Chapter 24 #2
I put my face in my hands and I laugh, and it’s not entirely a laugh, and he lets me have it.
“Vesper already knows,” Belai says, after a while. “She came here. On the second day, when I could speak again.” He’s watching the ceiling once more. “She sat where you are sitting, and she did not say very much. I told her where it was, and she has gone to get it herself.”
Herself?
That is why Vesper and Cricket left the country in such a hurry. I close my eyes. I am so sick of people keeping secrets from me. Secrets I could’ve handled.
“Where then? Since the secret’s out,” I deadpan.
Belai smiles like a math professor who just stumped his star pupil. “Where no one would look.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the earth. Where Teret used to stand. There is a place where the ground rises. There is nothing there now. There has been nothing there for ten years.” He stops and swallows. “My father is in that ground. And his father. And his father’s father.”
“You went home?”
“I go home, whenever I can.” He turns his head and looks at me. “Our country is called something very different now. But I still call it home. I put the truth down where my people fell. It seemed right that they should keep it.”
I look out the window, a full grin on my face. Clever, clever man.
There’s a parking structure out there and a strip of sky and a helicopter going somewhere over Bethesda. It’s strange: my pulse used to quicken at the sound of a helicopter, but after all these years, it’s quiet. The fear silenced. The guilt set down.
“You’ll want that in the book.” I clear my throat, hard. “That’s an epilogue, right there. That’s the last page.”
“Perhaps.” I hear the smile in it.
We sit here for a bit. The room hums. Somewhere down the hall a cart goes by with a bad wheel.
“Callen.” His voice cuts through the echoes of the world happening right outside the door.
“Yeah.”
“Where is Sylvie?”
Her name goes through me like a nail.
“You don’t have to worry about her.” I keep my tone flat. “She’s gone. She’s not coming back, and if she does, she won’t get within a mile of you. I’ll see to that personally.”
Belai frowns. “Worry about her?”
“She won’t hurt you again.”
“Callen.” He’s genuinely confused. “She did not hurt me.”
“She—”
“She saved my life.”
I stand up. I put my hands on the back of the chair and I lean on it. I have to be on my feet when I talk about Sylvie to calm the nerves, the hurt, the hate. The ache.
“She put you on that dock. She brought the man who did this to you. She stood there and pointed at you and said that’s him.
Then he opened you up in three places and left you on the ground with everything you spent ten years protecting gone off his back.
” My knuckles are white on the chair. “She tried to get us both killed, Belai. Both of us. That was her job.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“So don’t.” I’m shaking. “Don’t do that. Don’t make her into something more than the bad guy in this story.”
“Where is she now?” Belai asks in a tone that suggests I’m acting like a child mid-tantrum.
“I don’t know. Gone.”
It’s true.
She disappeared like a ghost. Her phone is dead, her hotel room was emptied and paid in cash, and Cricket has not slept in a week.
She is a memory now. I made her one when I sent her away.
“Callen, do you know what gave me the courage?”
“What?”
“That night. The aircraft was burning and there was fuel on the ground and I was fifty-nine years old and unarmed, and I did not know if you were a soldier or a devil.” He watches me. “Do you know what made me run toward you and not away?”
“No.”
“I am an excellent judge of character.”
I look at him, brows lifted. He says it with such absolution, even I believe it.
“It’s the best gift I have,” Belai says.
“I look at a man and I know what is at the bottom of him, often before he does. It is not a thought. It is more like a smell.” He folds his hands together, oh so delicately.
“I came down that hill and I looked at a boy with his leg broken in two places, screaming names into the dark, and I knew. I knew you were good. Before you said one word to me.”
I can’t speak.
“And Sylvie…”
“Please do not.”
“She is layered.” Belai’s tone goes even gentler, filled with an affection I haven’t been able to find over the past week. “But there is far more good in her than bad,” he states like it’s a fact about the weather. “I would stake my life on it. I have already staked my life on it.”
I stare at the floor for a long-ass time, unable to come up with a response. I dare not agree with him. But I can’t disagree either.
“If you see her again, tell her thank you. From me.”
I nod.
“If I see her again.” My voice comes out even. “I will.”
I know for a fact that I never will. That she is a thousand miles from here by now and even though she broke us with her truth, I’ll never get to put us back together with mine.
I GET HOME at nine, on the dot.
The building’s quiet. Everyone is resting early before the week begins again.
I put my key in the lock, and I turn it.
There’s no tension.
It just turns. Free and loose, no bolt, no give, nothing for the key to fight against. It spins in my hand like the barrel of a dead lock and the door drifts open two inches on its own weight.
Did I forget to lock this?
I’ve been awake for fifty-two hours. It’s quite possible.
I take one step in. Then another.
I hear the whack before I feel it. Something hard hits me in the back of the head.
Metal. Enormous. There’s a sound like a door slamming in a room a long way off. Then the floor comes up and meets my shoulder and my hip. I’m disoriented, on my side in my own hallway and the world goes fuzzy. The back of my head is growing wet. By the smell, it’s blood.
I can’t see. Something’s in my eye. It’s warm.
I try to get my hands under me, but my arms are useless. All I can do is try to blink the haze away, and when I get a flash of clarity, I can make out one thing.
Boots.
Two boots, enormous, laced tight, six inches from my nose.
Out of the toe of the left one, gleaming, four inches of black steel.