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FUCK.
Alistair had known about that?!
WHY had he known about that?!
He wasn’t my immediate superior. There was no reason for him to know I was on vacation.
The two men chatted about various things – what we’d done so far in London, Lars’s accent – until Alistair asked the one question I didn’t want to answer.
“How did the two of you meet?”
I had brushed Alistair off many times with the excuse that I never mixed business and pleasure; I didn’t want to admit I’d met Lars on my trip to Afghanistan.
So I grabbed his arm and blurted out, “Dating app.”
Lars looked both surprised and amused.
“Oh – how long ago?” Alistair asked.
“A while,” I said curtly.
Alistair gestured towards the bar section of the restaurant. “Well, if the two of you would like to join us for a drink, I’m here with Reginald Blakely and Patricia Leighton – you know both of them, Rachel.”
Two other Oxford alums. Both from money, both in the upper echelons of MI6 management.
I was sure an evening with them would feature lots of gossip about aristocrats – did you hear who Lord Fuckwit is cheating on his wife with? – and which of their trust-fund-baby friends had just returned from the Seychelles.
FUCK no.
I plastered on a fake smile. “Thank you for the invitation, Alistair, but we really must be going.”
“But… you just arrived.” He sounded confused – and a bit petulant, too.
I was annoyed, I was uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to be around him anymore –
So I used the nuclear option. Or at least a very polite version of the nuclear option.
“Yes, well, we’re late for something.”
“What?”
“Sex. Toodle-oo,” I said and dragged Lars with me out of the restaurant.
It was cruel, yes – to so blatantly tell a man who had a crush on me that I was about to go fuck the Viking god I’d just introduced him to.
But it worked.
Alistair completely stopped hitting on me after that, and he never mentioned Lars again.
That is until Lars disappeared.
151
It was about four weeks after Lars had ghosted me and a few days after Sean had talked to the hotel manager and confirmed I worked at MI6.
Sean was still angry at me about that. He refused to talk to me unless it was about work and he absolutely had to.
I was in headquarters for a briefing on an upcoming mission. I had taken over a temporary office to prepare but I couldn’t concentrate.
