Chapter 29 #2
When I opened the door for them forty minutes ago, Melissa looked at me for a long moment— taking me in the way a general surveys a battlefield— and then she nodded once.
“You’re taller than I expected,” she said.
Then she looked at Billie, who was standing behind me, and something in her face crumpled and rebuilt itself.
The two of them embraced in the doorway for a long time, and I stepped aside, because some things are not mine to stand near.
Now the seven of us— Rakowski, Melissa, Steve, Billie, Benny, myself, and Melissa's unborn child, who I am counting because it is clearly already participating in this operation— are arranged in the chalet’s living room.
Canvases lean against the far wall. My easel stands in the corner like a witness.
The paella has been cleared. It is past midnight and the world outside is black and still and full of things we cannot see.
“My recommendation,” Rakowski says, setting down her mug, “is that you go home. Both of you.” She looks at Billie, then at me.
“You’ve done enough. More than enough. What happens next is institutional— warrants, surveillance, coordination across jurisdictions.
It's slow, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s not something civilians should be anywhere near. ”
She says this the way doctors tell you to rest: she knows we won’t.
Billie leans forward in her chair.
“I’m not going home,” she says.
The room adjusts to this information.
“Alana turned herself in to protect us,” Billie continues.
Her voice is level in a way I have come to recognize as the version of Billie that appears when she’s made a decision and the decision has settled into her bones.
“I want to help find her, and I want to help bring the Twin Ledger down. It’s selfish, too.
I won’t be able to sleep until I know they’re gone. Finished.”
Rakowski studies her. “We’ve been after Marco Ledger for years,” she says.
“He’s careful. Disciplined. He runs the Ledger like a machine— dual authorization on everything, shell companies layered inside shell companies, vault access that requires both rings.
” She pauses. “His brother Mateo is dead. The missing ring is out there somewhere, and Marco is desperate to find it. You wouldn’t happen to know what Alana did with it, would you? ”
Billie looks at me and I try my best to avoid letting the truth cross my face. We’ve agreed to keep Billie’s ownership of the ring to ourselves, for now. A pleading look crosses her eyes: she’s a terrible liar. I decide to help her out:
“Alana likes to keep her secrets to herself,” I offer.
Agent Rakowski nods. “Marco has a personal vendetta,” she continues.
“Against both of you. And men like Marco don’t lose.
He will never stop,” Rakowski confirms. “Not until he’s in custody or dead.
You could go home to Chicago or Spain or wherever you want, and he’d find you.
Both of you. It might take months, might take years, but the Ledger has long arms. That’s why— although I should tell you to go home— I’m not. ”
The room sits with this. Melissa’s hand moves to her belly— a reflex, protective, the geometry of a mother already shielding.
“We have intel,” Rakowski continues, “that Alana is being taken to a location in Rome. A casino. On the surface it’s a luxury gambling establishment— private, exclusive.
But underneath, in the basements, the Ledger has infrastructure.
Holding rooms. Communication systems. It’s where Marco conducts his most sensitive deals.
” She sets her jaw. “We believe he’ll bring Alana there.
If we can get to him at that location, we can take him.
But the casino is heavily secured. If Marco gets even a hint that Interpol is nearby, he disappears.
We’ve seen him do it before— he has exit routes planned for every facility he uses.
Tunnels, cars, helicopters. The man is meticulous. ”
She looks at me. Then at Billie. Back at me.
“What we don’t have,” she says carefully, “is a way to draw him out. Into the open. Where we can make the arrest cleanly.” A beat.
“But if Marco believed that the two people he most wants to punish were walking into his casino— willingly, vulnerable, to retrieve their friend— he might come out himself. He might want to handle it personally. Men with vendettas often do.”
The implication settles over the room like weather.
Billie turns to me. Her eyes— those enormous, golden-brown eyes that I noticed at the baby shower and have not stopped noticing since— are steady and clear and full of something I can only describe as the opposite of fear.
“I want to see this through,” she says.
“I’m in,” Melissa says immediately, from the couch, with the conviction of a woman who was in before anyone asked.
“I’m—” Steve starts, looks at Melissa, recalibrates. “I’m in too. Obviously. Where she goes, I go. That’s the deal.”
Benny stands up from the corner where he’s been leaning against the wall. “This is exactly like Die Hard Three,” he says, with genuine reverence. “The one with Samuel L. Jackson. They go into the building and they?—“
“Benny,” I say.
“I’m in,” he says simply. “Primo. Always.”
Everyone is in. Everyone is brave. Everyone is looking at me with the expectation that I will say yes, because I am the man who stepped between Billie and the guard, because I am the man who fought off an assassin with a rope, because I have been, without choosing it, positioned as the person who walks toward danger when danger presents itself.
But something in me— something that has been building since Barcelona, since the rope, since the gun, since the six months before all of it— something cracks.
“No,” I say.
The word lands hard. Billie’s face shifts.
“No,” I say again, and I stand, because I cannot say this sitting down.
“Do you understand what you’re asking me?
You’re asking me to walk back into the world I’ve spent six months running from.
That’s Alana’s world, not mine.” My voice is louder than I intend, and I don’t correct it.
“I left. I left because that world was killing me— not just the danger, but the person I was becoming inside of it. A man who checks every doorway. A man who doesn’t sleep.
A man who looks at his cousin’s face and calculates whether someone might use him as leverage.
” I look at Benny. Benny looks at the floor.
“I came home to paint. To be quiet. To find out who I am when no one is trying to kill me. To be— a man who can love and be loved.”
I turn to Billie. She is watching me with those eyes, and I hate that even in my anger she is the most beautiful thing in this room, and I hate that I cannot separate what I feel for her from what she’s asking of me.
“You want me to let you walk into a place where I cannot protect you,” I say to Billie. “If something happens to you there and I cannot intervene— I don’t know if I can live with that.”
The silence that follows is total.
I look at her face. I see the hurt in it— she was trying to be brave and has been told that her bravery is a burden. I see it, and I feel it, and I cannot stay in this room with it.
“I need air,” I say.
I walk out the front door into the dark.
The night is cool and smells of sage and dry earth. I walk until the light from the chalet is behind me, and then I stop, and I breathe, and I look at the stars, which are indifferent and do not care what I decide.
Behind me, the door opens again. Footsteps on gravel. Lighter than mine.
Billie doesn’t say anything. She just stands there— close enough that I know she’s there, far enough that she’s giving me the space to decide whether I want her to be.
The countryside stretches out in every direction, dark and vast and patient, and we stand at the edge of it together, and neither of us speaks, and the silence is the most honest thing between us.