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I take a sip from my wine as well, if only to give myself a few seconds to yet again get my head back on straight.
“Yes, it’s one of my favorite restaurants,” I lie smoothly. Then I chuckle. “I’m guessing you haven’t really had time to explore the city much yet. Especially not since I’ve been… monopolizing your time quite a bit.”
Her eyes glitter as she smiles back. “No, not really. You can be very persistent, you know.”
“Oh, I’m aware. But so you never visited the city before you enrolled at Blackwater?”
“No,” she lies. Leaning back in her chair, she releases a long exhale and then drags an embarrassed hand through her hair. “To be honest, I hadn’t even left the state before I came here.”
And it’s so real, so genuine, that if I didn’t know with every fiber of my being that it’s a lie, I would have believed her. Fuck, she’s skilled.
“But what I would really like to do is to go abroad one day.” She rests her chin in her palm while a dreamy expression blows across her features for a second. Then her gaze returns to me. “Have you ever been?”
“No,” I lie. “I’ve been out of state, of course, with my Dad and brothers. But never abroad.” I cock my head. “Is that why you enrolled at Blackwater? Because you wanted to do the whole European spy thing that they do in the movies?”
She shoots me a look of mock affront. “Ouch. I could hear the judgement in your tone from all the way over here, you know.”
I just chuckle.
“And when you put it like that, it does sound kind of silly,” she continues. “But yeah, I guess that is part of why I enrolled.” She rubs the back of her neck in a highly embarrassed way and then shrugs. “Mostly, I did it because… Well, because I’ve never really been excellent at anything. I’ve never found my thing. Math, science, sports… I did okay. But, I don’t know, I guess I’m just getting tired of being mediocre. I just wanted to do something. To be something. For once.”
Silence falls over the table.
For a moment it looks like she is about to say something else, but then she abruptly raises her hand and waves it in the air. “Actually, you know what? That sounded ridiculously pathetic now that I said it out loud. Please pretend I never said anything. Why did you enroll?”
Once again, it’s so fucking genuine. The embarrassment. The breathless tone of her voice as she hurried on to askmea question instead, as if she is mortified that she shared such private thoughts with me.
“Why did I enroll?” I chuckle. “I didn’t really have much of a choice. I come from a very long line of hitmen. I’m kind of expected to continue the legacy.”
She grimaces. “Oh. Right. Sorry. What a stupid question.”
Before I can reply, the waiter returns with our food. Once he has placed the plates on the table and then retreated, I pick up my glass of wine and hold it out towards Isabella.
“Well, here’s to doing something.” I flash her a smirk. “For once.”
While shaking her head at me in disgruntled amusement that I used her own phrase, she raises her own glass.
And as we clink our glasses together and look into each other’s eyes, I know without a shred of doubt that every single word spoken at this table has been a lie. Both hers and mine.
I know it.
And she knows it.
After all, it takes one to know one.
I know that she is making all of it up. Her motivations, her dreams, her plans for the future. All of it. Because I have them too. Fake motivations, fake dreams, fake plans for the future.
I know that she is lying because I have been doing it for so long too. Living a life that isn’t mine.
Sometimes, I just want to scream and scream until I shatter the glass walls that trap me in this fake life. The invisible barriers that no one else sees that keep me from living my life. My real life.
That pit opens up in my stomach again. And before I know what I’m doing, I find myself asking, “Do you ever wish that you could just break everything so that you can finally stop it from spinning out of control and then just rearrange all those pieces to what you actually want them to be?”
“Yes.”
The answer is immediate. No hesitation. No time to think.
It sends a pulse of shock through my soul.She understands.
