Chapter 22
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
I’ve spent an hour securing the cabin—locking shutters and windows, pulling the biggest pieces of furniture in front of the French doors, and setting up the only bedroom upstairs to monitor our surroundings and the main road at the bottom of the hill.
It helps that we don’t need to worry much about the side of the cabin backed up to the cliff, but if Klaus finds our location and sends a hit squad, it’s me and my tiny push knife against the world.
I used to think that wasn’t a bad way to go out.
That started to change after Chelyabinsk. Lately, it feels like everything shifted after Chelyabinsk. If that mission was the catalyst for a run of tumbling dominoes, then this one was the arm that swept the whole row to the ground.
It’s been harder and harder to keep myself from thinking about that awful day in Russia, and the person I lost because of it.
Every mistake I’ve made needles me even more deeply—it simply proves that I haven’t gotten better.
This shadow I’m dragging around, the scar that runs deeper than the one on my forearm, refuses to be ignored. It simply colors everything I do.
Maybe grief and pain look a lot like being tired. Maybe pushing through, tamping it down, learning how to function with it—maybe that’s what’s made me so careless. What if blaming my brain for not falling into line hasn’t gotten me anywhere?
The worst part is, I shouldn’t have even been the one to walk away. Instead, I have blood on my hands, and I’m about to have even more.
My arm shoots out like a kickstand against the wall as the familiar buzzing sounds in my ears like a swarm of angry bees. I press a palm over my racing heart, focus on my breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and rub my knuckles against my chest.
Flashes of crimson. Dripping, pooling, staining my skin.
I groan and slam my forehead into the brick.
His face. Noah’s face.
The name I haven’t spoken aloud in months. I learned the hard way afterwards. I’m not meant to be human, I’m meant to oil my joints and mend my wires and restart my software. Sentimentality is a weakness.
I shake my head, the movement scraping into the rough wall, and drag it all back to the shadowy depths of my mind, despite its kicking and screaming to be acknowledged.
Raffaele was right to advise against emotionalism.
If I can’t keep my wits about me, my miniscule chance of survival will burn up with my sanity.
Noah’s dead. He’s gone, and letting the memory control me won’t bring him back. He’d want me to survive.
A sharp intake of breath whistles against my teeth at the sound of a car door. I part the curtain by less than an inch, pulse slamming now. My eyes frantically scan the dark gardens and the treeline below, finally falling on the driveway.
Josef. He’s finally arrived with our things.
The top of Graham’s head appears in the moonlight, approaching from the cabin. A shuddering laugh escapes my lips.
With my bag back, if a hit squad descends on us, it’ll be me and my 9mm against the world. Admittedly, not that much better. But it does increase our odds.
I jog down the creaking stairs and nearly fly toward the front door.
When I come through the garden, Graham already has my duffel on his shoulder, and he’s shaking Josef’s hand.
The man’s gaze falls on me for a split-second, as disinterested as ever, before he turns, grabs his jacket from the car, and begins walking back down the drive.
My steps on the gravel alert Graham to my presence. “Does he know how long it will take to walk to Paris?” I joke, in a better mood than I have been in days.
That’s what the prospect of soon holding a gun again will do to a girl.
He sends me a half-smile. “Josef will be hailing a cab in the town nearby to meet his family in Prague. This is our car now—stripped of all tracking technology this morning.”
“Was it smart to… car-jack the Consultant?”
“You can’t possibly make him any more angry,” Graham replies, adjusting the large suitcase by his feet. New, packed to the brim, and probably purchased by Graham’s friend, Claudette. Hopefully I can trust her as much as he does.
I eagerly reach for my duffel and begin rifling through its contents. Phone, phone, phone. “To be clear, I haven’t actually done anything to Klaus,” I mutter.
“You exist,” he replies, “and you’re attempting to topple his empire.”
He explained earlier, during the second round of deadly twenty questions, that Klaus had discovered Graham’s arrest record in the states.
It should’ve been temporarily expunged, but the Consultant has his own connections in the U.S.
government. With no records of release, or news of an impossible prison break, the conclusion was obvious.
We were only invited to their estate as a sick form of amusement—a predator playing with their food before going in for the kill, which would’ve been me. A swatting of the pesky fly off Graham’s back.
That’s the story Klaus told him, at least, and I’m not entirely sure if we should immediately believe it.
I know I’m not one for mysteries or puzzles, but I can’t shake the nagging urge to scratch deeper—to continue pulling away the rot, convinced that I’ll find more.
It’s ridiculous, really. I know better than most that a simple explanation is usually all there is. Paranoia is like poison for an agent.
And a criminal wanting to murder me, simply because I exist, isn’t exactly a revelation.
Although, it has made me realize that Graham’s not the one I’m automatically calling into question here. Maybe it’s because he played the double agent with his ruthless brother-in-law and got me out alive. He could’ve thrown me under the bus and gained his freedom.
Instead, Graham chose to save my life. That’s an outcome that flies in the face of all my previous assessments.
“Right, I almost forgot,” I reply absently after too long of a silence, “oil and water.” Letting my duffel fall to the ground so I can rip the top open and search it more thoroughly, I tuck my precious 9mm safely under my waistband with a tiny smile of gratification.
“What are you looking for?”
“My—” I cut myself off and sigh, scrubbing a hand over my face. “We should go inside. Standing out here in the open at night isn’t a good idea.”
Graham laughs quizzically, brows pulled together, but follows me back through the garden and up the steps, lugging our suitcase the whole way.
“We are practically in the middle of nowhere,” he says as I lock the door, slide the bolt into place, and begin pondering which piece of furniture to use as a barricade.
“I’m not sure all of this is entirely necessary,” he adds.
When I turn, he’s motioning to the ransacked living room, almost pitch-black aside from the crackling fireplace. He gathered the wood and assembled the fire earlier, assuming I wasn’t lying about being cold.
Civilians are so naive, I think darkly. I stomp the miniscule spark in my chest with the sole of my boot.
“It’s my job to keep us alive. It’s your job to…” I tilt my head.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I reply, breezing past him into the living room. I throw my duffel upside-down on the last remaining couch and begin picking through the mess.
His voice follows me. “No, it sounded like you knew what you wanted to say.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just not sure how your, er… skills will come in handy right now.” I let out an exasperated groan and pick up the duffel, turning each pocket inside out.
Empty, empty, empty.
Alarm creeps down my bones and wraps around my wrists, discharging down my fingers as they frantically search the crevices and pockets I’d already checked.
I’m fumbling, clumsy, unnaturally frenzied.
My pulse quickens. Josef took my phone. Or maybe Claudette.
It’s not the end of the world—we memorize our handler’s numbers, never store them.
But it means my beacon is gone. Shattered, shot to hell. I’m tumbling in the current now, adrift, no hope of ever spotting the surface. I can’t help the terror that seizes my chest. No matter how pathetic it is.
“For the love of—what are you looking for?” Graham says, cutting through the swarms of bees muffling the sounds of ripping fabric.
“My burner phone!” I snap. One of the pockets is torn off, crumpled in my fist.
Graham places a hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off.
“Sloane,” he says. “Sloane.”
I straighten and turn on him with a glare. “Can’t this wait? What could possibly be so urgent?”
“You’re not going to find your burner phone.”
The words scrape up my spine like a million microscopic daggers. My eyes narrow. “And what, exactly, are you implying?”
“It’s gone,” he responds, something icy shrouding his eyes. “I instructed Josef to destroy it.”
I lift the back of my sweater to find my gun.
Graham picks up the edge of his dress shirt in tandem with my movement, where my 9mm is nestled under the waistband of his dress pants.
Pinpricks dig into the base of my skull.
He must’ve managed to nick it moments earlier with my back turned.
I didn’t feel a thing, and now I feel it all.
The knots twisting in my stomach, the way the air around me has dropped several degrees in temperature.
So much for useless skills, I think, my knuckles moving of their own accord and rubbing at the sore point between my ribs. Why does it feel like I’ve been stabbed?
He raises his palms toward the ceiling in surrender. “I’m not going to use it, I was simply ensuring my own safety.”
“And why would I believe that?” I snap.
“Because I don’t condone senseless violence. You may think me a dirty criminal, but every act I’ve committed is entirely victimless.”
A poisonous laugh drips from my lips. “You work in tandem with people like Klaus. Pardon me if your saintly act is hard to believe.”
“I have never, nor will I ever, work with Klaus.” His jaw ticks and his arms drop to his sides. “I sell works of art to the type of bored rich prats that you accused me of being. What do you do? Enact justice for the highest bidder?”
“I—” My mouth snaps shut. It’s not exactly far from what I’ve been telling him since we met.
“But the definition of your justice fluctuates weekly,” Graham continues, his composure more maddening than his words.
“What will it be next month, I wonder? Or the month after that? You have no idea, because it’s whatever your employer says it is.
You’re the weapon that executes the ISA’s agenda—you’re not the hero here, Sloane, and deep down—you know it. ”
I silently beg my anger to permeate my skin. Pump into my veins and stay awhile. But it recedes like the tide, falling through my fingers even as I fruitlessly grasp, leaving me cold and alone. The final knife in my back destined to fell me.
Open your eyes, the words tumble through my mind. Look closer.
He drags both hands through his hair, a frenzy in his stare that I’ve only seen once before. As if he’s imploring me to listen, to see what he’s seeing, to read between the lines he’s drawing.
The problem is that he’s right. I hate that he’s right.
I’m a tool, calibrated for violence and blind obedience. More machine than human.
Perhaps the small voice pleading with my innate mulishness is merely a product of exhaustion.
I’m tired of running, tired of suppressing everything, tired of having this argument with him when he’s the first person who’s bothered to save me since Noah.
I’m tired of sweeping things under the rug—suspicions, doubts, grief—and expecting them to cease existing.
No one has cared to wonder about me. Sloane Walker, not Sloane the agent.
No one has ever tried to slough off my protective layers and ask where that girl went.
Not until Graham. And even though I believe it might be too late for me, I can no longer ignore his curious inclination to see something in me that’s long gone.
I suck in a sharp breath and force it down. This time, I choose to ignore all my training—my reflexes that scream I’m being manipulated, the muscle memory that jostles for control and colors my vision in crimson.
Maybe pivoting doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’d have to be stupid to ignore the facts in front of my face.
“Tell me,” I reply, quietly at first, my voice steadying when our gazes lock across the room. “I’m ready to hear it, Graham, tell me everything.”