Chapter 20
twenty
BILLIE
I’m standing outside a criminal compound, about to negotiate with international arms dealers.
We’re on the outskirts of Barcelona, and The Twin Ledger compound is an imposing concrete building that’s all angles.
Grey walls, no windows on the lower floors, a fence that means business, a gate that means even more business.
There are guards. Multiple. The surrounding landscape is flat and scrubby and thoroughly unimpressed by everything around it, which I find relatable.
I’m wearing the blazer. I’m standing up straight and doing my absolute best to look like I’ve been sent to this sort of place before.
“You look great,” Alana says, reading me like a book.
“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” I say.
“If you throw up, just don’t get it on my shoes,” she says helpfully.
“Can we go in yet, or—” I’ve been asking this question for the last fifteen minutes.
“Not yet,” Alana says, checking her Cartier watch. “We’re waiting for a special guest.”
She’s mentioned this special guest multiple times but won’t tell me who it is. I’m afraid. I’ve learned that surprises are never good if they’re coming from Alana.
Then, a car turns off the main road. A black sedan, plain— the kind that wants not to be noticed— and it slows as it approaches and my heart does a small, preparatory thing in my chest for no reason I can identify yet.
The car pulls to a stop at the edge of the access road. A door opens. A man gets out.
Everything goes quiet.
It’s Rodrigo.
He’s wearing a dark jacket and his jaw looks exactly like it did at Melissa’s baby shower, which is to say it looks like it was carved from stone by someone who took their time.
Moonlight strikes a path through the dark night, and Rodrigo walks it, his boots crunching over the brush.
When he gets closer his eyes find me. They’re warm, those eyes.
Warm and dark, and I have been refusing to fully admit that I remembered them perfectly since the baby shower, and the refusal has been doing me no good because here we are and here they are.
My heart is pounding. I tell my heart to keep it together.
“You’re okay,” he says, when he reaches us. At first I think he’s talking to Alana, but then I realize he’s looking at… me.
Alana must have thought the same, because she leaps into his arms, wrapping herself around him.
“Of course I’m okay, you silly duck,” Alana purrs.
Rodrigo lets her embrace him, but he’s looking at me the entire time.
“But you’ve really put me through hell. And now I have to go to all this trouble to cancel the hit I took out on you, and get my best friend all wrapped up in it, which is like, totally unfair. And all because you had cold feet!”
Alana releases him and Rodrigo is still looking at me. “Billie,” he says, and hearing him say my name makes me feel like we’ve known each other forever. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” I hesitate, and then I say, because I want him to know that I know: “I understand now. What you meant. At the baby shower.” I look at him. “I didn’t listen, and I should have.”
Something moves through his expression— not surprise, exactly. More like relief. It’s as if he’s been carrying a weight and has been given permission to set it down briefly. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says. “You didn’t know.”
“What’s going on here?” Alana says, throwing her hands up in the air. “Like, Rodrigo, you don’t even seem happy to see me!”
The warmth leaves Rodrigo’s face. “Maybe that’s because I’ve spent the last two days dodging assassins you sent my way.”
“It’s fine!” Alana waves a hand in the air as if this is nothing. “Billie’s going to help me cancel the hit.”
She tells him. All of it. The hit, the Twin Ledger’s refusal to cancel. She tells him that Marco and Mateo run this particular compound, and that the Twin Ledger operates on momentum, and that momentum, once started, has to be interrupted by something compelling enough to warrant the disruption.
“And that,” she says, gesturing at me with the full authority of someone presenting evidence, “is Billie. Who is the best head negotiator in the city of Chicago. Or really, like an assistant, but whatever, her career is on the rise!” She pauses.
“The three of us go in. Together. Billie makes the case. You are a human being with value, which is a concept these men struggle with, but which Billie can communicate in a way that makes them feel it’s in their interest. We get them to drop it.
We leave.” She spreads her hands. “Easy.”
Rodrigo is very still.
Then: “No,” he says. He says it quietly, which is worse. “No. I’m not bringing her into this compound. Billie didn’t ask for any of this. I will handle it myself?—“
“You’ll handle it yourself,” Alana says, with the tone of someone who has heard this sentence before, “by doing what, exactly? Dying?”
“If necessary,” Rodrigo shrugs. He turns to me and presses his car keys into my hands.
Then, he adds seriously, “Billie, take the car. Go right now. Drive as far away as you can.” He pulls me close to him into a tight hug, pressing himself against me.
Then, he whispers in my ear. “Call Melissa. She’ll get Interpol.
You’ll be safe.” He releases me, and I can smell his cologne still hovering nearby, the scent of sea salt making me imagine summers that we’ll never have.
I could take the keys. I could go.
But then I look at Rodrigo and I know— I just know— if I let him walk in there with Alana, he won’t come out alive.
He turns. Alana follows. The two of them start to walk toward the compound together, but stop when I call out?—
“Rodrigo!”
He turns.
I have no idea what I’m doing. My hands are entirely steady, which surprises me. “I want to do this.”
Silence. Rodrigo stares at me. Even Alana looks a little surprised.
“I’m not standing outside while you go in there by yourself because you think you’re protecting me.
” I take a breath. “I know I lied about being a negotiator. I know I’m technically an assistant who orders lunch and books appointments for a poodle named Bernard.
I know that.” I pause. “But I have spent years watching what actual negotiators do. I’ve been in every meeting.
I’ve read every file. I’ve made more coffee than any human being should be allowed to make, and I’ve used that time to learn everything there is to know about how to walk into a room and make someone feel the value of what you’re asking for.
” I look at him. “Let me help you. Please.”
A long moment. The compound waits behind us, grey and still.
“Please,” I say, again. Quieter this time. “What are you going to do otherwise? Spend your whole life running?”
Because if that’s the case, there’s no way for us to be together, I want to add. But it’s an insane thought. I barely know this man. Sure, I might be imagining running off to the Mediterranean countryside with him. But he doesn’t know that. Also, Billie, you have a boyfriend, I remind myself.
Rodrigo looks at me for a moment that stretches long in the afternoon light. Then, almost imperceptibly, something in him settles. His shoulders drop a half-inch. “Fine,” he says, but I can see the worry etched in his eyes.
Alana, beside me, makes a sound of quiet satisfaction.
The three of us turn to face the compound.
I look at the gate. The gate looks back.
I straighten my blazer, and we start walking.
* * *
Walking toward a criminal compound with an arms dealer and a man whose life is currently listed as a bounty item is not, it turns out, what it looks like in the movies.
In the movies there is music. In the movies everyone’s hair is doing something intentional.
In real life, there is the sound of gravel under my shoes and the feeling of the blazer across my shoulders.
Alana walks like she owns the place, which is, I have learned, simply how Alana walks everywhere. Rodrigo is on my left and he keeps looking over at me like he’s trying to memorize my face. I attempt to project serenity even though my internal organs are twisting around.
“Okay,” Alana says, still walking, voice low and practical. “Before we go in. There are things you need to know.”
“I’m listening,” I say.
“No empathy,” she says. “None. You walk in there and you are the most important person in the room. Not them. You. You don’t apologize, you don’t hesitate, you don’t make a face when someone says something alarming—” she pauses— “and above all, you do not show weakness. Not for a second. Not even a small one.” She glances at me sidelong.
“Because if you so much as stutter, they’re going to rip out our fallopian tubes and tie them around our necks like scarves. ”
I miss a step.
“Is that— is that a metaphor?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
“Right.”
“It’s happened before.”
“Of course it has,” I say, trying to act like this information doesn't bother me at all.
Alana stops walking. Just briefly— and she turns to face me with the full seriousness of someone who has forgotten something very important.
“Oh my gosh, I didn’t tell you about the rings,” she says.
“Could you have waited any longer to inform Billie of everything she needs to know?” Rodrigo hisses at her.
Alana rolls her eyes. I wait.
“Marco and Mateo each wear a ring.” She says it carefully.
“They’re not jewelry. They’re keys. Together they unlock a vault— the Ledger’s vault, everything they own, billions in assets, weapons, gold, accounts.
The whole empire.” Her voice drops further.
“They are obsessive about them. Paranoid. If you look at the rings, even glance at them, they will notice. They will clock it and they will decide you are a threat.” She holds my gaze.
“Do not look at the rings. Don’t let your eyes drift toward their hands.
Don’t acknowledge them. They do not exist. Understood? ”
“Understood,” I say.
“Say it back,” she says.
“The rings do not exist,” I say.
She nods. She turns back to the compound and resumes walking.
I straighten my spine. I think about the woman in the mirror in the boutique fitting room— the one who looked like she was deciding whether the people in the room had earned her presence. I think: be her. Just be her. She has better posture and she isn’t afraid of anything.
Billie, why are you here? I ask myself. I don’t have to do this. I could still turn away. But then I think about Rodrigo, and how he didn’t ask for any of this either.
I turn to look at him, and his face is so hypnotizing I’m lost, for a moment.
He looks back at me and our eyes meet, and we smile at each other softly like we each know something about the other.
Suddenly, I’m imagining summers spent on the beach with him, a slow golden haze, his arms holding me beneath the hot, European sun?—
The ground shifts under my left foot. A loose stone, half-buried in the path— the compound’s access road is old and uneven, the kind of surface that doesn’t care about your intentions.
My ankle twists. I go forward in a lurch that is entirely at odds with the composed professional image I have been constructing.
I catch myself, barely, three stumbling steps before I find my footing again and stand upright.
There is a pause.
Rodrigo does not comment, but gently helps me stand a little taller by grabbing my hand, then sliding an arm around my waist to help set me right. Alana does not comment. This is, I think, the most generous thing either of them has ever done for me.
I straighten the blazer and keep walking.
The gate is tall, iron, and guarded by two men. They look at us as we approach. The larger of the two reaches for something on his belt.
And then we’re inside the perimeter— I’m not entirely sure how, except that Alana said something in rapid, authoritative Spanish that I didn’t catch, and someone made a call on a radio, and the gate opened, and then we were surrounded.
There are four of them, suddenly— guards, materializing from the sides of the entrance like they stepped out of the concrete itself.
They are armed and not friendly, and my heart is doing something I would describe as “a lot.” Someone says something I don’t understand, directed at Alana, and Alana responds in a tone that says she finds the question irritating.
Then, a fifth figure appears from the far side of the entrance.
He is bald. Wide. His expression belongs on a monument to the concept of disapproval. He looks at Alana. Alana looks at him.
“Ivan!” she says, in the warm, bright, completely disingenuous tone of a woman greeting a neighbor she has always found deeply unremarkable.
She switches to Croatian with a smile that never touches her eyes: “Izgleda? umorno, Ivan. Malo odmora bi ti dobro do?lo.” She pratters on and then looks at me conspiratorially and says, under her breath: “I told him he looks tired and could use a rest, and that his bald head looks like the dark side of the moon. He loves it when I tease him,” Then, back to him, in English: “Long week?”
Ivan stares at her. His jaw works. He says something back, quiet and sharp, and Alana simply waves her hand at him the way you wave off a small and irritating insect.
“He’ll let us through,” she says, to me. “He hates me, but he’s also afraid of me.” She turns back to Ivan and smiles again. It is an absolutely spectacular smile. “Hvala, Ivan,” she says, all sweetness.
Ivan steps aside. He does not look happy about it.
We move forward, into the compound proper.
It is everything the outside promised. Concrete walls. Low ceilings in the corridor we enter. The smell of metal and something chemical underneath it. There are weapons visible— mounted, holstered, racked in neat rows through a half-open door we pass. The whole place hums.
Two guards flank us immediately, falling into step behind.
And then Rodrigo’s arm comes up— just slightly, just enough— and he steps fractionally forward and to my left, positioning himself between me and the nearest guard.
It is not dramatic. He does not announce it.
It is the most ordinary thing in the world if you don’t know to look for it, and I am looking, and I see it completely.
He is putting his body between me and the thing that could hurt me.
Something sits very still in my chest. Something I don’t examine too closely, because we are in a criminal compound and this is not the time.
I look forward. The corridor narrows toward a set of heavy doors at the far end, and behind those doors, somewhere, are two men with matching rings and a price on a life I’ve been asked to argue for.
I am an assistant who orders poodle grooming appointments… but I’m wearing a blazer that fits.
I keep walking.