She pulls back, wipes her face quickly with the back of her hand, and looks up at me. “You’re supposed to be dead,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“I saw the report.” Her jaw tightens. “Three months ago. The Bureau told me. Ryan Lismore, deceased.” A pause. “And I had to keep going. Stay in. Keep performing. I couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t say anything… I just had to keep going.”
“I know.”
“How?” The word is barely there. “How are you here? How are you alive?”
So, I tell her. Briefly and quietly about the hospital, Sam, and the operation. Enough that she understands the shape of it. Not more than she needs.
She listens the way she always listens, completely, without interrupting, filing everything as it comes.
“Sam sent you?”
“Sam gave me the choice. I chose.”
Something moves in her expression. “You chose to come for me?”
“I chose the operation. And yes, for you.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she moves to the edge of the bed and sits, the robe falling open as she does, the negligee beneath it leaving almost nothing to the low light, the line of her collarbone, the lace at her shoulder. She draws her knees up slightly, settling into the edge of the mattress the way someone does when they have learned to make themselves small in unfamiliar spaces.
I sit beside her on the bed, close but not touching. “Eight months,” I say. “Talk to me.”
She looks at her hands in her lap. “Three weeks over the original parameters.” A pause. “The Bureau went quiet six weeks ago. No contact. I didn’t know if the operation had been pulled. If something had happened.” Another pause. “There was a night about a month ago when one of Clemente’s men got suspicious of me. Nothing I’d done wrong, just the paranoia that runsthrough every operation like this. I thought that was it.” She looks up. “I handled it. But that night was the longest of my life.”
I look at her. At the exhaustion underneath the composure, deep and specific, the tiredness of someone who has been performing at the absolute outer limit of their capacity without a single moment of being entirely themselves.
“I’m here now.”
“I know.” There’s the exhale of someone who has been holding their breath for a very long time. “I know you are.”
A moment of quiet.
The ocean moves outside.
Then she reaches up. Her fingers move into the beard, tracing the line of my jaw like she is reading something in braille, looking for the face she knows underneath.
I hold completely still.
Stiller than I’d held with the gun at my temple.
That had been easy.
This is not easy.
Her scent reaches me, something warm and familiar underneath whatever Clemente’s world has dressed her in. That combination of her skin and something soft that I had always associated with her specifically and had not expected to find again in a cartel villa in Mexico in the night.
It lands somewhere I am not prepared for.
“I didn’t recognize you at dinner,” she says, her fingers still moving against my jaw. “I kept looking at you, thinking there’s something, but I couldn’t…” The ghost of a smile. “The beard.”
“That was the idea.”
“It works.” Her hand stills. “It really works.”
Her eyes drop then, moving from my face to my chest, and down my arms, the one tattoo still a little visible in the low light of the villa, against my skin.
