Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kat was already half-hardened when I arrived at the academy, my foster brother in tow, not a penny to our names except for the hopes and dreams of the glamorous life of a spy.
Raffaele spent days selling it to me and Noah: never again having to worry about money, or food, or a roof over our heads.
Transforming into mythical superheroes that help police officers catch the bad men.
I remember that Kat was similar to the other kids I’d met in the foster system.
While Noah and I were the lucky outliers, others—the ones like Kat, who witnessed the darkest parts of humanity before they were old enough to understand—walked around with a strange, far-off look in their eyes.
Present, but at the same time, nowhere at all.
Inaccessible. Like they’d survived so long, that switch would always be on.
Kat never spoke about her life before the academy, but she didn’t need to. I saw it the moment our eyes met for the first time.
She would’ve been two grades above us if it was a regular high school. The future Delta team paid no heed to the newbies in Epsilon. Kat least of all. She fought hard to be seen as one of them despite her age, but it didn’t help that Raffaele treated her like his personal pet project.
He called her his prodigy.
You’d think that would mean she’d get preferential treatment, but no. She had extra training sessions. Additional tutoring. The harshest consequences if she stepped out of line.
Kat wanted to fade into the background. Survive like the rest of us.
An impossible task when Raffaele was determined to break her apart and mold her into his successor.
Needless to say, Kat and I were never that close. We weren’t allowed to be.
So, when she’s sitting beside me at some seedy pub in Calais, grinning like a cat about to swallow the canary and talking about killing me—well, I believe her.
I speak after a painfully long sixty seconds of deliberation. “You’re already off to a terrible start.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m not moving from this spot,” I reply, motioning to the crush around us. “And we both know Raffaele didn’t send you to make a mess.”
Kat tilts her head at me. “How do you know I didn’t slip cyanide into your drink before you finished it?”
“Not your style.”
She observes me for a moment, shrugs, and motions the bartender to approach. “Two whiskeys, top shelf.” When he casts me a skeptical glance, she slaps down a €100 bill and shoos him away.
“I don’t want another drink,” I lie.
“You will.”
I nod my chin to the fuschia streaks in her otherwise raven-black hair. A fake piercing decorates her nose and lip. Enough to disguise her in plain sight without anyone realizing it’s a disguise. “Nice hair. Let me guess—rich kid on a gap year?”
Kat sighs. “It’s awful.” She holds up a lock of pink hair. “Nearly melted off my scalp.” Her nose wrinkles before she motions to my head with her chin. “That color suits you, though.”
I reply with a tight grin.
She must’ve been sent here straight from Budapest, whatever four-month assignment she was on cut short. I may even run into you, she’d said the last time we spoke. That was supposed to be a riddle? Some sort of hint?
I narrowly prevent the scowl from contorting my lips. My eyes dart to the door when she’s distracted by the bartender sliding us our drinks. Still crowded, but the pub’s bound to close eventually. Although a firefight with Kat might be preferable to hand-to-hand combat. We both know who would win.
“Drink,” she says, lifting her own to her lips. “Promise I didn’t poison it.”
I fight every instinct to run, instead taking a sip from the tiny black straw. Anything to extend this demented conversation until I can devise a plan.
Too bad the guy who always has a plan is AWOL.
My best bet is jumping from this stool and sprinting as far as I can, maybe scaling a building. Long legs and the upper body strength for climbing are a couple of the rare advantages I have over her.
You can’t out-maneuver a spy. You can only buy yourself time before someone ends up dead.
“Consider that I might’ve mapped all the escape routes already,” Kat muses out loud.
My jaw clenches. I’m a bee trapped under a jar, and she’s entertained. So much for whatever comradery I thought we might’ve shared.
“If you’re going to do this, you should know I’ll make it as difficult and as bloody as possible,” I grind out.
She lifts an eyebrow. “I’ve missed your stubbornness, Sloane. So has Raffaele, it seems, because he hasn’t shut up about you for the past few days.”
My stomach sours.
“If you were planning to go out with a bang, you’ve been successful,” Kat adds.
I take another swig of my drink, this time from the lip. “I wasn’t planning on going out at all, actually, considering I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Nothing wrong?” She laughs and traces her finger around the rim of her glass. “You’ve shirked your responsibilities and disappeared with Mr. Baudelaire. One can only imagine how you’ve been filling the time.”
So, as it stands, I won’t be able to simply deliver the Consultant and slink off into the shadows. They believe I’ve defected. I’m a traitor, and the punishment is death.
Which isn’t entirely untrue—although I was planning on quitting and vanishing before they could forcibly… retire me. Not that it went swimmingly for all of the agents who tried before. Call it hubris, or perhaps blind hope.
Her voice tightens an almost imperceptible degree as she asks, “Where is he, by the way? Mr. Baudelaire.”
“No idea.” I lift my shoulders into a shrug to appear unfazed. “I’m not sure what Raffaele told you, but we fled because the Consultant has a bullet marked with my name.”
Her eyes widen for a split second. Not long enough for anyone else to notice.
“Oh, the Consultant? I know his real name, his address… only a couple things that will die with me if you decide to follow through on your orders,” I say, heart beating wildly, hands steady as I swirl my straw around the glass.
“It’s true, then,” Kat murmurs. “You’re a traitor. You could help us capture him, and you won’t.”
I squint at her like she’s sprouted a second nose. “We would have to believe in something to be a traitor.” My words come out cold, firmer than I feel beneath my bravado. “What do you believe, Kat? What creed does the ISA follow?”
If Graham could hear me now.
“We do what others cannot,” she replies with a puff of her chest.
Maybe it’s the whiskey, but I bark out a dry laugh. “What? Breaking laws because it’s been approved by someone, somewhere?” I swivel toward her and dip my chin, voice lowering to a menacing frost. “Or is it the murder? I imagine most people find that hard to do themselves. It can be quite messy.”
Kat blinks at me for a few moments before replying. “You know as well as I do that they’re put down so they stop harming others.”
Put down. Retired.
Sterilized terms to prevent us from thinking of them as anything but faceless targets. It’s easy to lose our grip on right and wrong when our own vocabulary is dictated by the whims of one man.
“Who’s to say they were harming anyone?” I say.
No response.
“Who’s double-checking where the orders are coming from?
How do we know we’re not assassinating a dictator for a worse one to step in?
” I prod quietly. The words are urgent, hard, slicing like knives as I hope and pray they find their mark.
“Maybe it’s the criminal himself who’s given the order,” I finish.
She has no idea that this conversation is helping me process the insanity of the past twenty-four hours. I should really thank her, if I wasn’t trying to talk my way out of being murdered.
Kat’s jaw sets. “Raffaele made the ISA what it is today.”
“You’re proving my point.”
“I should just get this over with,” she mutters, mostly to herself. “Engaging was a mistake.”
There’s only one move left to play. Raffaele’s training, his insistence on sentimentality being weakness, is about to take over.
Any slivers of comradery that might’ve existed between us will burn up in an instant.
My fingernails bite into the flesh of my palm beneath the bar, the familiar chill creeping down my spine at the thought.
A rat will chew off its own leg to escape a trap. What can a desperate woman do?
My voice sounds distant, dampened by buzzing bees and the multilingual chatter of drunk patrons. “You’ve heard the rumors about Chelyabinsk,” I say, “but you don’t know the facts.”
Kat falters. “And you can’t tell me, it’s against?—”
“Spare me the sanctimonious hurdles. We both know we’ll never see each other again—whether it’s by my choice or not,” I snap. The admission lands sharply in my chest. “Noah died, and I think… I think he’d want me to finally be honest about what happened.”
“Stop, Sloane.”
She’ll have to kill me first.
“Did you know he wasn’t supposed to be there with me?”
She swallows, gaze stuck somewhere in the hollow space between us, shoulders stiff. Her lips mouth, “No,” the pub too loud for a whisper to be heard.
I hastily empty my whiskey glass. Every nerve ending is sparking, vibrating from the tips of my fingers to the bottoms of my feet.
I’m alive. It feels like the first time in a while—the joints of repressed memories are stiff, muscles meant to regulate emotions are atrophied, as if a dormant part of me is waking from a coma—but I’m alive.
No going back now.
“That’s why Raffaele tortured me over Chelyabinsk for the past year,” I spew bitterly, careful to keep my voice low. “Not because he lost an agent, not because I lost a brother. Because I broke protocol and couldn’t finish the assignment.”
“You were careless afterward, Sloane—making mistakes none of us would’ve, acting out on assignments.”
I smile sadly. “Maybe we’re wired differently, then, or maybe you’re just better than me, because I needed time that no one was willing to provide. I needed… I think I needed to grieve.”