Chapter 32 #2
Rodrigo watches me produce it. His eyebrows rise. “What else do you keep in there?” he whispers.
“Focus,” I whisper back, but I’m smiling.
We press back from the door. Rodrigo leans close, his mouth near my ear.
“We lure him out,” he says. “Into the open. The roof. If he sees the ring, he’ll follow. He won’t be able to stop himself. Rakowski can take him on the roof.”
I nod. It’s a good plan. It’s the only plan.
Rodrigo taps his earpiece. “Benny. Rakowski. Can you hear me?”
“I am here, primo!” Benny’s voice explodes through the comm, muffled slightly by what I suspect is a mouthful of shellfish. “The shrimp here is incredible, by the way?—“
“Listen to me,” Rodrigo says, his voice low and rapid. “Marco is in the basement. We’re going to lure him to the roof. Get Rakowski’s people positioned up there. Every exit from the rooftop covered.”
“Copy,” Rakowski’s voice cuts through, and I can hear her already moving, already relaying orders. “Rooftop units repositioning now. You have four minutes.”
Rodrigo turns to me. His jaw is set. His eyes are warm and afraid and proud, all at once. “I am a very fast runner,” he says. “Construction work is good for the legs.”
“Good,” I say. “Because you’re about to need them.”
Rodrigo considers, then pulls me close and kisses me. For a moment, it’s just the two of us, his lips on mine, warm and insistent. He grabs my hair with his hand and pulls away, looking deep into my eyes:
“Be safe, Billie,” he says.
I look at the ring in my hand. I look at the door. I look at the crack of light spilling through it, and straighten my spine.
“Time to negotiate,” I say.
I push the door open.
The room turns toward me. Every face. Every gun. Marco’s cold eyes find mine, and I watch them widen— just slightly, just enough to confirm that he was not expecting a woman in a red sequined dress to walk into his torture chamber. Nobody ever is.
I hold up the ring. Mateo’s ring. I hold it high, between two fingers, the way Alana held my credit card in the boutique— like it’s nothing to me, but everything to them.
“Looking for this?” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake. My voice is the voice of the woman in the mirror. The one who decides whether the people in the room have earned her presence.
Marco’s face transforms. The control fractures. His eyes lock onto the ring with a hunger that makes my skin crawl. He wants me dead— it’s written all over his face.
“Billie!” Alana exclaims, like I’ve just dropped by for tea. “Great dress. A little tight on you in the waist but?—”
“The ring,” Marco says, holding out his hand.
“You can have it,” I say. “If you can catch us.”
I toss the ring to Rodrigo. It arcs through the air— small, bright, catching the overhead light— and Rodrigo catches it cleanly, because of course he does, because this man catches everything I throw at him, literally and otherwise. And then he runs.
Rodrigo moves with a speed that surprises even me.
He is out the door and into the corridor before Marco’s mouth has finished forming the order— “Uhvatite ih!”— and then Marco is moving too, and the guards are moving, and the room erupts into the kind of chaos that happens when very angry men with guns decide to chase something.
Two of the guards don’t follow. They turn toward me instead— and the air cracks with a gunshot that chips the concrete wall six inches from my head. I drop. My knees hit the floor. My ears ring.
Then I hear a sound I will never forget: the sound of Alana’s restraints snapping.
She drops from the pipe, lands on her hands, and rolls— a controlled, athletic, absolutely impossible roll that brings her to her feet in a single fluid motion. She is upright. She is smiling.
“Pilates!” she announces, with the enthusiasm of a woman endorsing a fitness program. “It’s really good to have a strong core.”
Ivan turns toward her, reaching for his weapon, but Alana is already moving. She bends down, removes her right high-heeled shoe— a stiletto, pink, obviously— and presses something on the heel. There is a sharp, electric crack. The heel, it turns out, contains a taser. Because of course it does.
She drives the electrified heel into Ivan’s neck. His body goes rigid. He makes a sound and drops.
Alana looks at me. Her hair is wild. Her cheek is red where Marco hit her. She is, despite everything, radiant.
“Thanks for coming,” she says. “That was really, really stupid of you, by the way.”
“I know,” I say.
“Like, genuinely the dumbest thing anyone has ever done for me, and I once had a man steal a tractor just because I asked him.”
“We need to go,” I say, because the corridor beyond us is alive with the sound of shouting and running and Rodrigo’s footsteps growing distant.
Alana grabs my hand. We run.
The corridor blurs. My heels are wrong for this— everything about my outfit is wrong for this— but I run anyway, because Rodrigo is somewhere ahead of us, and he has the ring, and Marco is behind him, and the rooftop is above, and I have to get to Rodrigo before Marco does.
Alana runs beside me in one shoe. She doesn’t seem to notice.
We follow the sound of Rodrigo’s footsteps— upward, through a stairwell, the concrete steps spiraling above us— and I think: I am coming, Rodrigo.
I am coming, and I am not the woman who sat at a desk ordering lunch for a boss who never appreciated her.
I am the woman who walked into a torture chamber and held up a ring and said catch me.
And I will get to this man— this man I think…
well, I think I love— before anyone has the chance to hurt him.
We make a sharp turn at the end of the hallway, and stop dead in our tracks.
There’s a man pointing a gun at Rodrigo, who’s standing with his hands in the air.
The man’s finger is on the trigger. Rodrigo is unarmed— backed into a corner.
And I know— without a doubt— that the man I love is about to die, all because I couldn’t just stay in the countryside and paint with him.
Rodrigo is about to die… and it’s all my fault.
And in that moment, I feel like I might be dying, too.