Chapter 32
thirty-two
BILLIE
The casino floor stretches out ahead of us— glittering and excessive.
Rodrigo’s hand is warm in mine, and his fingers have closed around my fingers in a way that communicates something neither of us has said out loud yet, which is fine, because we are in the middle of an international criminal operation and there will be time for declarations later, assuming we survive.
We move through the crowd together— past the roulette tables with their spinning wheels and their tiny, fateful balls, past the blackjack dealers, past a woman in a silver gown who is laughing too loudly.
Everyone in this room is beautiful and none of them are thinking about what’s underneath the floor.
I am thinking about what’s underneath the floor.
But I am also thinking about the man beside me, and the thing he said— the thing that settled something inside my chest like a warm blanket thrown over me in my coldest moment.
You are not a passing thing. I keep returning to it.
The sentence. The way his voice sounded when he said it: he wasn’t performing or trying to win a point, but stating a fact he found so obvious it pained him to discover I didn’t already know it.
This is what I have been looking for, I think.
Not Rodrigo, in particular— though Rodrigo is doing an excellent job of being what I’ve been looking for— but this.
A person who doesn’t need me to be smaller so they can feel tall enough.
Tyler loved me the way you love a favorite chair: something comfortable, reliable, always in the same place when you need it.
Rodrigo looks at me like I’m a person— a whole, interesting person worthy of her own wants and needs.
The difference is staggering. The difference has rearranged things inside me that I thought were permanent fixtures.
“Northeast,” I murmur, steering us through the crowd.
The VIP lounge should be in this direction— according to Rakowski— and behind it, the corridor.
The service elevator. The underground. I scan the room, reading the arrangement of bodies, noting which staff members are real hospitality workers and which are standing a little too still with earpieces that don’t match the casino’s uniform.
“There,” Rodrigo says quietly, his chin tilting fractionally to the right.
I follow his gaze. Past the VIP lounge— which is sectioned off by velvet rope and soft amber light— there is a door.
It is not the kind of door that invites attention.
It is grey, recessed into the wall, and it would be unremarkable if not for the two men standing in front of it, arms crossed, faces communicating a professional disinterest in conversation.
Security. Not casino security— these men are larger, quieter, and dressed in suits that are cut to accommodate shoulder holsters. These guys are Twin Ledger security.
A live band plays on a small stage adjacent to the dance floor, between where we’re standing and the grey door. The music is slow and warm— a saxophone doing something romantic. Couples move together in the low light, bodies close.
An idea arrives in my head, and it’s stupid, but I still say it out loud:
“Dance with me,” I wink at Rodrigo.
Rodrigo looks at me. Then he looks at the guards. Then he looks back at me, and I watch him understand.
“Con mucho gusto,” he says, and the way he says it— low, warm, with a curve at the corner of his mouth.
He leads me onto the floor. His hand finds the small of my back. My hand finds his shoulder. We’re close, and it feels like coming home.
He pulls me in, and our bodies meet, and the space that was between us collapses to nothing. I can feel his heartbeat through the fabric of his jacket. Or maybe that’s my heartbeat. The two have become difficult to distinguish.
“You’re good at this,” I say, because he is. At the club in Madrid, it was a different kind of dancing. This is more formal.
“My grandmother taught me,” Rodrigo says, his mouth near my ear. “She was a terrible cook but an excellent dancer.”
“She had her priorities straight,” I say.
We turn together, and I let the turn carry us closer to the guards. The saxophone exhales something beautiful. Rodrigo’s hand presses gently against my lower back and he gives me a look that tells me I should follow his gaze. I do, and it leads me to a man on the edge of the dance floor:
Then I see the badge dangling from his waistband.
The man is a guard who has shifted his position.
He’s watching a woman at a nearby table, distracted.
His badge is clipped to his belt on the side nearest to us.
The clip is standard— the kind that requires a firm upward pull to release, the kind I have unclipped from my own lanyard a thousand times at work because Mr. Franklin insisted all assistants wear identification at all times, even in the bathroom, which I always thought was excessive but which has now, apparently, been training for this exact moment.
My entire career has been building to this.
I adjust my angle against Rodrigo— just slightly, just a half-turn that brings my right hand down from his shoulder.
Our bodies rotate. The guard is eighteen inches away.
Twelve. I let my hand drift as we pass him, and the motion looks— I hope— like nothing more than a woman adjusting her dress, and my fingers find the badge, and I pull upward, and the clip releases with a small, decisive sound that the saxophone covers perfectly.
The badge is in my hand. I press it flat against my thigh, against the sequined fabric, invisible.
Rodrigo looks down at me. He felt it— the shift in my movement, the precision of it. His eyes widen fractionally.
“Billie Harper,” he whispers. “You’re a thief.”
“Don’t make a thing of it,” I whisper back.
We dance for another thirty seconds— enough time to not look suspicious— and then we separate from the floor, moving naturally toward the bar, and finally, toward the grey door.
I hold the badge against the sensor. A small light blinks from red to green. The lock clicks.
Rodrigo opens the door. A corridor stretches beyond it— dim, industrial, the glamour of the casino ending abruptly at the threshold like a sentence cut short. Cold air rises from below.
We step through. The door closes behind us with a sound that is very, very final.
* * *
Rakowski’s voice arrives in my ear before we’ve made it ten steps down the corridor. “Do not engage,” she says, with clipped precision. “Report what you see and fall back. We need his location confirmed and we have to wait until he’s out in the open. Do not intervene. Do not make contact. Do not?—”
I reach up and tap my earpiece twice— the signal, I’ve decided in this moment, for I hear you and I’m going to do what I want anyway— and keep walking.
The corridor descends. The walls shift from painted plaster to raw concrete, and the lighting changes with them. The temperature drops. The air is stale and damp down here.
Rodrigo is beside me, moving quietly, always at my shoulder. We pass a VIP room with leather furniture and a bar cart, empty. A storage room, crates stacked against the walls with markings I can’t read.
Then I hear it.
A voice. Low, controlled, and angry. The words are another language— I can’t understand them— but the tone is universal. It is the tone of someone demanding something from someone who is not giving it.
We follow the sound down a branching hallway, to a room at the end. The door is heavy— industrial, steel— but it’s not fully closed. A gap of perhaps two inches separates the door from its frame, and through that gap, I can see everything.
The room is bare concrete. No windows. A single overhead light, harsh and unforgiving. Pipes run along the ceiling, and from one of those pipes, suspended by her ankles with what appears to be nylon cord— the universe’s apparent material of choice for restraining people— hangs Alana.
She is upside down. Her hair cascades toward the floor in a waterfall of blonde.
Her pink top has slipped slightly, and her face is flushed— from the position, from the blood rushing to her head, from the general indignity of the situation.
Even hanging inverted from a pipe in a basement torture chamber, she looks stunning. This is her gift and also her curse.
Standing in front of her is Marco Ledger.
Well, Alana, I think. You wanted Marco to come find you in person. Seems like he has.
Marco is enraged, and it’s terrifying. His suit is immaculate. He paces in place, then rolls up his sleeves.
He hits Alana. An open palm, across the cheek, and the sound of it makes my stomach drop. Alana’s head snaps to one side.
She recovers. She blinks. She looks at Marco with a calm, appraising expression that says, “That’s all you’ve got.”
“I bet this is really good for my circulation,” she says, her voice bright and conversational, deliberately wrong for the moment. “Like, who needs botox when you can just hang upside down in a torture chamber?”
Marco does not laugh. Marco does not seem like someone who has ever laughed.
“Where is my brother’s ring?” he says, and the edge to his voice tells me this isn’t the first time he’s asked. He holds up his hand, and on his finger, I see it: his ring. Gold, heavy, ornate. One half of the key to everything.
Then I notice something else. Alana’s eyes. They are not looking at Marco’s face. They are looking at his hand. At the ring. And in that look is something I recognize:
Desire.
Behind Marco, Ivan stands against the wall like a bald, disapproving monument. Two other guards flank the room.
Rodrigo’s hand touches my elbow. I turn. His eyes are dark and serious, and he mouths: the ring.
I look at him. He looks at me. And then I do something I would not have done two weeks ago, something the assistant who orders lunch for poodles and books grooming appointments would never have done— I reach into the front of my dress and produce Mateo’s ring from where I have kept it hidden, warm against my skin, since the chalet.