Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
I lean both elbows on the counter and attempt my best passive aggressive glare. It doesn’t help that the brooch on my chest keeps winking at the clerk under the dim, flickering lights.
“You’re telling me—” I repeat, slowly, as if that might change the trajectory of this evening.
“—that this place only has one room left.” For added effect, I wave an arm around at the suspicious water stains littering the coffered ceiling and the vending machine that has more cobwebs than snacks.
“And that room just so happens to be a single bed,” I hiss.
The clerk glances at Graham, like he’ll help, which only makes my blood boil. “Look, lady, there’s a hunt and fish expo in Denver this weekend. It’s not my fault y’all didn’t plan right.”
My fist balls at my side beneath the counter. I furtively look up at the security camera in the corner. The only one in this entire “lobby”. I’m supposed to stay in character as Manon Baudelaire until we’re able to leave the country, but that doesn’t mean I can’t color outside the lines a bit and?—
“You’re right.” My brows pull together in a glower, now directed at Graham’s smiling profile. “So sorry for the inconvenience… Tim,” he continues, reading the clerk’s nametag that’s smudged with a mystery substance.
Tim nods solemnly, as if we’ve interrupted something important, something other than his nightly online poker game blinking against the glass of the mini fridge door behind him. He rests both hands on his pot belly and says, “Apology accepted.”
Every exhausted nerve in my body wants to jump over the counter.
“If you’d be so kind as to give us that room key, we’ll be on our way and out of your hair,” Graham replies smoothly.
I stare pointedly at Tim’s shining bald head.
The clerk rolls his squeaking chair over to the back wall, plucks the remaining room key from its hook, and deposits it in the slot beneath the window.
“Room 125—right around the corner, straight down, then hang another right.” Tim eyes me as I snatch the keys off the counter.
“Might want to keep a handle on her, okay?”
I call on every minute of my training to avoid showing him a new and inventive way to use keys.
Graham steers me outside, where I pick up the pace until I’m far away from his hand on my back.
Inside, the room is about as bleak as I imagined—dark carpeting to hide countless sins, paper-thin drywall that smells like bleach, and faded bedding that makes my skin crawl.
Partly because I doubt it’s ever been washed.
And partly because, well, there’s only one bed.
I toss my duffel on the mattress before he can have the chance to stake a claim.
“Looks like you’re taking the floor,” I say, rummaging through my bag for something to sleep in.
Rolling myself up in a tarp would be preferable at this point.
When I find sweats and a sweatshirt, I realize Graham hasn’t stopped watching me.
He crosses his arms. “I can’t sleep on the floor.”
“That’s too bad.”
“My back, you see—I’m old and frail.”
“You’re thirty-two.”
“Quite old, where I’m from.” Graham presses a knee on the bed, like he’s testing the firmness.
“I’ve been to where you’re from.” I smack his knee away. “And if you’re going to keep trying to play me, I think you’ll be disappointed.”
“Oh, I do love a good challenge.”
“That wasn’t a challenge,” I retort, torn between changing into non-woolen clothes and potentially losing my territory.
Graham lifts an eyebrow. “I’m a proper gentleman when I retire to bed with a woman.”
“Good for you, but there’s no universe in which that’s happening.” I plant my feet and return a defiant look. “And you sound like Mary Poppins.”
He opens his mouth and snaps it shut, lifting a finger like he’s deep in thought.
“You know, that may actually be a new one.” Without warning, he sits on the edge of the mattress, making me spring backwards to create distance like a cat who’s touched tin foil.
“Although, I suppose I’m not used to working alongside brainless agents,” he adds under his breath.
“Is insulting me your attempt at distraction? There’s a perfectly acceptable armchair in the corner if you’re too good for the floor.”
Graham shrugs off his tux jacket and drapes it over the duvet. “Do you know how hard my bed was in prison? I’m not too good for anything, Agent… not anymore.”
I can’t help the triumphant smile, even if it vanishes as quickly as it came. He’s been fruitless in coaxing my real name from me. All day.
“You wouldn’t have been in prison if you didn’t break the law.”
He tilts his head at me. “And you don’t?”
I draw my shoulders back, suddenly feeling like the once-solid ground has turned to shifting sand without my permission. “Everything I do is sanctioned,” I reply evenly.
“Sanctioned.” Graham lets out a mirthless laugh. His features morph from the jovial, nonchalant mask I was becoming acquainted with, to an entirely different beast. “I suppose you trust the people who sanction your actions?”
The answer is no, not at all. Trust goes against our very nature.
It’s why the ISA recruits orphans with a downhill trajectory.
Without a safety net or anyone else to fall back on, we have no recourse but to rely on the people rubber-stamping our assignments and signing our paychecks.
The concept of trust pales in the face of survival-based devotion.
We’ll do anything to get the job done, because we have no choice.
Raffaele knows I’ll never walk away. He knows I’ll take as much punishment as he wants to dish out, always coming back for seconds, because this life is the breath in my body.
But I don’t like to think about that for too long.
“Yes, I do,” I reply, the words effortlessly flowing from my lips.
Graham appears less than impressed. He stands, picks up his jacket, and splays it across the floor. “You can have the bed to yourself,” he says flatly.
All previous hints of intrusiveness have vanished, replaced by a stone wall. Good.
Once the room dips into silence marked by the muffled sounds of television from our neighbor, I cross my arms and stare at the popcorn ceiling, internally seething.
Despite what he thinks, my job is to help people and keep the public safe—even if the public doesn’t know I exist. His job is to take what he wants for nobody’s benefit but his own.
We’re not the same. Not even close.
Our paths might be temporarily crossing, but once this assignment is over, he’ll be back at a federal supermax and I’ll be back in Raffaele’s good graces.
I need to keep that in mind if I want to survive.
No feelings, no attachments, no comradery.
One final lashing from the boss before I can return to normalcy.
And if someone ends up dying, I’m going to make sure that it’s not me.
At one in the morning, the door rattles with a knock.
Well, more of an incessant pounding than a knock. I lurch upright, hands already clasped around my pistol as my pulse picks up speed. Slipping off the bed—I had the good sense not to crawl under that duvet—I duckwalk past the window and sidle up beside the door.
Graham’s head appears somewhere in the dark. For one, blissful second between sleep and consciousness, I’d forgotten he existed.
“What’s happening?” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep.
He clearly can’t see the quieting finger held up to my lips. As he kneels beside the bed, it occurs to me that the individual on the other side of the door could be one of his friends. Had I thought to check him for a cell? Mateo told me his phone was confiscated as evidence when Graham was booked.
But that doesn’t mean one of his guard pals didn’t smuggle him a burner.
Braced against the corner next to the vibrating door, I move one of the blinds aside by a centimeter.
The figure on the other side is easily 6’5”.
Burly, with a ham-sized fist that could probably inflict some damage without even breaking his skin.
Strangely enough, he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
I’m about to shove Graham and myself through the bathroom window when the guy finally slumps against the exterior wall.
That’s when I spot the ice bucket hanging from his other hand. He mumbles something, sends the door one last scornful look, and staggers away.
Graham stands and tugs a hand through his hair. It does little to tame the mop. “Wrong room?” he asks.
I stand watch for a few more silent minutes before I advance on him. He steps backward, mildly confused but otherwise unbothered by the gun-wielding woman storming forward. It only sends my hackles higher.
“You—” When his back hits the wall, I press a forearm to his throat and my gun to his stomach. “—what did you do?”
He taps my forearm as if to say, can’t speak if I can’t breathe. “For the life of me,” Graham says when I move my arm to his chest. “I can’t think what you’re referring to.”
“That man.”
Straining around my head, he shrugs at the door. “Looks like he’s gone.”
“And that’s exactly what I’d do, too,” I reply, vitriol dripping from each syllable. “Pretend I have the wrong room and wait for a cleaner opportunity.”
“Am I meant to be impressed?”
My eyes flick to the ceiling, like something there will give me the required patience. “Shut up and tell me what you and that guard were talking about.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
The wicked grin that pulls on his lips has no business existing.
“She escorted you to the parking lot,” I snap.
“Oh, yes—Rhonda—fond memories,” he replies. “Why? Are you jealous?”
I shove away from him and create some distance, pistol still trained on center mass. Graham straightens his wrinkled dress shirt, unbuttoned far too low for anyone’s liking, the mischievous gleam never disappearing from his expression.
“And did Rhonda or any of the other guards happen to supply you with a means of communication? Maybe a burner phone that you neglected to disclose to the ISA?”
No use in playing into his game. That’s all any of this is to him—a game.
Unfortunately for me, I’m trying to decide if one of Graham’s many enemies has caught word of his release.
Or, worse, he’s betrayed me less than twelve hours into our tenuous collaboration.
Either way, it’s my job to keep us alive, and treating life-or-death like a joke doesn’t win him any points in my book.
For someone meant to be an expert at manipulation, he’s not picking up on the rage simmering right beneath my skin.
“No burner phone. The guards were disturbingly straight-laced.” Graham pulls all his pockets inside out. Another smirk, as casual as the last, curls onto his mouth. “Although you’re welcome to do a thorough search, Agent.”
Blinking, my gun tentatively lowers. “I think I hate you.”
“That doesn’t seem very professional.”
“I never claimed to be professional.”
Graham frowns. “See, when you say that, it doesn’t sound nearly as fun as one might think.”
“Grab your jacket,” I say, ignoring him once again. “We’re going to the airport.”
After changing back into my absurd cover outfit, I stuff my duffel with my sweats and tuck my pistol under the skirt’s waistband, covered by the cardigan.
Mateo said I wouldn’t need a weapon. That it didn’t make any sense for Manon to have a handgun permit, and if anyone looked closer, they’d be suspicious.
But the unspoken fact is that if anyone decides to take a closer look at this heinous situation, they’re already suspicious. Which means the mission is already blown.
A chill blows over my skin, my stomach momentarily bottoming out as the vertiginous sensation I’ve crammed to the corners of my mind overtakes me—like I’m dangling at the end of a live wire, or maybe I am the live wire, and the soles of my feet have come perilously close to a pool of gasoline.
None of this feels right. With over a decade spent living and breathing the ISA, a single degree off-kilter is tantamount to disaster.
I drag in a hissing breath through my teeth, focusing on the task at hand, wrangling my body into submission.
Graham leans against the wall and watches me as I inspect the exterior through the window.
“Are you aware that our flight is in six hours?”
I mimic his usual shrug. “Manon Baudelaire likes to get to the airport early.”
Truthfully, I feel like a sitting duck in this roadside motel held together by Elmer’s glue and black mold. Getting back to Switzerland, back to HQ, back to hot showers and a shred of normalcy is the clearest route back to solid ground.
Once the coast is as clear as I can feasibly guarantee, I drape my duffel over Graham’s shoulders and instruct him to open the door.
My arms cross, looking completely normal to the outside eye, but my right hand is gripping my handgun beneath the cardigan.
We make a beeline to the car. My eyes dart across our surroundings.
Any average woman would be skeptical of a motel parking lot in the middle of the night.
Well—she should be.
As I pull the car away, I spot that same behemoth figure lurking in the shadows of the corridor outside our room. Goosebumps erupt down my spine. I rub my eyes and he’s gone.
“What is it?” Graham asks.
The tires squeal as we merge onto the empty, poorly lit road. An abundance of caution won’t do us any harm in this case.
“Nothing.” Then, because I know I hardly convinced myself, I toss him a glare over my shoulder. “Already exhausted from babysitting you, I guess.”
His gaze lifts almost imperceptibly to the rearview mirror. That’s when I realize he was just as shaken by our early-morning visitor, though he was an expert at hiding it.
So, he wasn’t lying. That time.