Chapter 23
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Anyone watching us would think we’re on a romantic date.
Blanket on the floor, seated across from each other by the fire, staring intensely into each other’s eyes, no light in the room beside the flickers dancing across our profiles.
Except I’m staring because he stole my gun and destroyed my phone.
Definitely not how anyone should woo a woman.
“Talk,” I say, “or I’m wrestling you for my gun, and something tells me you won’t stand a chance.”
Old reflexes die hard, what can I say?
Graham’s lips curl. “Tempting.”
“Actually, I change my mind—I’ll start by breaking your fingers.”
“Alright, alright,” he relents, holding his hands up placatingly. “How much do you know about my mother?”
My brows pull together. “Not much—it wasn’t pertinent to the assignment.”
“I should have known.”
“Which finger should I start with?” I snap. I’m done with the riddles.
“My, my—patience is a virtue, Agent,” he replies. “Sophie Baudelaire was a complicated woman, but the best one I ever knew, even if it wasn’t very long. She was strong, and loyal, and smarter than my whole family combined. And my father, he was… a different man in the beginning.”
“Different, how?”
Graham’s eyes slip to the fire. “Gentle.”
“And what changed?” I ask, not totally sure what this has to do with everything, yet my curiosity has been thoroughly piqued.
“She was killed when I was a child.” He pauses to drag both hands down his face. “Many of the stories I heard about her came from Grandad—he taught me everything there was to know about his daughter. Until he died, he was like a father to me.”
I press my shoulder against the hearth’s stone platform and decide not to interrupt for the rest of his story. Even if I have no idea where this is going, previous experience tells me we’ll arrive somewhere that makes sense.
Graham gives me a sad smile. “My mother and my grandad were estranged for most of her adult life. Then she met my father, settled down, had a family… and for a while, it was perfect. I was too young to remember much of who my father was before, but I think Manon remembers it all, and I think that’s why she was always more rebellious than me—the transformation must have been unbearable.
Much of her childhood was spent with my mother, as well.
The two of them… they were inseparable.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and backs up until he’s leaned on the platform as well.
“I believe I’m getting off topic, my apologies. ”
There’s a charged silence while I watch him collect himself, and my heart beats so heavily that I worry he can hear it. Graham is rarely, if ever, discomposed. The image almost makes me squirm in anticipation.
“My Grandad was estranged from my mother because of her chosen occupation,” he begins again. “He didn’t agree with the things she had to do and the person she had to make herself into. She… Sloane, there’s no right way to say this—she worked for the ISA.”
The words fall on my ears warped for a moment, like he’s speaking from a fish tank, before clearing.
Dragging in a long breath, I focus on sounding as unfazed as possible. “I fail to see how that affects me, or why that has anything to do with you destroying my personal property.”
“She retired when she married my father. For years, they were happy, and Grandad said she truly felt at peace until that final year of her life, when she became consumed by—” Graham stops himself, visibly backtracking. “Are you privy to the inner workings of the ISA? Hirings, firings, all that?”
Something acrid laps at the back of my mouth. Bitterness or jealousy, I can’t tell, but either would be ridiculous to feel over a dead woman.
“I hate to break it to you, but if your mother had a home to go back to, she was not an ISA agent,” I reply.
“That wasn’t always the case.”
“Please,” I groan, pressing my palms against my eyes. “Please just get to the point.”
Was even allowing this conversation a mistake? I’m beginning to forget why I didn’t disarm him and steal the car out front.
“When she first began as an agent, the hiring and training was run much like any other agency across the world. Then Raffaele Castillo took charge after she retired and turned the ISA inside out.” Graham moves closer.
I don’t move away, reluctantly intrigued.
“Many agents left after her—none of them could, in good conscience, co-sign the plans he had for the ISA’s future. ”
I swallow. “Plans like what?”
“Exclusively recruiting orphans, for one,” Graham says with a sad smile, “and taking them away from their home countries, away from society, to be trained in accordance with his policies.”
He shouldn’t know that, my mind screams, how does he know that?
“Let alone starting at such a young age,” he adds quietly.
The reaction he gave, back at that cafe in Paris when I’d let it slip that I began at fourteen, suddenly begins to fit comfortably in my memories.
Graham slips his hand toward mine, warm and equally calloused, but I rip it away.
I feel exposed and vulnerable—an easy target. The last thing I need is sympathy.
“So… so what?” I whisper. Nausea grips my stomach.
“Several years go by,” he continues, “and then every former ISA agent begins dropping like flies. One by one—suicide, car accident, young men and women dying by heart attacks. My mother had been acting strange before her death, so we initially suspected poor health. That is until?—”
“I get it,” I cut him off, voice thin. “You don’t need to spell it out for me.”
I can’t hear anymore, at least not right now, not until I can put out the wildfire raging through my thoughts. Goosebumps erupt across my skin. My head suddenly feels like it’s been filled with lead, and I won’t be able to remain upright much longer.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I snap.
Only minutes ago, I was so eager to finally hear the truth.
To overturn the rock and dig my fingernails in the soil, turning to him with a mocking finger when nothing was revealed.
No worms or spiders or creeping secrets hiding in the shadows.
Perhaps I’d turn that finger on myself, as well, and finally quiet the incessant cry that I’m missing something.
Several quiet heartbeats pass.
“And you believe me?” he asks.
Do I? I shouldn’t.
Graham Baudelaire is a criminal and notorious manipulator—or so his file says. A file that could be filled with fiction, and I’d be none the wiser.
Every cell in my body has been trained to march forward like a good soldier and press the trigger without flinching. Question everything, unless it’s from the ISA. Everyone’s a liar—but not us, never us.
In the game of espionage, the rules are made by the people in charge.
But what happens if the person in charge can’t be trusted?
There are no checks and balances. We’re guided by the highest bidder, the government with the deepest pockets, the nameless entity with the most to lose.
I’ve beaten Graham over the head with my sense of morality and justice, convinced all along that I’m superior simply because my actions are sanctioned and therefore honorable. I’ve been senselessly blinded by resentment for my childhood and the type of people who caused it.
Here, at a cabin on the remote coast of France, I have nowhere to look but at the facts.
Nowhere to run anymore and everything to run from.
It’s not just Noah’s blood on my hands—it’s every innocent person I’ve killed in the misdirected name of rectitude, every time I’ve played judge, jury, and executioner.
How many? The question swirls through my thoughts and punctures wheezing holes in my lungs. A scream that’s haunted my memories and my dreams pierces through the noise, settling in my stomach like acid. How many?
I’ve occasionally thought, in the back of my mind, that the ISA could slap any crime on a target and I’d accept it without investigation.
But I heedlessly trusted the agency that pulled me from the clutches of poverty and provided clothes and food and a roof over my head. Trust. It was right there all along. Raffaele told us from the start not to put our faith in anyone—so why did we all decide he was the exception?
If they keep us moving, keep us dodging bullets and focused on survival, we don’t have time to consider anything else. We’re not machinery, we’re the walking dead. Festering, single-minded, focused entirely on our next meal. Willing to break ourselves to get it.
The quiet isn’t a salve. It’s not a comfort, either—it’s rubbing alcohol poured into my gaping, infected wounds, snapping me from my trance.
I stand and run before my brain catches up with my body.
Fumbling through the dark cottage, I make it to the bathroom and wrench the toilet lid open before the entire contents of my stomach spill out.
My knees hit the floor with enough force to make me wince.
I grip the edges of the bowl, heaving, silently glad there was barely anything in there to start.
I feel Graham’s presence beside me right as my hair is swept back and held away from the toilet.
When I’m finished, I flush it and fall against the vanity. He doesn’t say anything. My chest swells erratically, slowing as I wipe my mouth and blink my vision clear.
“I’m sorry,” he says, once the silence is so deep that it begins to hurt.
My head shakes and falls into my hands. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” I groan.
“I feel I’ve just stolen something from you.” He places a hand on my knee. When I look up, it’s gone. Part of me wonders if it was ever there. “And for the first time, I stole something I didn’t want to,” he adds.
Leave it to Graham to find a way to joke even while he’s crammed in a bathroom reeking of vomit.
“There wasn’t… I couldn’t find any other way to explain myself,” Graham continues, “other than to get straight to the point and rip the plaster off, so-to-speak.”
My head tips back against the wall. “That’s why you destroyed my phone—because the ISA, and Raffaele, can’t be trusted.”
“I—”
“No,” I cut him off. “I believe you—it’s been in front of me all along. It took way too much time, but the wool’s finally fallen from my eyes.”
A humorless laugh scrapes up my burning throat in the silence.
All the other teams I never saw—Alpha, Beta, Gamma—their wings at HQ are empty, aren’t they?
A veritable ghost town. I’ve never seen anyone be fired or demoted because they haven’t been.
Those who’ve tried to quit have been killed.
Which team was Graham’s mother a part of?
Another wave of nausea hits me like I’ve freefallen forty-five meters into the ocean. It’s concrete at that height.
I wrench the toilet seat open and my stomach squeezes out the remains. Once, twice, then a few dry heaves for good measure. Graham hasn’t moved when I flush it and fall back against the vanity again. I stare at a crack in the tile for minutes, or maybe hours, before I speak again.
“You must’ve thought I was such an idiot, lecturing you about morals and ethics while I was completely clueless.” I drag my eyes to his. “I’m not sure how you didn’t lose it on me.”
“And yet you managed to do it in such an enchanting way,” he jokes.
“Graham, I don’t?—”
“I know.”
I’m not sure if he does know.
I don’t know what to do, I was about to say, the words tangled on my tongue. It’s not possible for him to be able to read me so well when I’ve been sealed shut for over a decade.
Yet he reaches for my hand, and I let him pull me back to my feet.
I could swear his lips press against my knuckles as he leads me through the dark cottage and up the stairs, but my skull feels like it’s in a vise-grip and my stomach threatens to revolt again if I stand much longer.
I wouldn’t blame myself for hallucinating—my train of thought is off the rails and hurtling at a breakneck pace. I couldn’t process anything if I tried.
The room upstairs is the only bedroom in the house and it has the best vantage point. I’d already set up an armchair by the window to stand guard. When I shuffle toward it, Graham clamps onto my shoulders and steers me toward the bed.
“I have to keep watch,” I protest. “Now more than ever. Klaus’s men?—”
“You can barely keep your eyes open.” He folds the duvet aside and practically pushes me onto the bed. “We may have differing skillsets, but I’m perfectly capable of staring out a window.”
My limbs melt into the mattress upon impact. I sink backwards, sending him a glare the whole way.
“You interrupt me too much,” I mumble as he pulls the duvet over my legs.
Graham’s mouth lifts into a smile. He grabs my gun from his waistband and slips it under my pillow, right where it belongs. “This is the strangest way I’ve ever tucked someone into bed.”
“Do you frequently tuck people into bed?”
He moves toward the armchair and collapses into it, the floor groaning under his weight. “Some might say it’s a rather underappreciated skill.”
“Well, I appreciate it,” I sigh and turn onto my side.
Graham’s eyes, black in the dim bedroom, flick to mine.
The sliver of moonlight that slips through the curtains cuts sharp angles across his cheekbones and jaw.
That same lock of hair hangs over his forehead, begging to be pushed back.
I kick off the duvet, the room sweltering in the span of seconds, and flip around to face the wall.
A low chuckle brings another wave of heat across my cheeks.