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Swain came back to squat beside the chaise. “Don’t fight it,” he said gently.
“Who are you?” she managed to ask, though she could still think clearly enough to figure it out. He wasn’t a Nervi employee, so there was only one other possibility. He was CIA; whether one of their black-ops personnel or a contract agent himself; the end result was the same. Whatever his reason was for helping her with the Nervis, after that was finished, he had completed his own mission. She had completely fallen for his act, but then she’d noticed before what a superb actor he was, and that should have been a warning. By then, however, she had already been in love with him.
“I think you know.”
“Yes.” Her eyelids were so heavy, and the numbness had spread to her lips. She fought for coherency. “What happens now?”
He stroked a strand of hair back from her face, his touch gentle. “You just go to sleep,” he whispered. She had never heard him sound so tender before.
No pain, then. That was good. She wasn’t going to die in agony. “Was it real? Any of it?” Or had every touch, every kiss, been a lie?
His eyes darkened, or she thought they did. It could be that her eyesight was fading. “It was real.”
“Then . . .” She lost her train of thought, fought to get it back. What was she—? Yes, she remembered now. “Will you . . .” She could barely speak, and she couldn’t see him at all. She swallowed, made an effort: “. . . kiss me while I sleep?”
She wasn’t certain, but she thought she heard him say, “Always.” She tried to reach out her hand to him, and in her mind she did. Her last thought was that she wanted to touch him.
Swain stroked her cheek, and watched a light breeze flirt with her hair. The pale strands stirred and lifted, fell back, lifted again as if they were alive. He bent down and kissed her warm lips, then sat holding her hand for a long time.
Tears burned his eyes. God damn Frank. He wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t budge from his original plan, and if Swain couldn’t do the job, he’d by God send someone who could.
Yeah, well. If it hadn’t been for the small matter of a mole that still had to be located, Swain would have told him what he could do with his fucking job. But he had the recording Blanc had gotten to him during that week of preparation for taking down the Nervi lab, and when he got back to Washington, he had that to take care of. He’d heard Lily stirring in the bedroom yesterday afternoon and hadn’t been able to tell Frank everything that was going on, just the gist of what Dr. Giordano had been doing and a brief argument about what Frank wanted him to do with Lily.
He had sent Chrisoula away this afternoon because he had wanted one more time with Lily, wanted to hold her close and look into those remarkable eyes as she came, wanted to feel her arms around him.
It was over now.
He kissed her one last time, then made the call.
Soon the unmistakable whump whump whump of a helicopter sounded over the mountain slope. It sat down on a flat spot just off the terrace, and three men and a woman got out. They worked silently, competently, wrapping Lily and preparing her for transport. Then one of the men said to the woman, “Get the feet,” and Swain whirled on him.
“Her feet,” he said savagely. “She’s a woman, not a thing. And she’s a fucking patriot. If you treat her with anything but respect, I’ll rip your guts out.”
The man eyed him with consternation. “Sure, man. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Swain clenched his fist. “I know. Just . . . go on.”
A few minutes later, the helicopter lifted off. Swain stood and watched it until it was a tiny black speck; then, his expression set and blank, he turned and went into the house.
Epilogue
Six months later
Lily walked down the hallway toward Dr. Shay’s office for what she hoped was the last time. Six months of intensive deprogramming, therapy, and counseling was enough. After her initial rage at waking and finding herself in custody, she had been grateful for this second chance and had been as cooperative as possible, but she was ready to leave.
The entire six months hadn’t been taken up with therapy, though. Two months in, she’d had surgery to repair that leaky, damaged valve in her heart, and recovery from that hadn’t happened overnight. She felt completely well now, but the first few weeks after the surgery had been rough, even though the cardiac surgeon had used the minimally invasive technique. Any surgery on the heart required that the heart not be beating, so she’d been placed on a heart-lung machine while the work was being done. She still felt uneasy about that, even though it was in the past.
Dr. Shay wasn’t Lily’s idea of a typical shrink, assuming there was such an animal. She was a short, chubby, jolly elf of a person, with the kindest eyes Lily could imagine. Lily would have killed for Dr. Shay, and that was part of the reason she was still at the private clinic.
She had herself worried about whether she would ever be able to fit into a normal life, but the therapies Dr. Shay had designed had shown Lily how far she’d been from that normality. Until she had gone through those exercises that tested her impulses, she hadn’t realized how ready she was to kill, how that was always—always—her initial reaction to confrontation. Over the years she had become very good at avoiding confrontation because of that, without ever realizing that was what she was doing. She had minimized the risk by not associating with many people.
She had gone through the exercises again and again until she retrained herself, and through many sessions with Dr. Shay until her anger and pain were more manageable. Grief was a terrible thing, but so was isolation, and she had made things worse on herself by being so isolated. She needed her family, and with Dr. Shay’s encouragement she had worked up the nerve to call her mother a few weeks before. They had both cried, but Lily had felt a sense of incredible relief at once more connecting with that part of her life.
Swain was the only part of her life that she hadn’t discussed with Dr. Shay.
She hadn’t been allowed visitors or any contact with the outside world until she’d called her mother, so it wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t seen him or heard from him since that day on Evvoia when she’d thought he’d killed her. She wondered if he even realized that had been what she’d thought.
She didn’t know if he would get in trouble for the way he’d conducted his mission, how much the Agency even knew about it, so she simply hadn’t mentioned him and neither had Dr. Shay.
