sideways and try to wedge my knees into the tiny space between my chest and the side of the crate. They don’t fit, so I suck in a breath and try again, ignoring the burst of pain in my kneecap as it bumps against the metal edge. As I struggle, I hear raised voices speaking Spanish and feel the van come to a stop again.

We’re at the checkpoint.

Frantic, I turn and grab the lid of the crate, pulling it over me with shaking hands.

There are footsteps, followed by voices at the back of the van.

They’re going to open the doors.

My heart pounding, I flatten myself into an impossibly tiny ball, squashing my breasts with my knees. Even with the numbing effects of adrenaline, my body screams with pain at the unnatural position.

The lid meets the edge of the crate, and the van doors swing open.