Chapter 15
CALLEN
I AM A changed man. According to Eden, at least.
She said it Tuesday in the elevator, entirely sincere, entirely delighted.
Something about how I’m the first one in the building lately and how worried she was and how much better she feels knowing that I’m over the truth bomb Melissa dropped on me and my whole no-show mystery woman to Cricket and Lance’s wedding.
Either I’m a fantastic liar, or Eden’s starting to slip. It’s normally hard to sneak something like this past her. She even patted my arm while saying that early mornings agree with me.
Mornings do not agree with me. What agrees with me is a woman who cannot be seen leaving my apartment. Also getting laid daily, twice a day actually, most definitely agrees with me.
I’ve been a teenage boy again this week, sneaking his girlfriend around behind everyone’s back because if PALADIN were a parent, they wouldn’t approve of me and Sylvie’s dalliance.
Sylvie is staying at Cricket and Lance’s most nights, because Cricket will not let her out of arm’s reach and has said so with a knife in her hand.
Which means on the nights where Sylvie isn’t allowed to return to her tiny hotel room, she has to be back in that guest room before her sister’s alarm goes off.
And Cricket wakes at six like a rooster with a vendetta.
So I get up at four thirty. I drive Sylvie across town in the dark with the heater on and her bare feet up on my dash and her boots in the footwell, and I let her out two streets from her own sister’s house.
I watch her walk away into a sky the color of a bruise.
I have nowhere to be at five in the morning. So I come here.
I’m not particularly excited to get to the office and perform a pointless job. I’m just a man with two hours to kill and no way to explain them, sitting alone in a bunker with a coffee, being praised for his work ethic.
Yesterday I sat across a conference table from Cricket while she briefed us on a shipping manifest, and there were four crescent-shaped scabs healing under my shirt where her little sister had held on while I made her come so hard, her screams earned us a few angry knocks from my downstairs neighbors.
Their vents are probably a symphony of Sylvie’s mewling and moaning and they hate it.
Honestly? Fuck them for their bad taste. It’s music to my ears.
As Cricket droned on, I nodded in the right places.
I even asked a clarifying question about a suspicious customs hold.
She thanked me for the catch. I have looked that girl in the eye every day for two weeks and lied to her with my whole face, and I sleep fine.
What sleep I get, anyway. Oh, come off it.
Cricket would do the same to me. She did, when her and Lance started their fuck-bunny behavior around the office.
I specifically told them to keep their bare asses off the break room counters and yet I know they’ve messed around in there.
I’m indeed acting very un-Callen-like. I should be appalled at myself. Instead I keep catching my reflection in the elevator doors, grinning like a man who got away with something.
Cricket’s been working Vesper all week. “Bring her in. She’s an asset, she’s blood, she’s the best knife any of us has ever seen, and you’re going to let her walk out of D.C.
because your gut’s got indigestion?” Vesper’s answer is the same every time, and it’s nothing.
Her silences have dialects. This one translates roughly to a response like, “not yet,” and “I’m watching,” and even, “don’t fucking push me, Cricket. ”
Which is how Sylvie ends up spending her days down here.
Not employed. Not trusted. Tolerated, orbiting a building full of people who’d put her in the ground if the wind shifted.
The only grace she has is that Big Sister is aggressively protective.
Even Linc caught a fist in the gut for saying the stings on Sylvie’s hands were highly suspicious.
They are—one day in bed I noticed her hand looked like she tried to bottle-feed a swarm of angry wasps.
When I asked, she said it was an unfortunate encounter with fire ants.
I didn’t believe her. But I also didn’t press.
At the moment, on a Friday mid-morning, Sylvie is doing a lap of my office like a health inspector.
Four minutes and counting. She lifts things, turns them over, sets them down two inches from where she found them, which is the most infuriating act a human being can perform on a man who alphabetizes his own filing cabinet.
“Your office is very sad,” she announces.
“What? It’s a functional office.”
“That’s what I said.”
She picks up my letter opener and tests the edge against the pad of her thumb, a reflex I’ve stopped remarking on because I’m afraid of the origin. Cricket’s been through some dark shit to survive her family’s legacy. I have a gnawing feeling Sylvie’s done some dark shit to still be here today.
“Nobody’s ever bled on this,” she remarks with genuine curiosity. “What’s it for?”
“For opening letters, Sylvie.”
She sets it down, blade facing out. Naturally.
Then she stops at the shelf—the one holding two binders, a radio with a dead battery, and then eleven inches of extra space filled with nothing—and tips her head at it.
“How come you don’t have any pictures of your friends or family up?”
I cock a brow. “It’s not really that kind of office. Vesper doesn’t allow smoke breaks either. So she’s breaking all sorts of labor rules.”
Sylvie scoffs heavily. “Vesper. Please. She doesn’t allow personal pictures?”
“I just don’t really have any. Childless and divorced, remember?”
“Do you miss the service?”
Where I was sentenced to death with a faulty chopper, corrupt pilot, and had a front-row seat to a scene straight out of Lone Survivor? “No, baby. I don’t.”
“What about the FBI?”
I shrug. “That wasn’t much of a job. It kind of reminds me of this one.”
She runs her fingertips across the shelves as if she’s looking for dust. Ha. Good luck with that. I won awards in training for how spotless I kept my bunks.
“What kind of job is this?”
“A pseudo-one. One where we pretend we have positions and this office is necessary, and we aren’t just a bunch of killers playing God with spotty intel and loose morals.”
She turns around. “Wow. That’s how you talk about your friends?”
“They are my family. And this isn’t really a job. More of a life.” The chair complains as I lean back into it. I stare at the top secret files in front of me, details from past missions that Vesper asked me to corroborate.
“Is it worth it? Living half a lie all the time? I mean, can you travel with a passport? Can you even be on Tinder?”
“I’m a liaison, Syl. I’m the only one who can travel with a real passport. That’s why I’m an asset to PALADIN. I can march into the White House as if I belong, if I wanted. My hands are clean on paper…and yeah, I’ve been on Tinder before.”
She glares at me. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. Yes, I’m a little scared of Sylvie. Also, yes, it turns me on a little when she gets jealous at the idea of me having a life before her. She’s not using me as a daddy-issues fuck. I think she actually cares about me, which feels really damn good.
“Vesper saved my life, did I tell you that? That’s how we first met. I’d be dead without her.”
She doesn’t ask for follow-up details. She never asks about the parts I don’t hand over. I used to read that as manners. I’ve come to understand it as professional courtesy between two people carrying loads they aren’t ready to set down.
“She hates me,” Sylvie says.
“She doesn’t hate you. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I’m tolerated because my sister’s so protective.” Her tone is light. Nothing about what she’s saying is light. “Vesper looks at me like I’m a stain on her carpet she hasn’t figured out how to get out.”
“Vesper just doesn’t trust you. Yet.” I let her sit with that for a moment, because honestly, Sylvie doesn’t act trustworthy.
That kleptomaniac rooster has come home to roost. Last week, we walked downtown past the shopping district, hand in hand like a real couple, hiding in plain daylight.
We popped into a shop for three minutes so I could use the restroom, and by the time we came out she had a fancy new Chanel clutch tucked under her arm, all nonchalant like she’d owned it for more than sixty seconds.
I went back and paid for it.
“Well pardon me for not bowing to the Queen B like the rest of you. And no, I don’t mean an insect. The ‘B’ is indeed for bitch.”
“She’ll come around, Sylvie. I did.”
She lifts one shoulder and picks the letter opener back up, because her hands cannot be still. “She doesn’t need to. Families aren’t really my thing.”
“Shame,” I say. “A family is the only reason I get out of bed each day. Maybe you should try one.”
The office ticks. Down the hall a door shuts on somebody else’s afternoon. Thirty feet of packed earth over our heads, not a window in the building, and here I sit thinking about how badly I want to hang a photograph on a concrete wall.
She sighs. It bubbles up from somewhere deep, a complete expression of exasperation that she clearly doesn’t want to talk through. No, she has something else on her mind, judging by the way that sexy smile curls the corner of her lips.
“Does your door lock?”
“Sylvie.”
She’s already up. Already crossing the room. The flimsy metal latch on the top right of the door slides home with a small obscene click and she sets her back against the door, hands flat behind her.
“I chose not to wear underwear today. You do with that what you will.”
I don’t move. I have precisely one advantage over this woman, and it is my ability to sit very still while my entire nervous system screams, mayday, mayday.
“Your sister is down the hall,” I point out.
“Yes, right?” She pushes off the door. “Makes the stakes so much higher.”
“That’s not the selling point you think it is.”