6. Silas
SIX
SILAS
I leave Vaughn behind, the smell of his cologne still filling my senses, without turning back.
If I do, then I might be tempted to turn around and follow him to his room.
Once I’m a safe distance away, I pull out my phone to message Zuza.
Silas:
On my way to you.
Her response comes immediately.
Zuza:
Got it.
I pocket my phone and keep walking. It’s not my first time in Warsaw, so I know these streets well. I could catch a bus to Zuza’s neighborhood, but the less my face shows up on camera, the better, so I keep walking. The chill in the air helps me focus on something other than Vaughn.
The thing about having a photographic memory is it doesn’t discriminate.
It doesn’t file things in order of importance or filter out the details you’d rather not keep.
It captures everything with equal fidelity and stores it without your permission, which means I am now in possession of a perfect, permanent record of the last three hours, whether I want it or not.
Anything is possible when you’re in an impossible place.
I don’t know what came over me.
That’s not entirely true. I know exactly what came over me. I’ve known it for thirteen years. I’ve just been extraordinarily disciplined about not letting it out. Tonight, for reasons I’m still in the process of understanding, the discipline slipped.
I flirted. I sat across from him in that hidden restaurant and basically told him in no uncertain terms that I’d interrupted his evening on purpose.
That I could give him what he’d expected to get from Seth.
And then watched his expression tell me, clearly and unmistakably, he wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea.
Which was why I didn’t press it. I did the right thing and kept it friendly, and then I walked away after kissing his cheek.
I’ve been careful around Vaughn for thirteen years.
If Rowan knew I’d crushed on his dad the moment we met, he’d kill me, and then he’d use his contacts at the FBI to hide my body.
I’ve been declining invitations to visit because with every minute I spend with Vaughn, I find something else that fascinates me.
Every minute then replays in my mind like a movie for days until I can replace it with something else. Usually the next job. The next kill.
Today I practically jumped the man, and my brain, instead of feeling all kinds of embarrassment, is fixating on the microexpression that changed everything. Vaughn isn’t completely unaffected.
Zuza’s apartment is on the fourth floor of a building two streets back from the river. She opens the door before I knock, which means she heard the elevator.
The apartment is warm. On the kitchen counter two things are waiting: a glass of red wine and a coffee.
“Which one?” she asks.
“Coffee, please.” She hands it to me and then picks up the wine and settles into the armchair by the window with her legs crossed.
The beautiful emerald dress is gone. The makeup is gone.
Somehow, without all the accessories, Zuza seems more lethal.
“Or maybe a cigarette? Given what I was listening to tonight, you might need one.”
I sit on the couch and wrap my hands around the coffee cup. “You’re imagining things.”
“Am I?” Her eyebrows rise and her lips curl up even as she takes a sip of wine.
“I was playing a role. Getting close to him and trying to find out what’s going on.”
“You’re his favorite person,” she says, dragging out the word favorite.
“That was—”
“You told his date that you go way back.”
“I was trying to get rid of him.”
“You practically offered to jump his bones, and from the silence I heard after that and your swift change of topic, I can only guess that he would be up for it and you chickened out.”
I drink my coffee while Zuza unfolds herself from the armchair and leans forward, elbows on her knees.
“You know him better than you led me to believe. Significantly better. And I think,” she pauses, choosing her words carefully, “that the reason we’re sitting in this apartment right now instead of having completed the job is not because you think there’s something suspicious about the contract. ” Another pause. “Or not only that.”
I say nothing.
“I think it’s time to put all the cards on the table, Silas.”
The apartment is quiet. Outside, a tram moves along the street below, its light sweeping briefly across the ceiling.
I set the coffee cup down on the table in front of me and lean back against the couch cushions.
“His name is Vaughn Reeves. He’s my best friend’s father.”
Zuza doesn’t give me an ounce of a reaction.
“I’ve known him for thirteen years,” I say. “And I have been—” I swallow hard. “I’ve been in love with him for most of them.”
“Okay,” she says, as if she’s recalibrating everything she knows about the situation. “Okay. So, when you said we can’t kill him …”
I throw one of her fancy cushions at her, not caring if it makes her spill the red wine all over her cream top.
“He’s a good man, Zuza. The contract makes no sense. Who’d want him dead? And why?”
“What do we do now?”
“We can’t go to Draven.”
Zuza tilts her head. “Why not?”
“Because if he did his due diligence and he still put Vaughn on the list, then something is wrong with his process, which means he’s compromised.”
“Or he’s been fed bad intel.” She stares ahead before her eyes meet mine. “Which means someone went to considerable lengths to make that happen.”
“Which makes them more dangerous than a straightforward contract. Someone built a case against Vaughn.” Too restless to keep sitting, I stand up and walk around the couch to pace the area between Zuza’s sitting room and open-plan kitchen.
“They constructed something convincing enough to pass Draven’s process.
That takes resources and connections. That takes someone who really wants him gone. ”
My hair is a mess, and my bow tie has been hanging loose around my neck for hours.
The thought that someone wants Vaughn dead this badly makes me feel sick and helpless.
I’m the guy who ends people, not the guy who saves them.
But now Vaughn is on the wrong side of a kill list and I need to do something, because if I don’t, then whoever went to Draven will go elsewhere.
While my work comes with checks and balances, there are a lot of mercenaries out there who don’t care about the why as long as the money shows in their bank account.
“We investigate ourselves,” Zuza says, pulling me out of my head.
“We have to. Just us, Zee.”
She nods. “But we need time to do it properly. Right now, Draven is waiting for confirmation the job is done. If we go dark, he’ll just send someone else.”
The words splash over me like a bucket of cold water, making me shiver even in Zuza’s warm apartment.
I don’t like that I left Vaughn at the hotel.
He’s alone there right now, in a city where at least two people arrived tonight with the intention of killing him.
I don’t like that he doesn’t know any of this.
That someone out there with the right kinds of resources and connections decided he needs to disappear.
“He’s alone,” I say.
“I know, which is why we need to move quickly, but for now he’s safe. No one else but us has the contract.”
“That we know of.” The words come out of my mouth before I can process them. “Fuck. What if the client has hired multiple—”
She stands up and crosses the room to face me.
“Stop spiraling and come back to me. No one is stupid enough to do that. It attracts too much attention, especially when most contractors out there are as subtle as an angry wasps’ nest. Let’s buy time with Draven, start our own investigation, and figure out who’s behind this. ”
I nod.
She grabs her phone from the kitchen counter and connects the call, putting it on speaker.
It rings twice before Draven’s voice fills the apartment, measured and cool. “It’s late. You better have good news.”
“We have a situation,” she says.
“Define situation.”
“The job isn’t done,” I say.
Silence, and then, “Silas.” Something has shifted in his tone. “Is this you rebelling? Making a point? Trying to give me gray hairs? You agreed to one more job. This is it.”
“It’s not that,” I say. “We were unable to complete the assignment tonight because the target wasn’t alone.”
“Explain.”
“He had dinner with someone,” Zuza says, “They were together for most of the evening in public. Then returned together to the hotel. The person went up with him.”
This isn’t entirely true, but hopefully Draven will buy it. He doesn’t like unnecessary casualties.
Another pause. When Draven speaks again, the edge in his voice has receded slightly. “The location isn’t ideal.”
“Exactly,” I say. “The Bristol is next door to the presidential palace. If we terminate a mark with an uninvolved civilian present and something goes wrong, we’re not just facing exposure, we’re inviting an international incident. You know what that kind of attention costs.”
“You have two days,” he says after a pause so long I swear I age ten years.
“The mark is leaving the country,” I say immediately. “He flies out tomorrow. Two days isn’t workable.”
“Then follow him.”
“Draven,” I keep my voice as even as I can muster.
“We received almost nothing on this target. No name, no background, no explanation of why he was flagged. We had a photo and location. That’s it.
You don’t usually operate like that. You know you don’t.
And if we’re going to complete this job cleanly, in a new location, we need time to do our own research. ”
A rustling noise on the other side of the phone suggests Draven put his hand over the receiver, and the muted voices tell us he’s not alone. Zuza narrows her brows as she looks at me.
“Two weeks,” Draven says. “You have two weeks. After that, I reassign.”
“Two weeks,” I confirm.
“And Silas.” His voice sharpens on my name. “When this is done, we talk. As agreed. So make it good and quick.”
“Got it.”
He’s gone.
Zuza makes sure the call is disconnected before turning to me.
“You have two weeks. That should be enough to find something if there’s anything to find.
” She goes to the coffee table and grabs the empty wine glass and coffee cup.
“I’ll start pulling threads first thing tomorrow.
Financial records, research publications, anyone with a personal grievance.
If someone built a case against your man, there’ll be evidence. We start there.”
“He’s not my man.”
“You want him to be. Is that why you’re quitting?”
I let out a huff. “What I want is irrelevant. We can’t be together.”
“Why not?”
“We just can’t.” Because Rowan would have my balls in a vice, that’s why. “Let’s just focus on keeping him alive.”
“You know what you have to do,” she says, and it’s one of the few times I see the kind of emotion in her eyes that makes her more than a work partner. She’s a friend too.
“Yeah, I know. I have to follow him home.”