Chapter Twenty-One
RYAN
Sleep won’t claim me. Not properly, not the way you sleep in a place that’s yours, in a bed that’s safe, even though I checked the entire villa for listening devices and cameras, only to find nothing.
Surprising, but not completely unexpected.
Lying in the dark with the ocean moving beyond the window, my hand within reach of the weapon tucked under the pillow, and my brain doing what it always does in hostile territory, running quietly in the background, listening, never fully letting go.
You don’t sleep deeply in your enemy’s house.
Not if you want to wake up.
So when the knock comes, three times, soft and deliberate, at the window rather than the door, I am upright with the weapon in my hand before I am fully conscious of moving.
I hold completely still.
Listen.
The ocean. The guards at the perimeter, their footsteps in their pattern, unchanged, nothing broken in the rhythm of them. The wind moving through the gardens.
Then again.
Three knocks.
Soft and deliberate.
Someone who doesn’t want to be heard.
Crossing to the window in the night, no lights, moving by memory and instinct, I stand to one side of it, weapon raised, and look through the edge of the glass.
Riley.
She’s standing in the garden in a silk robe that the desert night wind is doing nothing to keep properly closed.
Her arms are wrapped around herself against the cool air, and her dark hair is loose around her shoulders.
She’s looking up at the window with an expression I can read even from here because I have always been able to read her face in any light.
Controlled.
Terrified.
Both at once, the way only Riley ever manages to do.
I put the weapon down and open the window.
“What are you doing here?” Barely a sound. Less than a whisper.
“Let me in.”
I check the garden first.
The path back to the main house is still and quiet. The guards are at the far perimeter, unchanged, and the cameras are angled away.
Clean…
For now.
I step back from the window and let her in.
She comes through it with the practiced ease of a woman who has been moving carefully through dangerous spaces for months, no wasted movement, no noise, her bare feet finding the floor without a sound.
I close the window behind her and turn around.
The robe has fallen open more, but I keep my eyes on her face.
“How did you get out?” Still barely a whisper.
“I told the guards I needed some fresh air.” Her voice matches mine, less than a whisper, years of training making it instinctive. “That I couldn’t sleep. They wanted to come—”
“But you told them you needed the time alone.”
“You know how it works.”
“I know how it works. I also know you improvised that on the spot, which means you’ve used one of your limited excuses, and now you’ve got one fewer—”
“Ryan.”
She says my name, my actual name, not Marco, not anything else, and the sound of it in her mouth in the night stops me completely.
I hadn’t heard my own name in weeks.
She looks at me for a long moment, really looks, the way she’d been trying to do across the dinner table for hours, no candlelight, wine, and Clemente between us now. Just her eyes, my face, and eight months of everything that had happened since the last time we’d been in the same room.
Her face changes.
Something cracks open in it, and everything she’d held together through dinner finally releases at once, the way things do when you find somewhere safe enough to let them go.
Her eyes fill.
I cross the distance between us and reach her at the same moment she reaches me, both of us moving without deciding to, and I hold her.
Both arms, her face against my chest, her hands gripping the back of my shirt like she is checking I am real, like if she holds on hard enough, she can confirm this isn’t something her exhausted mind has constructed out of isolation and hope.
I am real.
She is real.
She has one hand at the back of her head, and says nothing because there is nothing that matters more than this right now.
Just this. Just being alive in the same room.
Just two people who have known each other through enough darkness to understand that sometimes the only thing required is to hold on.
Her breathing slowly evens out.
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 runs through 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.
She stills completely.
Her eyes move over it slowly, taking it in.
“When did you get this?” she breathes.
“When I joined the club.”
She looks at me, and something moves in her expression, the complexity of finding someone familiar and discovering how much of them you missed. How much life had been lived in the space between.
Her fingers move from my jaw and trace the edge of one tattoo on my chest, slowly, carefully, following the line of it the way she’d followed the line of my beard, mapping me, finding the version of me she hadn’t known existed.
“Ryan,” she says. Not a question, just my name. Just the reality of me sitting beside her in the flesh and blood.
Her palm flattens against my chest, feeling my heartbeat, and confirming I am real in the most fundamental way, the solid certainty of a heart beating under a hand.
I look down at her hand and don’t move. Then my eyes find it, that small constellation of freckles on her left cheek, the one that has been there in every version of every light I’ve ever seen her in. The familiar thing that nothing can change.
There you are, I think. There’s the face I know.
She is looking at me the same way.
Both of us are reading the other in the low light, finding the familiar underneath everything the years have changed.
Her hand is still against my chest.
The distance between us is down to almost nothing.
The ocean moves outside.
Neither of us speaks.
And then, without warning, she turns and presses her lips hard against mine, desperate and immediate, nothing careful about it, her hands sliding up my chest and pulling my head down toward her.
Her entire body leans into the kiss with the urgency of a woman who has been starved of something real for far too long.
Her mouth moves against mine, her hands grip my shirt, and she pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes bright and shining, something raw and completely unguarded in them that she’d been holding back all evening.
“Ryan,” she breathes out. “I need you. Please.” Her voice breaks slightly on the word, the composure she’d held all night cracking at the edges.
“It’s been so long since I’ve felt like myself.
Since I’ve felt anything real.” Her hands are still on my chest, still gripping.
“Give me this. Give me tonight. Make love to me like I deserve.”
I feel everything she is asking for, the months of it, the isolation of it, the desperation of a woman who has been performing intimacy without any real human connection for so long that the real thing has become almost unrecognizable.
And I feel the pull.
Because this is Riley, the pull of her is real, specific, has never entirely gone away, and some part of me has never let go of what we were.
Reaching up, I grip her shoulders and pull back.
Her eyes meet mine, shining, breath uneven, everything she’d been holding down right there on the surface.
I shake my head slowly. “I can’t.” The words come out rougher than I intended.
She stares at me.
“Ryan…”
“Not here. Not like this. Not in his house.” I keep my voice low and steady, even though my chest is doing anything but. “You deserve better than this, Riley. Better than a stolen night in a cartel villa where either of us could be dead by morning.”
Her jaw tightens.
The tears that had been threatening finally spill, just one, quickly wiped away, the way Riley has always cried. Fast, efficient, and furious at herself for doing it.
“I know,” she says. “I know you’re right.”
The way she says it tells me that knowing it doesn’t make it any easier.
“What’s the plan?”
Moving on, the Riley I know, filing the moment away, getting back to work because the job is what keeps them both alive.
“I can’t tell you much. Not yet. Not here.” A pause. “You need to act completely normal around Clemente. Nothing changes. Nothing in how you look at me, how you speak to me, nothing. Can you do that?”
She looks at me steadily. “I’ve been doing it for months.”
“I know you can. I know.”
A beat of quiet.
“Do you trust Sam?”
“With my life. With yours.”
She holds my gaze. “Okay.”
Another beat.
And then I ask it. The question I hadn’t planned to ask that has been sitting in the back of my chest since dinner, since I’d watched Clemente’s hand move down her face and she’d leaned into it.
“Clemente.” A pause. “Do you…”
She looks at me completely level and steady. The look of a woman who has known this question was coming and has already decided exactly how to answer it.
“I do what I need to do, Ryan.”
The words land exactly as hard as anticipated.
Looking at the window, I breathe once. “Okay.”
She stands from the bed and pulls the robe closed around her, tying it, the efficient movements of a woman putting herself back together for the world she is about to walk back into.
Ava is assembling herself in the low light, piece by piece, until Riley is entirely underneath, and only Ava remains on the surface.
“I need to get back,” she says. “He’ll notice.”
A nod. We both know what that means, and neither of us needs to say it.
I check the garden, the path, the guards in their pattern, and the cameras angled away.
Clean.
She moves to the window.
Stops.
Turns back.
She looks at me, the robe now closed, composed, everything folded away except her eyes, which have always been the one thing she can’t entirely control, and says it simply, without asking for anything in return.
“I’ve missed you, Ryan.”
I look at the freckle, the eyes I have always known, and the hand that had been flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat.
“I’ve missed you too.”
She goes out through the window the way she came in, no sound, no wasted movement, bare feet on the stone path, and I watch her cross the darkened garden until the shadows take her, and she is gone.
I stand at the window for a long time after.
The guards move in their pattern.
The ocean moves behind the walls.
Sitting back on the edge of the bed in the low light, I press my hand flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat where hers had been a moment ago, and try to locate something I can’t quite name.
She had meant it. All of it. And I had felt the pull of her, the familiarity of her, and the truth of two people who had loved each other in the wrong life at the wrong time.
Lying back on the bed, I stare at the ceiling.
The ocean keeps moving.
Somewhere in the main house across the darkened gardens, Riley is lying in Clemente’s bed, in the role, in the life she’d built around a lie, and I make her the same promise I’d made everyone else I’d left behind.
I’m coming back.
No matter what it takes.
No matter how long.
No matter what name I’m wearing when I do.