Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Even on the ISA’s budget, I’ve never stayed anywhere similar. Depending on the assignment, we’re usually holed up in an impersonal, blur-of-faces type luxury chain hotel. What’s even more pressing, though, is the fact that this is decidedly not where the ISA planned for us to stay.
According to the mission brief, we would be staying at Graham’s family estate on the other side of Paris.
The days we were holed up at HQ, a specialized team swept through his ancestral home and installed cameras, sensors, and all manner of security devices on every available window and door.
It was meant to be our safe house of sorts, or rather, an extension of the ISA’s HQ while we attempt to pull off the impossible. Most importantly, a net to catch me.
Every assignment has one—a place to fall back on, a beacon in the storm.
Except when we arrived earlier, we found it wrapped in a giant tent and sealed for fumigation, the plastic emblazoned with a logo reading Plus De Nuisibles. The taxi driver muttered about how rare tenting homes was in Paris. Graham avoided eye contact with me and directed him here, to La Réserve.
So when we step in the lobby, decorated more like the Palace of Versailles or a billionaire’s living room, every nerve in my body is alert as curious eyes turn to us.
I slouch a little and force myself to relax.
Poppy’s duffel, laden with an array of denim and combat boots, is digging into my shoulder as I surreptitiously sidle up beside Graham.
“We’re leaving,” I whisper in his ear and grip his elbow.
A public argument is exactly what I want to avoid. Hopefully he’ll give me some ridiculous line about spending his freedom in luxury and we can move on peacefully.
“Monsieur Baudelaire.” Our attention is averted to a lithe brunette in a pencil skirt. I read her badge instinctively before she closes the distance. Claudette. “We are so pleased to welcome you once again,” she speaks in heavily accented French.
“La Réserve has my heart,” Graham responds in kind.
A merlot-colored smile grows on her lips as he presses a kiss to her knuckles. My pulse rages. He’s been here before, I shout at myself, they know him here!
It’s with great displeasure that I remember Poppy should have no idea what’s being said—she’s never been outside of the States, let alone a French class.
And I’m still latched to his arm, at an intimate-looking distance, which explains the inquisitive tilt of Claudette’s head.
I give her an impressively believable I have no idea what’s happening look. Probably because it’s partly true.
“Ton amour?” she asks Graham, with a tiny nod in my direction.
“My business partner,” he replies in French. “For now.” Then there’s a wink.
I pinch the inside of his bicep and relish his barely hidden flinch before dropping it like he’s radioactive. He clears his throat and continues: “The suite we spoke about is still available, yes?”
After we pass our luggage to a suit-clad bellhop, I drown out Graham and Claudette’s flirting-disguised-as-small-talk and plod up the grandiose, winding staircase whilst silently devising his murder.
It’ll have to remain a fantasy for now—as much as the ISA claims to be in control here, I’m fully at the mercy of Graham’s whims. He knows we can’t use pain to force him into cooperation.
He’d be no good to us dead or maimed, unfortunately, and there’s no believable threat of imprisonment until he helps us. I have no leverage.
I’m primed for a fight when the heavy double doors lock shut behind us.
“This is not what was agreed on,” I hiss, advancing on him as he peruses the suite with latent interest. “There was a carefully formulated plan, thief, and you had no right to screw it up.”
“Plans change.”
“Not when you’re me,” I snap. “And not when you’ve been all-but sprung from prison for the sole purpose of this assignment.”
Graham sighs, disinterested, and walks away.
I watch like a leopard staring down its next meal as he works to prop open the impressive row of black-paned windows.
That’s when I notice the Eiffel Tower, awash in golden afternoon sunlight, peeking up from the trees in the distance.
It occurs to me that—in all my time slinking across Paris over the years—I’ve never stopped to look at it.
Strange.
At the pair of French doors, he swings them open and beckons me out to the balcony. He sits at the bistro table and opens the champagne bottle left in a gleaming ice bucket.
I’m left standing in the suite’s living room, muscles taut, brain seething for conflict.
Upon further inspection, it’s exactly the place I’d imagine Graham staying.
Walls heavily accented with molding, antique furniture, a plush rug underfoot that makes me feel as if I shouldn’t be wearing shoes.
It’s sleek and polished, entirely unlike the gaudy flashes of wealth that someone with new money might prefer.
I stare down at my combat boots dirty with an obscene day of travel—I like this Poppy character, she has comfortable footwear—and decide against removing them. Whoever’s covering the bill can worry about the damages.
The ISA or Graham, I don’t care. I can’t decide who I’m more annoyed with at present.
Swallowing, I reach deep inside and retrieve the indignant rage that had been rapidly subsiding. He’s not getting off this easy.
Graham slides me a flute of champagne the moment I sit across from him on the balcony. I squint at him, then the effervescent, deeply gold liquid, as if he might’ve poisoned it with an incredible slight of hand.
“There are better views, I’ll admit,” he says, draping one leg over the other as he motions to the whole of Paris splayed out before us.
“I don’t care about the view,” I seethe. “You agreed to using your home as our neutral ground, but you’ve successfully given yourself the advantage here. You’re so transparent.”
Graham arches a brow and sips his drink. “Among all the accusations, I’ve never heard that one before.”
“You successfully wiped the ISA’s—my advantage off the board, and now we’re in familiar territory for you. Where’d you make the call? In the bathroom of the train?”
A horrific expression passes over his features: amusement.
“Of course, it all makes sense,” I continue, thinking out loud at this point, feeling egged on. “This place is free of all the surveillance the ISA painstakingly hid in your home in the days leading up to this assignment. You knew that, of course, even if no one told you—you’re not an idiot.”
He placed a palm on his chest. “Do I detect the beginnings of a compliment, Agent?”
I roll my eyes, carelessly tossing back a bit of champagne, and ignore him. “You’ve created the ideal environment for an escape. My question is: when will you do it?”
“Quite presumptuous,” he murmurs.
“You’ll wait for me to get complacent, maybe attempt to charm me—only, I think you’re figuring out that won’t happen, right?
” Graham refuses to betray an ounce of emotion.
“Whatever you’re planning, it’ll involve hanging me out to dry.
You’ve won yourself an ounce of freedom with this maneuver, I’ll grant you, but you’ve also ensured that I won’t let you out of my sight for one second,” I say.
He smiles to himself. The shadow of dark stubble on his jaw almost casts him as a rugged Casanova rather than a spoiled thief. “You make me sound positively Machiavellian."
“Because you’re a criminal,” I reply.
The truckload of simmering resentment I carry like a yoke around my shoulders seeps into every syllable.
He’s only partly responsible, of course, but I’m running on a few hours of sleep, eyes burning from staying awake while he napped whenever he could.
Just another perk of the job. There’s something else there, too.
A gnawing, creeping sensation I can’t quite name.
I laugh mirthlessly and finish my champagne. I’m about to say that I couldn’t care less about his feelings when he continues.
“Unfortunately, Agent, I’m quite fond of my chosen career path.
I know exactly who I am.” He rises, dark hair framed by pastels, lips curling in a pitying smile, and my stomach flips despite my dogged commitment to remaining unbothered.
“And I believe I’m the only one of us who can honestly say that. ”
Graham steps back inside, his champagne flute sitting half-emptied across from me.
Feeling the sharp edge of recklessness, I fill my glass and continue to nurse it as the sky darkens to violet.
The Eiffel Tower flickers on and sparkles for a handful of minutes.
I watch, entranced, arms wrapped around my knees as the chill whispers through my thin black t-shirt.
My eyes reflexively flit back to the open doors, skin prickling like I’m being watched.
Graham’s door is shut. I sink back into my chair, shaking my head.
It’s not what I should be doing.
I should find my burner, call Ximena, and update our location. Instruct her that Graham’s become even more of a flight risk. Wait for further instruction, which will most likely be a command to do a thorough security sweep of the hotel and install the cameras they’ll send by courier.
That sensation—the gnawing at the peripherals of my resident obstinance—comes into focus.
Excitement.
The idea that I’m fully untethered, possibly for the first time since I was fourteen, alights my nerve endings like sparklers. If I’m honest, an embarrassing amount of panic shoots down my spine as well. As if I’m a rebellious teenager and not a fully grown adult.
I hate that it’s part bliss and part anxiety. I hate that, by consuming me so completely, Raffaele has made me terrified to be apart from the ISA.
Graham’s words sit like an anvil on my chest.
In the life of a chameleon, nothing is harder than hanging onto a sense of reality. At my core, I always considered myself—Sloane, that is—to be the strong, independent, fearless type. That’s who I am in the field. Gunfire and fistfights and car chases don’t faze me.
But here, now that the ISA’s momentarily vanished, I realize there’s not much left to behold.
Sloane’s been chipped away while I was busy being other people.
When it’s quiet, and I’m safe, and I’m forced to confront it head on, I recognize I’m more empty husk than human.
Sloane isn’t strong or independent or fearless.
She’s an amalgamation of every identity I’ve internalized since I was a foster kid living in rural Oregon.
Being a spy doesn’t allow for much individuality.
That’s the inconvenient, ever-present truth.
I’ve always accepted it as a necessary evil—but I can no longer tell how much of my complacency is free will, and how much is the knowledge that I have no other option.
I don’t like where my mind wanders when it’s left alone.
I head back inside long after the Eiffel Tower ceases twinkling.
Graham’s bedroom door is shut, and mine—closest to the front door—is wide open. I could feasibly sleep in there and wake if he attempts to flee. But at this juncture, I’d rather not risk it.
I arrange the pillows on the living room couch so I’m propped nearly upright.
I move mechanically, as if I’m on autopilot.
My burner phone, which I dug out of my duffel, stares blankly up at me from my lap.
In the morning, we’ll begin the next leg of our assignment: casing the Louvre and making Graham’s presence known.
I’m naively hopeful that the Consultant will make contact before we have to pull off a near-impossible heist.
And in the morning, I’ll call Ximena and brief her on our whereabouts.
For now, as sleep pulls at my eyelids and drags me under, I’m oddly comforted by the idea of being no one at all.