Run To You

the back of her neck. “Those Gorokhov bastards are cutting into my business. No one takes money out of my pocket and gets away with it. No one leans on my— What’s that noise?” he interrupted himself. “Are you at the airport?”
    She hit end on her phone and looked around as if she half expected Ricky or one of the Gallos to grab her. Her breath caught in her chest as she bent down and grabbed her duffel. She moved toward the first-class check-in and took her place in line. Ricky didn’t know for sure she was at the airport, she told herself, but even if he acted on his suspicion, it would take a good half hour to forty-five minutes to get to MIA from the bar.
    The duffel weighed down her arm as she moved forward in line. He’d have to know which terminal and line, and the odds of him actually finding her were slim to impossible. The heavy airport security calmed her nerves about her crazy former boss but did nothing for the other reason her stomach was a knot of nervous tension.
    Sadie.
    Stella moved forward in line. For the past few years, she’d given up her dream of meeting her sister. She’d packed it away with other childhood dreams and hadn’t thought of it much. Hadn’t thought of family much. Especially Sadie. Now Sadie wanted to meet her, and all the old feeling of want and hope and hurt swamped her. The one thing that Stella had wanted so desperately as a child was just a plane ticket away. A few hours from happening.
    The knot in her stomach tightened as she took another step forward. With each step, it got tighter and tighter until she thought she might be sick. Her chest ached and her head got light and she tried to pull air deep into her lungs. Heat flushed her neck and cheeks, and, a few feet from the front of the line, she ducked under the rope before she fell on her face. She wove through travelers and luggage. She couldn’t breathe and bumped into a businessman on a cell phone. She practically ran through the automatic doors and gasped once she was outside. She sucked humid fumes into her lungs as deep as possible.
    Panic attack. She recognized it flushing her face and pounding in her head and chest. She’d had them before, only now she knew she wasn’t going to die. That her heart would not explode, and if she focused on something else, she would not pass out.
    All around her, people brushed past and horns honked and she walked. She didn’t know where she was going. Just somewhere before the last twelve hours caught up with her and she passed out or worse. A Hilton shuttle pulled between a minivan and a cab at the curb and she kept walking. As she moved from the north to the central terminal, the sun hit her face. She paused to pull her glasses from the top of her head and shoved them on the bridge of her nose. An afternoon breeze stirred palm trees across the street of the upper-deck garden. Flags from around the world stood like sentinels at one end and fluttered in the slight wind. She moved across the road toward the oasis in the midst of concrete and steel and glass. The weight of her duffel pulled at her arm as she dodged a black truck and almost got mowed down by a Prius. She found a bench hidden within the greenery and sank onto it. The duffel and backpack dropped at her feet and she raised her face. She took deep, shaky, breaths and shut her eyes. Her heart wasn’t going to explode, she told herself. She wasn’t going to die. She wasn’t going to pass out if she slowed her breathing and calmed down.
    For some reason, the thought of getting on a plane and living out her childhood dream had finally shoved her into the panic attack she’d been avoiding since Ricky had grabbed her last night. It scared her more than mobsters busting into her apartment. Although that had scared her plenty.
    She slowly let her breath out and placed her forearms on her thighs. Sadie had hired Beau Junger to find her. Sadie wanted to meet Stella. So what was so scary? What had kept her from getting on that American flight to Texas?
    Stella relaxed her shoulders and stared at the toes of her boots. What was she afraid of? she asked herself, even though she knew the answer. Long ago she’d figured out that sometimes people just didn’t like her. Whether it was her sense of humor or her outlook on life, some people didn’t think she was as funny as she thought she was. Others didn’t like her lack of focus. She did seem to flit from job to job and place to place. There were even those in