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from hell, and then it had taken a turn for the worse and gone downhill from there.
    Since the night he'd died, she'd been lost, trying to juggle the realities of her father's past, the dangerous legacy he'd left her, and the very harsh realities of trying to stay alive—and it was all coming down to this: Edmund Braun was huge. The beach boy was not.
    They were eating up the distance to the stairwell door. Any second Edmund was bound to notice.
    And sure enough he did, his beady-eyed gaze turning on them, zeroing in on them, his simian features clouding up.
    It was said he'd once torn a man in half with his bare hands. Impossible, she'd thought, but three separate accounts of the deadly brawl had surfaced in Prague, with people from all sides claiming to have seen the body.
    Her gaze went to Edmund's hands, big, coarse hands, and she stumbled—but she didn't fall. The crazy man hauling her to her doom didn't let her fall.
    “Wh-what's your name?” she asked. If she was going to die with him, or die because of him, she should know his name.
    “Creed,” he said without slowing down.
    The strangeness of the name barely registered. Cody was too busy recalling another story about Edmund killing a girl with a single blow to the head. She knew that one was true. She'd known the girl.
    Ernst wasn't quite so impulsive, quite so psychotic—but it was Edmund starting toward them, his mouth set, his hands clenching into fists, ready to take on the challenge her captor was telegraphing like an air raid siren. There was absolutely no hesitation in Creed's long, forceful strides, no hesitation in the way he was dragging her with him. Except for that one brief glance, his gaze hadn't wavered from Braun's for an instant, and every inch of him was sending out one signal, loud and clear: “I'm coming down your throat,
zhopa
.”
    It was insane, and she was caught in the middle of it with no good end in sight. Edmund sometimes forgot himself, sometimes lost track of the big picture—in this case, it being that his boss, Reinhard, would want her alive, at least to begin with.
    God save her.
The voices behind them were getting closer, and one for certain was Bruno. He wouldn't let Edmund kill her, not on the spot. Even more than Reinhard, Sergei Patrushev wanted her alive, and Bruno knew why. Sergei needed the map that would lead him into the mountains of Tajikistan, where her father had hidden one of Mother Russia's nuclear warheads.
    And so help her God, she had the map.
    She didn't want it, could barely read it, and wished to hell she'd never seen it, but she knew deep in her heart that the last thing her father had given her, a slim volume of self-published poetry titled
Tajikistan Discontent
, was a coded map to the warhead, and she was pretty damn sure Sergei had figured it out the same time she had. But by then, she'd slipped his noose.
    At least she'd thought she'd slipped his noose. Tonight had proven her wrong.
    “My name is Dominique Cordelia Stark. Cody Stark,” she said to the stranger, wanting him to know. If bad came to worse, he should know her real name, the one her mother would recognize in the newspapers, and it wasn't Kaplan.
    “Well, Cody Stark,” he said, not sounding like he believed her for a minute, “when I let go of you, I suggest you run like hell for the stairs. Klein has this floor covered.”
    A spark of hope ignited in her breast. He was going to let go of her. Thank God. The one thing she could do was run like hell. She just hoped the beach boy put up enough of a fight to give her a chance to escape.
    She no sooner had the thought than she felt a twinge of guilt. Edmund was going to hurt him, badly, maybe even kill him. She shot her captor a quick look and had the unbelievable thought of “what a waste.” He truly did have the face of an angel, his eyes a pale bluish gray, his brown hair streaked with gold, his face artfully carved and too pretty by half, and he was about to be mangled by a