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I half-turned, tipping up the drink, enjoying the burn, finding him watching me, sitting back in the chair, chin angled up, something that somehow told me to tell him more, get it off my chest.
That was a thing people underestimated about those who worked covert jobs of all sorts, who couldn't - for national security reasons - talk about it, couldn't shrug off the boulders they carried around on their shoulders.
It was a heavy life.
And it didn't matter how strong you got, it was always a lot of shit to carry around every day of your life.
Some things tripped out here and there, nothing things, basic outlines of jobs. At least since I had been burned with no hopes of proving myself, showing the government that whoever had reported me had lied.
But not this.
Never fucking this.
I'd done ugly things.
I'd fucked over countless people.
But none of that, singularly, or compiled together, came close to comparing to this.
This was the weight that compressed my spine, that made getting out of bed some mornings hard, that made me feel older.
"She was a job," I told him. "Well, her uncle was. And I was supposed to seduce her, and get what I needed out of her. I know," I agreed, nodding, when a hissing noise escaped him, as his head shook.
Cam was a lot of things, I was sure, but not the least of which was the protector of his girls. Liv, who had been more like a boss to him, but especially the younger Astrid. It didn't take too much imagination to figure he was thinking of a nineteen-year-old Astrid, and some fucker coming along ten years her senior, using that maturity against her, fucking her over.
"But it was a job. One among hundreds of unsavory ones I had needed to do over the years. I couldn't have known at the time, though, that it wouldn't be long before it wasn't just a job. Before I saw her as a person, not just a mark, an asset."
There had been sparks of it before the night in Levon's House.
But having her give herself to me, yeah, that had really made me see the situation from a different angle, from a human angle, as a person instead of an agent.
And every goddamn day after had me digging my hole deeper, had me falling.
So deep, in fact, that I forgot about everything else. About the job. About protocols. About checking in.
Until one day, I had a voicemail from Allen chewing my ass out, demanding I get back to him.
And, well, that call, as one could imagine, did not go well.
But the ultimate conclusion was that I needed to get my shit together, I needed to get my head in the game, I needed to remember I wasn't here for pleasure, but to complete a mission.
That Mack was a job.
That I had clearly gained her trust.
And it was time to start working on her.
This was where I - for the first time in my career- disobeyed a direct order.
I was supposed to start explaining to her what her uncle was tied up in, getting her outraged by his activities, eventually get her to agree to work for us, spying on him and his contacts.
That was how this worked.
You had contracted employees. Like me. Like Riva.
And then there were dozens - or hundreds - of people who spied from the inside of their organizations. People who had ins that we could never have. Like Mack.
Except, well, I wasn't going to do that to her.
It was bad enough how deep she already was in all of it.
She would already have to suffer through enough when I was gone. And I would be gone, regardless of if I turned her or not.
But if I turned her and left, well, she was completely on her own. There would be no one around to look out for her, to answer her questions, to make sure she was being smart and careful.
She would be alone, putting herself at tremendous risk, spending her life with her stomach in knots, looking over her shoulder, never knowing who to trust, and who might be onto her.
From the intel Allen had given me about her uncle's contacts, they were not the kind of people who would shrug off being ratted on to the CIA.
Her life was at risk.
I was simply not going to let that happen.
If, to accomplish that, I had to lie about her unwillingness to join up, then so be it.
I could tell him that I was shit at a Romeo job, that I had barely convinced her to get me the file that gave us more than enough to make a case against Armen.
That would simply have to do.
Then Mack could go back to England, go back to her parents who just wanted the best for her, even if they were smothering her a little bit. She could go back to school, build a life, find a man worthy of her.
