CHAPTER 12
OLIVER
Zara’s living room is always OCD clean, but today the place is such a mess that it looks like a tornado tore right through it.
Right now, we are basically camping on her white rug, buried under a sea of printed shipping manifests, thousands of color-coded sticky notes, pictures, papers, and her laptop.
Let’s just say Sherlock Holmes would be impressed as hell if he saw the level of connections, deductions, and information we have in here.
I step over a stack of port schedules, pacing from the windows to the velvet couch and back again. I haven’t slept more than ten hours in the last three and a half days; my eyes are burning, and my blood feels like it’s made of Red Bull.
I want to scream.
But unfortunately, my lack of sleep has nothing to do with the logistical nightmare we’re trying to pull off.
Nope.
It comes from the fact that every time I close my eyes, my stupid brain decides to replay Damián’s sexy voice saying three lovely words… “I fucked up.”
…Yep. Those freaking three words have been echoing in my skull, slicing through my chest and killing me slowly from the inside out for eighty-freakin’-four hours!
The way he kissed me in my bathroom, the way we touched, waking up completely tangled up in him… it all made me believe we had shared something real.
And it was incredible… at least for me.
It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt, and the happiest I’ve ever been. And of course, like the absolute naive idiot that I am, I thought he felt it too.
But I guess this is just who Damián is.
He’s so magnetic that he makes everyone around him feel like the most important, most desired person in the world.
Hell, he even warned me.
He told me outright that he doesn’t do relationships and can’t stand commitment, and I was just too blinded by the thrill of finally having someone interested in me to remember that this was always supposed to be fake.
And not to sound insanely self-deprecating, but… I don’t get it.
I don’t get why I’m so hard to love.
I mean, despite everything in my life, I am a good man; I always do my best to help others however I can, I have a purpose in life, and I have the best friend anyone can ask for… but besides her, I’m never loved, I’m never wanted.
I’m never chosen.
And I’m tired of it. I am tired of being used, left behind, having to do everything by myself, tired of feeling so damn lonely all the freaking time.
I just don’t get what I’m doing wrong, or what is so wrong with me that everyone else seems to find someone to love and trust, but I’m always left standing here.
I’m always alone.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s really too much to ask for just one person to choose me? One person to see me as someone worthy of being loved, not just used? One person who can look at me and say, “Relax, I got this. I got you”?
Well, I suppose I was just built to give, but never receive… to watch from the sidelines, but never actually participate.
Ugh… I’m basically an extra in my own life.
How freaking depressing is that?
“How many this time?” Zara asks, breaking through my miserable mental spiral.
She is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the rug, writing our last notes in a notebook. I look at her notes to remind me what she just asked, and smile for a second.
I think it’s cute how much she loves writing in Bubbles, which is a cipher we invented together when we were teenagers, so we could pass notes without risking Rafael or my father reading them.
“Four…” I say, rubbing my temples. “No! Five. Male, female, and three kids.”
“Ages of the kids?” she asks, not looking up.
“Ten, eight, and five.”
Zara’s pen pauses for a second. “Are they connected with Elijah?”
“Not by work; this time, Kaleo sent their names to me.” I sit on the velvet couch, letting my head fall back. “Turns out they are friends of his family, and my father wants their family’s land. They didn’t know who they were dealing with, so they refused to sell.”
“Oh… I assume that didn’t go well.”
“Nope… Their grandfather and an uncle have already been killed. This man is the next name on the deed.” I try to get more comfortable on the couch, but the stillness suffocates me, and two seconds later, I’m back on my feet, pacing all around the room.
“Such a stupid reason to wipe out an entire family.”
“My father’s reasons are always stupid.”
“Where are we relocating them?” she asks while opening a map on her computer.
“Find them a small town near Alicante, Spain.”
Zara stops typing and looks up. “You are never that specific. Any reason why you are now?”
“The wife suffers from severe rheumatism. Research shows that Costa Blanca’s climate is one of the best for managing that disease.”
“Aww! You are such a softie, Ollie.” She smiles, and I just shrug. “Okay, what the hell is going on?”
“Nothing.” I deflect instantly, looking away. “What’s the next question?”
“Screw the next question… You are all jumpy and huffy. And you look like you’re about to either pass out or cry. What is going on?”
“We are about to lock up and fake-murder an innocent man, his wife, and his three kids. So I’m sorry if I’m a little stressed out!”
“They will only be locked up in a luxury cabin, with food and toys for the kids, I might add, for exactly thirty-eight minutes until the yacht goes past New Shoreham,” Zara says, shaking her arms and pointing at all the paperwork we’ve been doing for the past day. “As we just planned.”
“I’ll still have to throw them overboard at night in the freaking ocean,” I argue. “Zara, one of the kids is five.”
“Ollie, we’ve done this dozens of times, and not counting Castor’s fuck-up, in the first year, there has never been an accident or a single issue.
Elijah’s crew thinks you’re a fucking monster for leaving a terrified family drowning in the open sea, and that family gets to survive and flee safely to—” she checks her notes—“Alicante, Spain. There, win-win.”
“Well… what if Tom is late?” I ask, though by now I know I am only searching for things to panic about.
Anything I can use as an excuse or a distraction for my brain.
“Tom is never late.”
“I don’t know, Z…” I trail off, and my fingers fidget with the hem of my shirt. Zara sighs, and then her green eyes glare at me.
“Oliver… Either you tell me what the hell is actually going on in that head of yours, or shut up.” She points her finger at the mess of papers around her. “We have exactly ten hours to get this entire thing ready before we meet with Kaleo, and your nervous pacing is making me nervous.”
“Fine… but promise me you won’t look at me with those puppy-dog-pitying eyes you make whenever something absolutely pathetic happens.”
“I don’t make puppy-dog-pitying eyes.”
“Then I’m not telling you. What’s next on the—”
“—I promise, I won’t make puppy-dog-pitying eyes,” she says, lifting her hand in a swear.
“A few days ago, Damián went to my house, and he swam with Serena and me.”
“Ahh!” she gasps. “He swam? How does he look wet and half-naked in a bathing suit?”
“…okay, fucking incredible… but that’s not the point… We drank, talked, and things got… well, a little too intense.”
“Intense how? Was Rafael there?”
“More like intense, as in he made out with me in the pool after telling me he had to be exclusive.”
“Oh, my God!” Zara squeaks, beyond excited. “Oh, my God!”
“No, no!” I physically hold her down so she stops jumping. “There are no ‘Oh, my Gods’ in this story. This is a sad story.”
“Then get to the sad part.”
“We decided to be exclusive because that way the relationship cover is more believable.”
“Ajamm…”
“Then it rained, so we went to my room, and it was getting cold, so I opened the shower for him and…”
“And…?!”
“And we made out like crazy, I blew him in the shower, he blew me on my bed, and we fell asleep. Then the next day, he panicked and told me he fucked up and that he’s never fucked up before, we got into an argument, and then we were dragged by my family to the most uncomfortable breakfast of my life, where Damián put a knife between Rafael’s fingers, then he left… the end.”
Zara opens her mouth… then closes it.
She opens it again… and closes it.
“Should I come back in ten hours, when you’ve found your words?”
“So… what you’re telling me is…” she says, and I nod. “…that you blew him in the shower?!” she gasps in shock. “Ollie! How was that?! Omg, how big is he? Did it match the rest of the body, because sometimes they don’t.”
“Seriously?” I glare at her. “You hear all this, and the info that got stuck in your head is that I blew him in the shower?”
“Well, first of all, this is the first time I can talk about this with my bestie, and second, nothing of what you said sounded terminally horrible—” she starts saying, but she stops and shakes her head—“except for the breakfast with your family. That could’ve been, well, terminally horrible.”
“He said he fucked up, Z,” I repeat, and well, look at this, turns out the words hurt even more when I say them out loud than when I think about them.
“But he is a spy. Saying he fucked up could’ve meant a lot of things, like he fucked up the mission, or his morning gym routine, or even sleeping with a client.”
“I’m not his client.”
“No? I kinda thought you were.” She lifts her blonde curls, rolls them in a bun, and stabs one of the pens through the bun, making it stay that way. “Okay, how did he tell you? And use his exact words.”
“We woke up in bed, everything seemed okay, but then he stood up and said a bunch of things in Spanish, like pendejoe or something like that.”
“It’s pronounced pendejo… it means idiot or asshole, or like twenty other things,” she adds, and I nod, half confused that she knows this and half surprised. “What? My Spanish teacher was hot, so I paid a lot of attention… then what happened?”
“He started to dress up and said, ‘I fucked up,’ and ‘this has never happened.’ Nothing else.”
“Honestly, I still think it could’ve meant so many other things than what you are imagining now… what is he saying in his texts? Or is he acting like nothing ever happened?”