Chapter 29
twenty-nine
RODRIGO
Billie looks beautiful, sitting at a barstool in my family’s chalet. Her feet dangle over the edge of the chair, and being near her makes me feel like everything is right with my world.
The air in the chalet is thick with the smell of garlic and olive oil.
Benny has made dinner— a paella that he claims is our grandmother’s recipe, though I happen to know our grandmother never once made paella; she made tortilla espa?ola and she made it badly, and we loved her for it.
Benny’s paella is, against all probability, very good.
He has set the table with mismatched plates from the kitchen’s ancient cabinets and lit a candle.
The four of us sit in a square, ready for dinner: Benny and I on one side, Billie and Alana on the other. I try not to glare at Alana with the hatred I feel.
Outside the window, the Italian countryside is going dark in the slow, unhurried way it does— the hills turning from gold to grey, the olive trees becoming silhouettes, the last of the light collecting along the western horizon.
Agent Rakowski, from Interpol— my contact’s contact, a woman whose voice on the phone communicated confidence— told me she could have people here in just a few hours.
Since overhearing our phone call, Alana has thrown multiple temper tantrums about this, but what’s done is done.
I will keep Billie safe, whatever it takes.
Benny is talking. He is always talking. “You know what this reminds me of?” he says, gesturing with his fork at the table, the candle, the general situation.
“Die Hard Two. Not the first one— the second one. The one in the airport. Where they are all waiting, and they know the bad guys are coming, but they eat dinner first because a man must eat.” He nods sagely. “Bruce Willis understood this.”
“Bruce Willis was not eating dinner in Die Hard Two,” I say.
“He was eating something,” Benny insists. “I remember this very clearly.”
Billie smiles. It is a small smile— careful, tired— but it is there, and I catch it from across the table the way you catch light off water. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I am aware that this is a thought I keep having, but that it also becomes truer each time.
Alana has been quiet during dinner. This is the detail that should concern me most, and it does. She has eaten her paella without commentary. She has not taken a single photograph. She has not mentioned a single brand name. She is sitting with her hands in her lap.
She looks like someone who has already made a decision and is waiting for the right moment to say it out loud.
“Can I tell you something?” Alana says.
The table goes still. Even Benny stops chewing.
Alana looks at Billie first, and then at me, and then back at Billie.
“You two,” she says, “are the closest thing I’ve had to real friends.
” She says it plainly, without the Valley-girl lilt, without the bubbly cadence.
“I know that sounds— I know what it sounds like, coming from me. But it’s true.
Everyone else in my life sees me as a means to an end.
Marco. The Ledger. All of it. You pay and you get paid and nobody actually knows you.
” She presses her lips together. “Billie, you know me. You’ve seen me at my worst and you’re still sitting here, being my friend and eating Benny’s terrible paella?—”
“It’s not terrible,” Benny protests quietly.
“—and Rodrigo.” She turns to me. Her jaw is set in the way I recognize from the arguments we used to have— not angry, but certain.
“I’m over you. I need you to hear that. Not because I never loved you— I did, in my way, which I understand is a complicated way— but because what you and Billie have is...
” She pauses, searching for the word. “Real. I saw it the moment you two met at the baby shower. It's like, annoyingly real. The way you look at her makes me want to throw up, honestly, but in a good way? Like a romantic-comedy throw-up.” She waves her hand. “You should be together. You should be happy. Both of you.” A beat. Her eyes harden. “Assuming you survive what’s about to happen next.”
The last sentence lands differently than the rest. It’s ominous.
“What do you mean?” Billie asks.
Alana looks at me. Directly at me, and there it is— the thing I sensed underneath her silence all evening. Something hard and resolved.
“Now that Interpol is involved, there’s no version of this where I walk away free,” she says. “You know that. I know that.”
“Alana—” I begin.
“So I had no other choice,” she says, and her voice is steady and final. “I called Ivan. From the Twin Ledger.”
The name drops into the room like a stone into still water.
Outside— as if the universe has been listening and believes in perfect timing— there is a sound. Two sharp cracks, distant but unmistakable: gunshots. Then silence. Then one more.
Everything happens at once and also very slowly.
I am on my feet before I’ve decided to stand.
My hand finds Billie’s arm. Benny grabs the cast-iron pan from the stove— the one he used to make the paella— and holds it like a shield, which would be funny if the fear on his face weren’t genuine.
Billie is rigid beside me, her eyes wide, her body angled toward the door.
“Calm down,” Alana says. She hasn’t moved from her chair. “They’re not here for you. I told them I ditched you back in Barcelona.”
Through the window, headlights sweep across the gravel path.
A jeep— dark, military-grade— pulls to a stop thirty meters from the chalet.
The engine idles. Two figures sit in the backseat, visible only as shapes.
And standing beside the driver’s door, illuminated by the porch light that Benny installed crookedly last summer, is Ivan. I remember him from the compound.
His bald head catches the light like a pale, disapproving moon. He is looking at the chalet with a disappointed expression.
“You called him?” I say. “To double-cross Marco together?”
“Not exactly, although that was my first idea,” Alana says, standing now, smoothing her top.
“But sadly he’s made up with Marco, and bringing me in will get him back on the good list. So I’ve made a choice.
I’m turning myself in. It’s the only play that keeps everyone alive.
” She looks at Billie. “If I go back to Marco myself, I have leverage. I know things he needs. He won’t kill me. Probably.”
“Probably,” Billie repeats.
“High probably,” Alana clarifies. “Like, eighty-five percent.” She leans in and whispers. “Plus, I have a shot at getting what I want.” She winks at Billie, flashing the ring on her finger.
Billie stands. The two women face each other across the table, the candle flickering between them, and something passes between them that I cannot fully read— something that belongs to their friendship, to the strange and terrible and genuine thing they built in a short space of time, the thing that started with a yoga class and a baby shower and ended here, in a stone house in the Italian countryside, with a jeep idling outside.
“You can’t,” Billie says. Her voice is quiet and firm.
“I can,” Alana says. “And I’m going to.” She reaches out and takes Billie’s hands.
“Listen to me. You are the best friend I’ve ever had, and I know that’s a low bar because my previous best friend was a Serbian weapons manufacturer named Drago, but still.
You believed in me when you had absolutely no reason to.
You believed in me even when I was literally the worst.” She squeezes Billie’s hands.
“So do something for me. Believe in yourself the way you believed in me. Okay? Because you are— and I say this with love— a designer item on clearance. And someone needs to pay full price for you.” She looks at me. “Rodrigo. Pay full price.”
“Don’t—” Billie’s voice breaks.
Alana pulls her into a hug. It is tight and real and lasts exactly long enough. Then she releases Billie, wipes a thumb under her own eye— smearing nothing, because her makeup is flawless, because of course it is— and turns to me.
“Don’t screw this up,” she says.
She clutches Billie’s hand in hers one more time, lingering there. A look of surprise crosses Billie’s face, like she’s being given a secret message. Then: Alana walks out the front door.
I watch through the window as she crosses the gravel in her heels, her silhouette sharp against the jeep’s headlights.
Ivan opens the door for her. She gets in without looking back.
The door closes. The jeep reverses, turns, and the taillights shrink down the dark road until they are red points, and then nothing.
The chalet is very quiet.
Benny is still holding the paella pan.
Billie stands at the window. The candlelight catches the gold flecks in her eyes, and they are wet, and she is watching the empty road, and I understand— watching her— that she has just lost a friend.
Then, Billie turns, showing me something in her outstretched hand. It’s a small, shiny object, a red ruby in the center.
Mateo’s ring is sitting in Billie’s hand.
“She gave it to me,” Billie says. “She gave me the ring.”
And now I know, without a doubt, we are in enormous trouble.
* * *
Agent Rakowski sits in the one good chair in the living room, and she holds her coffee the way a soldier holds a weapon: with both hands, at the ready.
She is exactly what her voice on the phone suggested: tired, experienced, her dark hair pulled back in a bun so severe it seems to be holding her entire skull together by force of will.
Her Interpol uniform is pressed. Her eyes miss nothing.
Melissa is on the couch. She is eight months pregnant and looks it, but— after a tearful reunion with Billie— seems ready to get to business. Steve is beside her, one hand on her knee, the other gripping a glass of water.