Chapter 31
thirty-one
RODRIGO
I am still angry with Billie Harper when we pull up outside the casino, which is a problem, because anger makes me stupid and I cannot afford to be stupid tonight. Not when I need to protect Billie, and keep us both alive.
The drive from the Tuscan countryside to Rome took four hours.
Four hours in the back of an Interpol vehicle with tinted windows and uncomfortable vinyl upholstery.
Agent Rakowski drove. Melissa and Steve followed in a second vehicle.
Benny sat in the front passenger seat and tried, three separate times, to explain the plot of Ocean’s Eleven to Agent Rakowski, who responded with a silence so total it should have shut him down, but of course, it did not.
Billie sat beside me in the back, and neither of us spoke.
Four hours is a long time to not speak to someone whose knee is seven inches from yours. Especially when she is gorgeous, and you can think of nothing but the desire to touch her
I kept my eyes on the window and she did the same. The countryside gave way to coast, and coast gave way to highway, and highway gave way to the outskirts of Rome, and I spent all of it replaying the argument and hating both of us for having it.
Here is what happened in the dark outside the chalet:
Billie wasn’t wrong. I am afraid of making the same mistakes again.
Of rushing into things with someone who is not the person I thought they were.
But where she misunderstands me is in the details of the thing.
She does not understand that I am so sure I’ve found the woman I’ve been seeking, that I’m afraid of losing her: to guns, to danger, and yes, maybe to the world that Alana dragged us both into.
But Billie needs to do this for herself.
Fine. So I am here, making sure she does not get hurt, as best I can.
I put on a suit that Rakowski procured from somewhere— it fits well enough, dark, narrow-lapeled, the kind of thing a man wears when he expects to be shot at— and now I am standing outside a casino in Rome.
Billie is beside me in a dress that takes my breath away, and my degenerate cousin is next to her, adjusting his cufflinks.
Casino Luminara sits at the end of a private road lined with black cars.
The building itself is stunning— all glass and pale stone, with a grand entrance flanked by columns.
Through the tall windows, I can see chandeliers glittering and the movement of fancy people in formal dress, and it looks, from the outside, like a place someone would aspire to enter.
It is, of course, a place where terrible things happen constantly, just very quietly and several floors below the champagne.
“Can everyone hear me?” Agent Rakowski’s voice arrives in my ear, crisp and close. The earpiece is small— nearly invisible— and she placed it herself before we left the vehicle.
“Loud and clear,” I say.
“Copy,” Billie says beside me, and her voice is steady.
“I can hear you also!” Benny announces, too loudly. “This is like the movie— what is it called— the one where they have the earpieces and the man says?—“
“Benny,” Rakowski says. “Less talking.”
“Understood,” Benny whispers, conspiratorially.
“Here’s what we know,” Rakowski continues.
“Marco arrived two hours ago with a security detail. Alana was seen being escorted through a service entrance on the north side approximately ninety minutes ago. The underground level is accessed through the casino floor— there’s a corridor behind the VIP lounge that leads to a service elevator.
That elevator goes down. Below, the Ledger maintains holding rooms, communications equipment, and what we believe is a secondary vault.
” She pauses. “Your job is to get downstairs. Find the corridor. Get eyes on the underground access and report back. Do not engage Marco directly. We want to lure him out of the most secure areas. Do not engage anyone directly. You are guests at a casino. You are gambling. You are having a lovely evening. Understood?”
“Understood,” I say.
“We have units positioned at all exits,” Rakowski adds.
“When we have confirmation of Marco’s location inside the facility, we move.
Not before. If he gets any indication that law enforcement is present, he will disappear through one of his contingency routes, and we will not get another shot at this. ”
“So no pressure,” Billie says.
“Considerable pressure, actually,” Rakowski replies, without humor. “Melissa, are you on the line?”
“I’m here,” Melissa’s voice crackles through. “Steve’s here too. We’re in the van. I can see the front entrance from where we’re parked.”
“Good,” Rakowski says. “Stay in the van.”
“Obviously, I’m staying in the van,” Melissa says. “I’m enormous. I can barely fit in the van.”
“You look beautiful, honey,” Steve says, somewhere in the background.
“Focus,” Rakowski says.
I turn to look at Billie, and everything else— the earpiece, the mission, the coal of anger in my chest— recedes for a moment, because she is standing in the light from the casino entrance and she is stunning.
She’s wearing a deep, red dress that’s tight in all the right places, covered in sequins that reflect every fractal of light back at me— but none of them glow the way she does.
Her hair is in loose waves that cascade to one side, soft waves moving without effort.
Her shoulders are bare, and the gentle slope of her nose reminds me of the carved statues that circle every piazza in Rome.
Let the statues weep— Billie puts them to shame.
She is the most beautiful woman in Italy.
Billie Harper— tonight— in this dress— is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen. If I die tonight— which is likely— I only hope I can leave this world looking at her. As mad as I am, it strikes me:
This is who Billie has been trying to become. This woman, in the red dress. And I tried to convince her to paint with me in the countryside, when she needed this adventure to heal something: to see herself the way I have always seen her.
“Stop staring,” Billie says, without looking at me. But the corner of her mouth moves, just slightly. A smile.
“I’m not staring,” I say. “I’m conducting a visual assessment of our operational readiness. I highly doubt you could fit a weapon in that dress.”
“You’re staring.”
“Sí,” I admit. “I’m staring.”
We approach the entrance. The bouncer is large, and he stands with his arms crossed in front of a velvet rope. He looks at us with complete indifference to our arrival.
Billie steps forward.
I watch it happen. The shift. She straightens a half-inch— I have seen this before, in the compound, the way she assembles herself into the version of Billie that walks into rooms— and her chin comes up, and something in her eyes goes from warm to precise.
“Good evening,” she says to the bouncer, and her voice has a quality I can only describe as executive. Calm, unhurried. “We’re guests of the Marchetti party.” She says this with the confidence of a person who knows there is a Marchetti party because she invented it three seconds ago.
The bouncer looks at her. He looks at me. He looks at Benny, who is standing slightly behind us and attempting to project sophistication, which for Benny involves squinting slightly and holding his hands behind his back.
“Name?” the bouncer says.
“The reservation is under Marchetti,” Billie says, and she holds his gaze without blinking, without flinching, with the full, enormous weight of her dark eyes, and she waits.
She does not explain further. She does not repeat herself.
She simply waits, as if the passage of time will inevitably resolve this in her favor, because it always does.
The bouncer’s hand moves to his earpiece. He considers. Then, he moves the rope aside.
“Enjoy your evening,” he says.
We walk through.
I’m proud of her. I’m so proud of her that it sits in my throat like something I can’t swallow, and I want to tell her, but the casino opens up around us and there is too much to take in.
The interior is what the exterior promised— extravagance.
Elegant danger dressed in crystal. High ceilings.
Gold fixtures. The sound of glasses and low conversation layered over ambient music.
Tables arranged across a vast floor— roulette, blackjack, poker— with dealers in black and patrons in everything else.
The light is warm and diffuse, making every face look its best, which is a kindness the architects probably didn’t extend to the rooms below.
“Dios mío,” Benny breathes, looking around with the wide eyes of a child who has been released into a theme park. “This is exactly like?—“
“Don’t say it,” I warn him.
“Casino Royale,” he says anyway, reverently referencing the James Bond movie.
And then Benny sees the food.
There is, along the far wall, a spread of elaborate construction.
Towers of shellfish. Arrangements of expensive cheese.
Tiny, perfect things on tiny, perfect plates.
Benny’s eyes lock onto this spread the way a heat-seeking missile locks onto its target, and I watch the precise moment when his commitment to our mission is overridden by his commitment to jamón ibérico.
“I will scout the area near the food,” he says, already moving. “For strategic purposes.”
“Benny—”
“Strategic purposes, primo,” he repeats, and he is gone, absorbed into the crowd and moving toward the shellfish tower.
Billie and I are alone. Or as alone as two people can be in a room full of strangers, with an Interpol agent in their ears and a criminal overlord somewhere beneath their feet.
She is scanning the room— I can see her doing it, the way her eyes move from table to table, cataloguing exits, looking for the corridor Rakowski described. She is being professional. She is being focused. She is also, I can tell, still angry with me.
It’s in her posture. In the careful way she is not looking at me. In the precise distance she’s maintaining— close enough to appear together, far enough to communicate that together is, at this moment, a professional arrangement and nothing more.
I take her hand.
She lets me, but her fingers don’t close around mine. They stay neutral, neither accepting nor rejecting, the hand equivalent of a polite silence.
I pull her— gently, not commanding, just guiding— toward a column near the edge of the floor, where the crowd is thinner and the music is softer and there is a small pocket of space that belongs, for a moment, only to us.
“Billie,” I say.
She looks at me. Her eyes are guarded. Her jaw is set in that way she has— the way that says she has prepared a position and intends to hold it.
I want to say so much to her. I want to tell her how I cannot lose her. But there are no words, so instead:
I kiss her.
It is not the kiss from the hotel corridor— that one was urgent, surprised, a thing that happened because neither of us could stop it.
This one is deliberate. An apology. I put my hand on the side of her face and I lean in and I kiss her slowly, because I want her to feel what I cannot seem to say correctly with words.
I want her to understand that I am here.
That I chose this. That I chose her, even though I’m angry, even though I’m afraid, even though every rational part of me said to walk away and I could not, because walking away from Billie Harper is something I am apparently incapable of doing.
For a moment— one suspended, perfect moment— she kisses me back.
Her hand comes up to my chest, and her fingers grip the lapel of my jacket, and I feel her lean in, and the casino and the danger and Marco and the Ledger all disappear, and there is only this: her mouth and mine and the devastating warmth of being close to someone who matters.
Then she pulls away.
Not far. Just enough. Her hand stays on my lapel, but her eyes are different now— softer, but also wounded, the way animals look when they’ve been hurt and are deciding whether to trust again.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says quietly.
“Do what?”
“Kiss me like that to make me forget that you didn’t want to come.”
She almost smiles. Almost. But something else comes first— something that has been sitting underneath the anger this whole time, waiting for enough space to surface.
“Rodrigo,” she says, and her voice goes to the place where the real things live, the things she usually keeps hidden under humor and self-deprecation and the work of taking care of everyone else. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to be honest.”
“Always,” I say.
She takes a breath.
“Are you sure about me?” she says. “Because— you said it yourself. You rush into things. You see something beautiful and you leap— and maybe to you I’m just a passing thing?—”
The words hit me with a force I am not prepared for.
I stare at her. I stare at her because I cannot believe— genuinely, with every part of my being, cannot believe— that this woman, this woman standing in front of me in a dress that has rearranged the architecture of my heart, thinks she is a passing thing.
“Billie,” I say, and my voice sounds different, even to me. “You are not a passing thing.”
She looks at me. Her lips part slightly. The gold in her eyes catches the casino’s warm light, and she is— in this moment, in this terrible, beautiful, probably-going-to-kill-us moment— the only real thing in the room.
“I know why you needed to do this,” I tell her, nodding. “You have put off all of your adventures for other people. I don’t want you to do that for me.”
Billie softens. “But I shouldn’t have made you come back,” she says, shaking her head. “I was thinking about it the entire drive over, and I know you need distance from this life— from Alana— and it’s selfish of me to drag you here?—”
“Esta bien, hermosa,” I tell her. “You are not dragging me back. I am a man, choosing to follow. You are too small to drag me, sadly.”
She laughs. Her hand tightens on my lapel. Just slightly. Just enough to tell me: I am forgiven.
Then Rakowski’s voice crackles in both our ears simultaneously, breaking the moment. “As touching as this little moment is, I’d recommend you two keeping moving to avoid creating suspicion. The VIP lounge is northeast corner.”
Billie releases my lapel. She straightens. She blinks once, resettling herself into the woman who talks her way past bouncers and negotiates with arms dealers.
But before she turns away— before we step back into the crowd and the mission and the terrible, necessary thing we’ve come here to do— she looks at me.
And something in her expression has shifted.
Not resolved, not certain, but— open. A door that was closed is now ajar, and behind it is the possibility that she might, eventually, believe me.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go finish this adventure.”
I nod. I take her hand again. This time, her fingers close around mine.