Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
Ximena’s voice fades into the distance as I break into a jog. My blood’s already rushing in my ears when I secure my duffle bag around my shoulders. I force air through my lungs despite their reluctance to comply. Cement walls feel like they’re pressing in.
I’ve always known when a mission’s destined to go wrong.
Prior to Chelyabinsk, I was at the top of my game.
It was meant to be an easy op before a couple days leave.
Instead, every step of the operation filled me with dread—as if something told me it would all unravel, but I was helpless to stop it.
Deep in my gut, it all felt off. A slew of tiny, ostensibly negligible off-kilter choices that led to worse and worse mistakes.
Inevitable—like a tidal wave hurtling toward shore, its size obscured until escape is futile.
I can’t shake it. I’m so sure it’s going to end in bloodshed and death, and every new piece of intel is another brick laid on this doomed road.
You’d think spies are unfeeling, solid. Like dying wouldn’t affect us at all. But holding onto our humanity—the thing that lets the fear in—keeps us on the straight and narrow. It’s what separates us from the people who take lives without blinking. How could we hunt them if we’re one in the same?
Death is the only thing I’m afraid of.
Footsteps are pounding in time behind my own. I fight my usual reflex and glance over my shoulder, a scowl pulling on my lips.
Graham grins at me. “Where you off to, partner?”
“Not your partner.” I look away and pick up speed, but he runs beside me without even having the decency to breathe heavily. “Go away,” I grunt.
“Shouldn’t we be getting to know each other?”
“No.”
“Raffaele said it was—” He brings a finger to his chin like he’s thinking. “—imperitive to mission success. Even you could see why a partnership would be hard to believe if we so clearly despise each other.”
Of course I’m not going to tell him that this entire thing is stinking of disaster and I can’t be bothered with anything coming out of his mouth right now. That’s something you inform a partner. And he is not my partner.
“You can explain to all your felon buddies that your apprentice hates you.”
“Ah, therein lies the issue—I don’t work with felons.” I spare him a quizzical glimpse as he continues, “None of them have been convicted.”
My eyes flick to the ceiling. “Guess it’s just you that’s the felon now.”
“Huh, I suppose I am.”
“Do you think this is all one big joke?” I hiss.
“At present, I’m dreadfully devoid of amusement.”
I swallow my need to shove him into the wall and toss him a cutting glare instead. “Not only are we meant to be partners, which is—” A dry laugh rumbles from my chest. “—insane in itself. Then we’re meant to rob the Louvre, avoid arrest, discover the Consultant’s identity and put him behind bars.”
Graham lifts a brow. “Aren’t you lot meant to be the best of the best?”
“Oh, it’s not me I’m worried about,” I lie smoothly.
“I’m flattered.”
My eyes flick to the ceiling. “We’re chained together.
If you go down, I go down.” In more ways than one, I think miserably.
“The Consultant is who the worst kinds of people are scared of, and we’ll have to impress him enough to show us his face and convince him we’re…
colleagues. You can guess what happens if we don’t pull it off. ”
I don’t have to guess. There was a whole class on torture at the academy for a reason.
We fall into a brief silence as we run to the Epsilon wing.
The occasional ISA handler or operations analyst passes us, their faces contorting as they take in the agent and the convict out on a jog together.
It must be a sight to see. I want to break his leg and take off into a sprint—because he’s about to find out where my apartment is—but Raffaele would have my head.
He’s handling Mr. Baudelaire with velvet gloves.
The reason is clear, although I’d rather not admit it to myself quite yet.
“Who lives down there?” he asks, nodding to the adjacent hall that leads to the Gamma team’s residences.
“None of your business.”
“It’s only that I haven’t seen anyone come down it.” Graham pauses, no doubt waiting for some thrilling explanation that I have no desire to provide.
In the alternate reality that I cared to wonder why I’ve never seen anyone in Gamma—or Alpha and Beta, for that matter—I’d be moving too fast to stop and think about it. I have priorities, after all, and they don’t include borrowing a cup of sugar from my neighbors.
“If you’d stop for a moment, I’d like to discuss this mission.”
I regard him with a glare as I turn the corridor. “There’s nothing to discuss.”
“Quite the contrary, Agent,” Graham replies, “You see, there’s an issue with the premise of the whole thing. If they’d have asked me?—”
“Except no one asked you.” I stop beside the door that leads to the Epsilon residences, smoothing my hair. “Do you want to know why, Graham?”
His gaze hardens. “Enlighten me.”
“Because you’re a criminal,” I spit, “a soulless cog in a machine that kills for profit, and now you’re dead weight tied to my ankles.
No matter how this whole thing might make you feel, you’re not one of us, and you never will be.
At the end of my assignment, you’ll be back behind bars and I’ll be free to continue doing my job. Got it?”
I don’t wait for his reply, scanning myself through the door and shutting it before he can follow.
It’s an entire day later when I see Graham next.
I’m bent over a table in Operations, studying my soon-to-be new identity.
The disguise team—a tight-knit group of people who probably could’ve made a killing in fashion design or special effects makeup—works for Mateo in the basement level of the compound.
Every inch of the football-field-sized room is utilized: mannequins draped in fabric, sketches of wigs, clothes, and example photos for prosthetics spread over the walls, endless rows of shelving filled with supplies and old disguises.
Despite its size, you can’t escape the pungent smell of burning plastic or the acrid wafts of polyurethane and acetone.
Mateo works at the far end, in a large office made of glass. The distant hum of sewing machines drifts through his open door as he sits on the edge of his desk and drones on about something I can’t be bothered about at the moment.
Minutes ago, I heard the double doors whir open hundreds of yards away—slicing through the chatter of the disguise team—and now I can’t focus on anything else.
“...or should I advise Raffaele that you’re not up for the job?”
My gaze snaps to Mateo. “I’m perfectly capable.”
“So you did hear that.”
“You’re my boss,” I reply mechanically.
“Then what was saying?”
Drawing my shoulders back, I force myself to turn away from the windows as I cross my arms and size him up. “The same thing you always talk about before an assignment,” I lie through my teeth. “Communication, updates, ISA regulations—like I don’t have it all memorized.”
His mouth tilts. “Kat told me to be worried about you. Should I?”
Mental note: murder Kat later. It would have to be quick—no one’s winning in a fight but her.
My muscles relax as I reply, “I passed all my psychological examinations with flying colors.” After every. Single. Mission. “But you’re welcome to administer them again, if you’d like,” I finish with a feline smile.
Lying to an agent isn’t just a skill, it’s an art form. Every twitch, change in octave, and dilation of pupils gets reflexively filed away into what some might naively call gut instinct.
“We both know that those are only a formality,” Mateo says. “The type of people recruited for field work at the ISA are naturally talented enough to manipulate those tests. Not to mention your training at the academy, and the fact that even Kat struggles to distinguish your lies from the truth.”
“I doubt Kat would appreciate you admitting that.”
“You’re probably right, so I’d appreciate your discretion.” He breathes a silent, humorless laugh through his nose. “I know I’m your boss, Sloane, but I also consider us to be friends.”
We are not friends—none of us are, I think while I stare back blankly.
“Where are you going with this?” I begin stacking some papers on the table between us to keep my hands busy.
“What you went through was traumatic—no one would fault you for needing some time.”
A mirthless chuckle bubbles in my throat but dies there. I can think of one person in particular who would find fault if I decided to take a break. Instead of answering, I lean my hip on the table and raise a challenging brow.
“Has my performance since Chelyabinsk been lacking? Last I checked, all my mission reports have your signature of approval at the bottom.”
“Lacking isn’t what I’m referring to,” Mateo replies. “It’s your increasing penchant for coloring outside the lines and pushing the envelope—we can both agree that London was a mess, mission success or not.”
I’m trying not to reveal the anger boiling deep beneath my skin. For too long, I’ve been second-guessed and handled like a loose cannon that needs to be strangled into submission.
As if my career isn’t the only thing I have.
And I can’t help but want to scream that you made me this way. Other people have families, hobbies, pets. My seams are sewn with the blood-soaked thread of a job well done. The more they tug and pull, I worry there’ll be nothing left when I come apart.
Of course, they can take it from me whenever they please. They ripped my beating heart out at eighteen and replaced it with something foreign, a copper-plated organ with an ISA-branded kill switch.
I am not my own. I’ve been slowly forgetting myself since the agency declared me dead at fourteen, since I first took a life, since I held someone I loved as blood gushed from a hole in their stomach.
Each a mile marker—a test to see if I’d come up for air and swim for shore.
The current has been my home for so long, every second of this existence a fight, I’m not sure if I know which way is up.
It’s exactly where they need me: desperate for their approval while every cell in my body wants to push back.
Raffaele doesn’t want a band of do-gooders with a savior complex.
Sentimentality is weakness, he’d say. He wants us, body and soul, clawing our way through whatever he assigns like addicts who’ve replaced their DNA with the mission objective.
It just so happens that we all get to help some other people along the way.
“I miss him, too,” he mutters, and my blood runs cold.
My jaw clamps shut so hard my teeth might turn to dust. Outside hires, I rage internally.
If he was really one of us, he’d know not to bring it up.
He’d know to give me a wide berth until I can properly forget about it.
That’s the only way to function here. And he’s just reopened the wound right before I head out on a mission.
A knock sounds on the glass of Mateo’s open door and I’m ripped from my spiraling thoughts.
“Am I interrupting?” Graham’s voice drawls, and I make a conscious effort not to acknowledge his presence. Still, I use the distraction to suck in a steadying breath and force it all back down.
I hate that he’s been given leave to wander ISA’s HQ like he wasn’t rotting in a federal supermax a week ago. I hate that everyone’s acting as if this is completely okay, and not an insult to everything we stand for.
Mateo pushes off from his desk. “No, not at all. Command sent you?”
“Right, the large fellow with the South African accent.”
“That’ll be Tombe,” he responds. “Take a seat. We’ve been… discussing Sloane’s cover.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rise as Graham sits right beside me. I move to the end of the table and slip into a chair, kicking my feet up, which earns me a glare from Mateo. There’s a silence while he sorts through the papers and spreads them out before us.
Mateo clears his throat. “The most difficult part of this operation will be convincing your former colleagues that you’re working with a partner.”
I snort at the word colleagues.
“Easy,” Graham says. “We’ll tell them we’re in love.” He turns to me with a smirk and an appraising look. “Not quite my type, darling, but we can work on that.”
“Please. You’re going to need to change your tactics if you want a reaction.” I snatch a piece of paper from the table and my fingers begin making rapid folds.
“Dinner at seven, then? I’m sure your calendar is wide-open.” He frowns. “What are you doing with that?”
My eyes meet his. “Fashioning a shank.”
A beat of silence.
“Play nice, children,” Mateo chimes in.
“Maybe our cover is that I broke him out of prison,” I say, turning my eyes to Graham. “Because it’s not like he could do it himself.”
“You wouldn’t have survived a day in there, Agent.”
I set my paper shank aside, which Mateo quickly confiscates, and send Graham two raised eyebrows. “Must’ve been torture—no butlers or caviar. How did you manage?”
“Only with the knowledge that agencies like yours exist.” He smiles, unfazed.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Graham’s eyes darken. “I think you know.”
Mateo claps once, then twice, to get our attention. We turn to him at the same time, my mouth clamped shut as Graham’s growing smirk plays in my peripheral vision. He seems to know exactly what buttons to press, and he’s pressing them every moment he gets. But I can’t let him win.
“Whatever’s happening here is poison for an assignment,” Mateo says, motioning between us.
“Sloane, integrating you into the field at such an accelerated rate is already going to be tricky—you have to win loyalty in a highly exclusive, cutthroat environment where suspicions naturally run high. If you fail to gain trust, you won’t get close to the Consultant, and everything the ISA has done and sacrificed for this mission will amount to nothing. ”
I swallow the rising frustration and nod. “I’m not going to fail.”
“You’re at each other’s throats.” He spreads both hands on the table and leans forward. “I don’t care if you want to kill him. The second your feet land on Italian soil, assume the entire criminal underworld is watching your every move, and you’re Graham’s partner. Understand?”
I sweep my gaze from Mateo to Graham, who’s watching me with great interest. As if I have any choice in what to say, I think. The words fall from my lips like a spellbound compulsion.
“Yes sir.”