“His bodyguards saw me. I could bow out like a coward or confront the man. Make sure he knew I was watching. I walked in, asked about the food, told him to have a good time, and I left.”
“That’s it?” Cooper asked.
“By the time I cleared the restaurant, Claire called and told me you had Navi Sobol covered.”
“Olivia saw you. Called in,” Neil explained.
She more than saw him, they all but ran into each other.
Right in front of the bodyguards. “Olivia was in the restaurant . . . walking out as I was walking in. I stopped her,” he said, remembering the scene vividly.
“Why?” Sasha asked.
“I thought she looked familiar.” Leo shook his head. “That’s when Navi’s bodyguards saw me. As Olivia was walking away.”
A hush went over the room and the others online.
Sasha said something in German.
Claire and Jax both responded.
“English, ladies!” Lars said with a roll of his eyes.
“Leo wasn’t shot,” Cooper said for them. “Olivia was. A centimeter in the other direction and she’d be dead.”
“So maybe Leo wasn’t the target,” Claire said.
Sasha shook her head, started again in German.
When no one insisted she speak in English, Leo couldn’t help but wonder if the secrets he’d yet to earn his stripes to hear were being discussed.
“Or maybe Navi is a pushy prick and wanted to get back at me for interrupting his evening,” Leo said, not willing to accept that Olivia was the one the bullet was intended for.
The alarm on the trip sensors went off, and everyone turned to look at the map. A second set in line with the first sounded off.
“Same two sensors. Neil, when you come, bring some silencers. I’m in need of a hat,” Lars told him.
Leo stood, looked around the room. “Since it appears as if I’m about to get asked to leave, I’ll go out and reset them.”
“Take a radio,” Sasha told him.
Leo grabbed one that sat on a charger and left the room.
He looked up the silent stairway and pictured the sleeping woman everyone was talking about.
Who the hell is she?
“There is the logical side of your brain and the emotional side.”
Olivia sat across from a new doctor. The man had flown in with Neil for the sole purpose of following up on her healing process. After a thirty-minute physical exam, he now sat with her in the sitting room on the upper floor. Leo was beside her while Neil and Pam were across from them.
“The logical,” Dr. Falconio said, “is what you’re using right now. It’s the knowing how to speak without having to learn the language again. It’s cooking, driving . . . whatever your normal function is.”
“Fighting?” she asked.
“Yes, fighting. If you were a boxer, you’d remember how to box, but maybe forget that you did it for a living. I once knew an emergency medicine doctor who hit his head in a skiing accident. While he was a patient in the ER, he couldn’t remember his name or his profession, even though he was in his normal environment. He could read an EKG but couldn’t recall why he knew how to do that.”
“Did he regain his memories?”
“Yes. The trauma wore off and he went back to normal. But consider the emotional part of the brain. The part that is likely blocking you from remembering who you are or were the day of the shooting. Here you are walking down the street minding your own business and you see someone with a gun. There is an emotional component here that protects the brain. Over time there are triggers . . . like the strong reaction you had when you thought you were threatened. Emotion shot through your system, triggering logic to kick in.”
“It wasn’t logical for me to attack Sasha.”
“It’s no different from thinking you see something on the side of the road dart out, and you swerve to get out of the way. You striking out is like swerving out of the way. It was instinctive. Eventually you’ll match your logical actions with your emotions, and attacking Sasha or anyone else won’t be an issue. Severe head trauma often changes people’s personality.”
“The extent of my head trauma was a laceration and a headache.”
Dr. Falconio shook his head. “The extent was a loss of consciousness, a concussion, and amnesia. Just because you didn’t need brain surgery to fix the problem doesn’t mean the trauma is less.”
All this was nice information, but it wasn’t answering her question. “How long is this going to