Chapter 23
SYLVIE
HIS FOOTSTEPS COME slow and ominous. I can feel them against the concrete. Thud, thud, thud. Even, heavy strides, boot after boot on wet concrete, taking his time.
The way an executioner walks.
I’m tempted to turn around and look into his eyes but I’m not ready to face my fate.
I sit on the edge of this dock with my legs hanging over the black water and I count down to the collision in tandem with his footsteps. Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen…
My rib aches miserably when I breathe. I could shift my weight.
Take the pressure off, let it settle. I don’t.
I sit up straight so the broken ends grate against each other and I pull the air in deep and hold it there, and it’s a hot white bar driven through my chest, and I want it. I want every ounce of it.
Let it hurt. Let all of it hurt. There’s nothing broken in me tonight that shouldn’t be.
Eleven steps, ten steps, nine steps…
I don’t even turn around when I feel the heat of a body two feet away from me.
Three, two, one…
Then nothing. Just the river not moving and the work lights humming behind us and Callen standing at my back, breathing, not saying anything at all.
That’s when the barrel touches the base of my skull.
Cold. Smaller than I expected. It settles into the notch where my spine meets my head and rests there, steady as a hand.
I still don’t turn around.
“Are you scared?” he asks. His voice is unrecognizable. Flat and sanded down to nothing but putrid hate. “Of my reaction to all this?”
“Terrified,” I admit.
The hammer comes back with a click that goes through my whole body.
“Good,” he growls out. “You should be.”
The first tear surprises me.
It comes down my left cheek and finds the place where the concrete rubbed against my face. It burns. Salt in the scrape. Such a small pain, next to everything else, but it’s the one that I focus on. The sting.
“Do it, if you want to,” I say. I keep my eyes fixed on the water. “But let me tell you the truth first.” My voice cracks all the way through. “All of it.”
The barrel stays where it is. Somewhere behind me a van door slams, and an engine starts. But they’re idling. Belai is still yards away. Alive. At least that part is true.
Finally, Callen exhales.
It’s an enormous sound, all of it at once, his whole chest behind it, and the pressure leaves the back of my head.
He sits down beside me, dropping onto the concrete with a grunt before he swings his legs out over the water. He’s so much taller than me that the toe of his boot skims the surface and sends a ring out into the dark.
He doesn’t look at me as he holds the gun out and ejects the magazine.
He pulls the top of the pistol back and lets it snap.
The last round jumps out and hits the concrete and rolls.
He makes no move to retrieve it. He does all of it silently, with the deadness of a man doing dishes after a long day of work.
Then, he throws the whole thing in the river.
The splash is loud. Obscene. It goes out into the middle of the channel and the Anacostia takes it.
“Knowing what I am, was that smart?”
I meant it to be light. But it comes out like the heaviest thing he’s ever carried.
“No. But I don’t want to risk temptation. I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
I finally look at him. His profile is all strong jaw, perfectly symmetrical nose bridge, dark, handsome eyes tucked behind thick lashes.
I’m savoring what I know is one of my final looks.
“You were afraid?”
He watches his own boot make rings. “Yeah.” His jaw clenches. “Of how much I cared about you.” The rings spread out and disappear into the darkness. “But that’s gone now.”
My ailments are nothing. Nothing compared to the pain of that sentence.
Something in my chest screams in agony, and it has nothing to do with a broken rib or open wound.
It’s a constriction. My heart pulling in on itself, closing up, going small and hard and tight.
I’m sitting here in the dark beside the only good thing that ever happened to me, and I realize something.
A heart can go instantly numb the moment it’s told it has no more reason to keep beating.
“Admiral Salisbrie found me upstate,” I explain.
Callen doesn’t even flinch.
“It came in as an anonymous job. Steal a car, a very specific fancy car, and I did it. It cost me more than I can convey. And it was only the audition.” I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and it comes away pink.
I don’t even know where I’m still bleeding.
“There are more details about that night. I’ll give you every single one.
I’ll sit here until the sun comes up and give you all of it if you want—”
“I don’t.”
“Callen,” I whimper.
“I don’t want the details.” His voice doesn’t rise. “Just tell me what I need to know.”
I close my lids tight, the tears squeezing free.
“It was a simple job.” My hands are shaking in my lap. “She wanted a few witnesses silenced. Loose ends from something bad she did in a past life. She said the last one who could speak to it was a man in D.C., and I was supposed to get close to him, and use him to find the others.”
The river.
The lights.
The pain.
I try to focus on anything other than the ugly truth I have to say out loud.
“The mission was to destroy the evidence. Bury you all.”
I break into a frenzy of despair. There’s no other word for it. A sound comes up out of me that I’ve never made. I fold forward over my own knees causing my broken rib to poke something else excruciating in my chest as I sob into my hands. My rib screams. I sob harder.
It’s out now. No going back.
All this time. Every pleasant hour of it, every kiss, every cuddle, every warm morning in a car with my feet on his dash, and I have finally ruined it all with the truth.
He sits still and does not touch me and does not speak. I fantasize about keeling over into the river. Letting it take me away from all my consequences. I should’ve died in that river an hour ago. It would have been the kinder fate.
“Is the pain bad?” he grunts out.
I lift my head.
“Excruciating.”
He nods, once.
“But I’m not talking about my body,” I add.
His boot stops moving.
“It’s my heart, Callen.”
“Sylvie…”
“I know—”
“Don’t.” His hands are flat on his thighs until he balls them up so tight his knuckles turn white.
“There’s no coming back from this.” He finally turns his head, our gazes locked.
And I hate the way he’s looking at me because it’s the most sorrowful thing I’ve ever seen.
Like he’s already mourning me. “Trust is everything to me. It’s the only thing I have. Loyalty is the only language I speak.”
His eyes are red and dry.
“You and I are nothing.” He says it evenly. “We were always nothing.”
I sniffle. It’s a small, disgusting, undignified sound. “You said you wanted the parts you need to know.”
He laughs.
God, it’s an awful laugh.
“How much more could there be?” His hand comes up and drops. “Hm? What’s left? Are you digging up my brothers’ graves now? You going to rob them too, with those sticky little fingers?”
I take it. I take it all on the edge of that dock with my leg leaking into the river. I owe him this. Every verbal swing that lands like a punch to my wounded heart…he’s owed that much at least.
“No, not that.”
I reach for his hand, but he jerks it away, carving our boundaries into stone.
“You need to know it was real,” I force out between soft heaves. “Every touch.” My throat is closing and I push through it. “Every word. Every soft moment between us… It changed me. I promise it changed me, Callen.”
He isn’t looking at me now.
“I had nothing left when I took the job. I didn’t know my sister was alive in this world. I had nothing left to live for, so I found meaningless things to kill for. And I want to regret it. Parts of it, I do. Deeply. But not the parts that brought me to you—”
My voice goes out.
I wait a few moments until I get it back.
“You salvaged something in me I didn’t know was still there to salvage.”
The lights hum. The trees rustle. I give him space to speak, but he doesn’t, so I continue to fill the silent night with hopeless confessions.
“I know it doesn’t mean anything now…” I say the next part to the side of his face because he won’t look at me anymore.
“But it was real. I love you. That’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.
I love you, and I know you won’t say it back, but I’m saying it because I know… this’ll be the last time I get to.”
The seconds go by.
I wait.
God forgive me, I wait. Hope pulsing in me. Every cell in me strains to hear a man’s silence, wanting something out of it. Wanting anything.
Desperately wanting to be forgiven. Knowing it isn’t coming.
I knew it before I opened my mouth. I’ve known it since I dialed a number on a dying man’s phone. I want it anyway.
“Did you?” I can barely get it out. “Did you ever love me back?”
His shoulders come up as he exhales through his nose.
“Love who, Sylvie?”
He looks at me again, this time searching for something behind my eyes. He says they’re murky when I lie, so they must be gleaming like crystals tonight.
“Are you asking if I ever loved the person you invented?” His eyes go all over my face, slow, like he’s memorizing it. “Or the thing you actually are?”
I break apart into a fit of sobs I’m trying to control. “I’m sorry.” It’s the only thing left in me. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”
He rises to his feet, in pieces, an old man’s movement. The air around us goes frigid. He hovers over me with the work lights behind him so I can’t see his face at all.
“Thank you for saving Belai,” Callen says.
I look up into the fury in his eyes.
“And fuck you for putting him in harm’s way.”
I’m heaving now. I can’t get air past the rib. “Callen, please.”
“Vesper wanted me to ask you to stay.”
Everything stops, everything smears together—truth and lies, laughter and despair. I hold his gaze praying there’s something of value left in the mixture.
His voice stays steady, devoid of any emotion, unwilling to give anything more away. “She said the only way you’d stay is if I found a way to forgive you.”
Something enormous and stupid and awful opens up in my chest. Hope.
I hate it. I hate that it’s still in me, in a body this ruined. It comes up out of the ground and takes hold of me, and it hurts more than everything else combined. Please, please. Don’t leave me like this.
“And?” I whisper.
Callen looks at me for a long time. There’s something in his face. I can see it. I can see him standing on the edge of it. It seems like we’re so close…but then he looks down at his boots.
“You should see a doctor,” he says. “Before you go.”
He walks away.
His boots hit the wet concrete in measured thuds. He leaves the same way he came—slow and even and heavy. I watch him go up that dock past the bollard, past the work lights, past the dark stain where Belai crawled twenty feet toward a fence. He does not look back at me.
Not even once.
The absence of him suffocates me, renders my senses useless. I’m almost in disbelief that this played out exactly the way I was terrified it would.
The man I love, the warmth I need, the very source of anything redeemable in me…
Gone, gone, gone.
I put my face in my hands, still covered in another man’s blood. I press them into my eyes as I keel over onto the concrete, allowing myself to finally fall all the fucking way apart.