Chapter 10 #2
Fuck, fuck, FUCK. There’s no lie big and bold enough to get me out of this.
I need to go before Callen sees me. Maybe he won’t put two and two together, because I’m not ready to make the big decision: betray him, or betray Salisbrie.
I’m still working on that math and haven’t calculated the final answer.
And the part that hits me with a kind of horror is I’m less worried about the mission.
I’m not afraid of Salisbrie, or not getting the rest of my money, or even protecting my own skin.
I’m worried about Callen. About him finding out how much I’ve lied.
About the look on his face if he learns what I am, what I’ve promised to do to him, and…
why. I feel cheap which is perhaps what I’ve been all along. Only now I have to face it.
When did that happen? When did he become the thing I’m scared of losing?
I’m already backing away from Lance, excuse on my lips, my feet both set to the nearest exit, when Lance’s attention lifts past my shoulder toward the room. He raises a hand, beckoning someone over. Shit.
“Cricket,” Lance calls out. “I want you to meet a friend.”
Cricket? Not Callen. I can work with that. I turn around to say hello quickly before fleeing and my ponytail whips a blonde woman across the face. A rude thwap of hair against cheek. Thanks to Callen making me annoyingly more mindful, I apologize.
“Oh, shit, I’m so sorry—”
And then I see her.
And the world stops.
Everything disappears one by one: the gold light, the crowd, the noise, Lance, the bar, the drink Ollie’s making, the panic, my ability to fucking move… All of it drains out of the room until there’s nothing left but a narrow black tunnel with a face at the end of it, and the face is—
No.
No, it isn’t. It can’t be. Impossible.
My mind is doing something to me, some cruel trick, because I’ve spent ten years seeing this face in daydreams and nightmares and it’s never once been real.
I see her at train stations. I see her in the backs of cars.
I saw her in a market in Prague so clearly I followed a stranger four blocks before the woman turned around and had the wrong eyes.
My sister lives in every crowd I’ve ever stood in, and yet she is never, ever actually there.
Until right now.
She’s taken two steps back from me. She’s gone white—bloodless, stricken, one hand rising to her mouth.
Older. Of course she’s older, we both are, it’s been ten years, but it’s her, it’s the bones of her, it’s the face I memorized before I could spell my own name, the face I failed to save, the face I’ve apologized to in the dark of a thousand hotel rooms.
“It can’t be,” she whispers.
And her voice…it’s the same, it’s got the old country still in it, the accent we were both born with and I trained out of my mouth like a removable stain for anonymity. She apparently never did, and hearing it now turns me into a rag doll being unstitched, thread by thread.
I’m about to fall apart.
I can’t speak. I can’t move. I’m sixteen again and there’s a hole in me, and Fiona is screaming at me to run. And I am. I’m running into the dark, and I’m saying goodbye in the breathlessness because I knew surviving would mean never seeing her again.
The last thing I heard my big sister pleading with our enemy was to take her, not me. Gallant, honorable, the poster child of big sisters, sacrificing herself for me.
Her breath is coming shallow and fast. The shock moves through her like it does me…the disbelief, then the terrible dawning, then something breaking open behind her eyes, acceptance arriving in her before it arrives in me. Her face crumples. Tears spill over her slim cheeks, fast, silent.
“Saoirse,” she says. My name. My real one, my first one, the one nobody’s said with love in a decade. “You’re alive.”
And then her arms are around me.
She closes the small space between us and grabs me, yanks me, into her, both arms locking around my back, crushing, desperate, like she’s afraid I’ll dissolve if she loosens her grip.
It’s the arms that finally make it real.
I know these arms, stronger and more muscled than before, but still familiar.
I’ve imagined her face a thousand times, my brain likely embellishing the memories—because who could actually be that beautiful?
—but I couldn’t fictionalize the feel of this hug.
This is a real memory. She holds me like she did from the very day I was born and she became a whole world for a baby sister.
Something in my chest that’s been frozen solid for ten years cracks straight down the middle.
I can’t speak, but she can. She’s whispering into my ear, fast and low, in the old tongue—the Irish we spoke as girls, the language of our mother’s kitchen, the words I haven’t heard out loud since they stripped our kingdom bare.
She’s saying the gods heard her prayers and resurrected her sister.
That I died—that Luca Accardi told her, that he swore it to her face, that I was gone.
That she sees my ghost everywhere, all the time, the same way I see hers.
She’s begging me to tell her this isn’t a dream. That she isn’t going to wake up.
I hold her tighter. I press my face into her shoulder, and the tears finally come.
Hot, fast, and like an acidic relief. Ten years overdue.
Somehow I find the strength to answer back in our native tongue I haven’t spoken in so long.
The words are rusty in my mouth and then not rusty at all, because some things you don’t forget no matter how hard you try to.
I tell her, I’m alive, Fiona. I’m alive, sister. I’m here. It’s not a dream. I’m here.
We stand there in the middle of a swanky lounge, weeping into each other’s necks, and I don’t care who’s watching.
I don’t care about the mission or the cover or the nine hundred lives or Salisbrie or any of it.
My sister is alive. My sister is alive, and her arms are around me, and for one shattering, perfect moment I am nobody’s weapon.
I’m just Saoirse O’Leary, and finally, I’m home.
I blink the tears clear, my chin still hooked over her shoulder, her heartbeat going wild against mine, yet the rapid pounding in my chest still outpaces hers.
I almost slip into relief…and that’s when I see him.
Past Cricket, a few feet back, frozen mid-step.
Callen.
A glass of champagne in each hand, one likely meant for me.
Watching. His face wide open with a shock that’s slowly, horribly, reorganizing itself into understanding because he’s a smart man, one of the smartest I’ve met, and I can see him doing the math even now, even at this distance, even through the noise.
The woman weeping in his pseudo-sister’s arms. The woman he brought here. The stranger from the bar with the too-many lies and the eyes that change color when she’s not telling the truth.
His date.
Cricket’s long-lost sister.
Both.
The champagne trembles in his hands, and over my sister’s shoulder, Callen looks at me like the floor has opened under the entire world.
And he doesn’t look happy.