Chapter 49
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINE
Graham Baudelaire, infamous thief and notorious loner, had a memorial so large that guests formed a queue outside the church.
Men and women from all walks of life—detectives, jewellers, federal prison guards, painters who unofficially make their living forging the greatest works in history.
Alban and Claudette made an appearance. Nathalie, the attendant from the boutique in Paris, somehow heard the news and spent the entire service sniffling into a handkerchief.
It was an unspoken rule that his funeral was sacred ground. For a single moment in history, we all ignored the dividing line, paying our respects in peace.
The service was held at the église Sainte Catherine in Honfleur, France, the small port town in Normandy that his mother grew up in.
France’s largest wooden church, built in the fifteenth century, I couldn’t help but sit in my pew and think of how much Graham would’ve loved to comment on the architecture and the history of the glass staining process.
Locals who still remembered Graham’s mother came to the service. They sat in the back, though, politely confused about the colorful array of attendees.
I wished Graham could have seen it.
Not only because of the church, but because he’d spent so much of his life convinced that he was and friendless, the same as me. With a tormentor for a father and a sister who let her demons win, who could really blame him?
As it turned out, there were far more people who loved him than just me.
Weeks later, I’m stepping outside his family’s mausoleum, arms wrapped tightly against the wintry Parisian gusts, when I catch movement in the trees.
It’s a massive, beautiful cemetery that looks more like a park, but the Baudelaire family is interred in a quiet spot at the crest of a hill.
There aren’t many passersby here. And with grey skies overhead threatening rain, tourists have been few and far between.
My shoulders hunch and I sweep a finger across my cheek, as if I’m catching a tear.
Movement again. Closer this time. My pulse picks up speed, half giddy and half frustrated. I thought I had more time. But today seems like as good a day as any to spill some blood—at least the morticians won’t have to take them far.
Straightening, I feign a distracted pout, folding my arms again as my boots scrape against the cobblestone path. My scabbed-over palm protests against the grip of my gun beneath my coat.
Footsteps coming from behind.
I force myself to keep walking. When they’re within arm’s reach, close enough to feel the stones rattling underfoot, I whirl around with my gun at the ready. The eyes staring back at me nearly knock all the oxygen from my lungs.
“Mateo,” I sneer. “Visiting family?”
His hands, markedly empty, lift defensively. “I only came to talk.”
“Oh, spare me.”
We both watch as my finger falls to the trigger. He braces himself. With great reluctance, I holster it under my coat again.
Mateo heaves a relieved sigh. “Thank you, Sloane—” He’s halted by the glint of my brand-new Bowie knife.
Rippling Damascus steel, a custom grip, a trailing point that curves menacingly at the tip. Ideal for filleting.
“The gun is far too noisy,” I explain, pointing the tip at his throat. “Walk. Into those trees.” My chin juts out toward a patch of trees a handful of yards away that provides shade and coverage from any nosy onlookers.
He swallows, turns, and begins marching. “Listen, Sloane?—”
“I don’t need to listen to anything you say,” I snap, “not anymore.”
“Please—I’m not here to kill you.”
I snort. “You couldn’t even if you were.”
Our feet meet grass, footsteps padded by the lush, thick green. To accentuate my point, I prod his back with my knife, but not enough pressure to cut. He arches in response and jumps away. My lips curl into a merciless smile.
“Now—” I push him headlong into a tree. He catches himself against the bark and whips around. “—how would you like to die?”
Mateo’s jaw works, eyes flicking from my knife and back to me.
“Death by a thousand cuts?” Coming close, I trail the tip of my knife along his cheekbone, opening the skin a fraction. Crimson begins to gather in tiny beads. “Or I could snap your neck,” I say, “wouldn’t that be something like poetic justice?”
Raw grief flashes in his stare. I recognize it because I’ve felt it.
“I didn’t know how bad it was.” His voice is thin, like he’s choking back a sob. “None of us knew except Raffaele.”
A merciless laugh falls from my mouth. “I find that hard to believe, considering you’re the one who was in charge of operations.”
“You want the truth?” he snaps. “All I knew is that Kat was being sent to trail you. She encountered Graham briefly, but let him go when she realized he didn’t have the hard drive.”
The first time he snuck away to his family estate in Paris. It’s a miracle he got away with only a scrape.
Or maybe Kat wasn’t as ruthless as I gave her credit for.
“The orders—” He clears his throat. “—the orders to kill you came in-field. I didn’t… I had no idea about any of it until they told me she’d died.”
My head tilts. “What about Petyr?”
“Raffaele said it was a necessary evil,” he spits. “That he had no time to consult me beforehand, that he had to act swiftly.”
“Sentimentality is weakness.”
Mateo’s expression sours even further. “His exact words.”
“Still,” I say, edging his jacket open with my knife so I can get a better look at his carotid. “You had to have known about the other missions we were being sent on—that not all of them were above board.”
“You’re right.”
His response surprises me. I push away from the tree, squinting at him. That’s when I fully take in his unruly, overgrown beard, the dark purplish circles beneath his eyes, his wrinkled shirt.
“You’re actually admitting to being a criminal.”
“I am,” Mateo replies plainly. “There were even rumors at the NCA before Raffaele headhunted me for the job. All my colleagues warned me against it. But I… I got swept up in it all.”
I raise a brow. “He dirtied your hands before you could come to your senses.”
“He did—and then I met Kat, and it seemed like we could survive it together.”
“And Chelyabinsk…”
Mateo nods solemnly, casting his gaze to the ground between us. “The hard drive.”
“Tell me what you know,” I reply. I’m not going to show him all my cards quite yet.
“I doubt I know as much as you—it happened long before I was hired.” He continues hurriedly when I give him an impatient look.
“All I know is that a hacker reached out to Raffaele through the Consultant’s network, looking to sell a hard drive that had fallen into his hands.
He decoded it and… well, the evidence was valuable, to say the least. Instead of buying it, though, Raffaele sent you. ”
My stomach clenches with the memory of that night. “That’s why he wanted me to burn that house down. Destroy it all in one go.”
“Yes. But you didn’t, because…”
“Noah.”
“If I had known about the family, I wouldn’t have let him?—”
“There’s no way you could’ve known he was going to die,” I cut him off. “But the hard drive was already gone, anyway.”
Mateo slumps against the tree. “Raffaele figured that out when we swept the house—it’s the only reason you weren’t killed for not finishing the assignment, I suspect.”
I’m aware that I look like a lunatic, but I can’t help the smile that appears on my face. Graham saved my life more than once. Without even trying.
“The next thing I knew, he asked for information about old colleagues at the NCA,” he continues. My stomach turns. Mateo appears to be just as nauseous. “And then… they all died, Sloane. They looked like accidents at first, but in the end I knew.”
I flatten my lips against the rising bile. Jones’s task force for the Consultant. All those agents were murdered by the ISA. Maybe he simply gave Manon the names. Maybe he ordered it himself. Directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter. At least I can help clear Jones’s name now.
“Sloane, I’ve always thought of you as a friend?—”
“We were never friends,” I say honestly.
As far as I’m concerned, he confessed to being Raffaele’s co-conspirator.
Maybe he’s not responsible for Kat’s death.
But how many others died from his orders?
He should either be dead or in prison for continuing at the ISA while knowing everything he did.
I may have pulled the triggers, but I had no idea what I was really doing.
He sighs wearily, a familiar sound. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep.”
A frigid chill ripples across my skin. I launch at him, knife pressed to his throat with the promise of murder. “How do you know that? What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, Sloane, I promise,” Mateo wheezes. Fumbling with his pocket, he retrieves something small and presses it into my sternum.
I blindly rip it away. A burner phone.
One eye trained on Mateo, I dial the number that’s practically tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. I’ll probably still remember it when I’m ninety and senile. It rings once. I repeat the passphrase.
“It’s been a while, cari?a.” Ximena’s voice flows into my unbandaged ear like an actual hug.
“What—” I glance at Mateo and make the decision to finally sheath my knife. “What’s happening?”
She laughs. “What’s happening is that I’m surprised you’re not dead right now.”
“Yeah, well, no thanks to you,” I reply hotly. “You could’ve at least tried to warn me.”
I can practically hear her eyes roll.
“There was nothing I could do, Sloane. All I had was the gut instinct that the tides were turning against you, and no concrete information to give. The handlers are kept even more in the dark than agents.” She hesitates.
“But when you called the final time, I’d already been handed your death notice. ”
The payphone. I’d thought it wasn’t working, but she was trying to tell me that I shouldn’t have called.
“Of course, Raffaele soon found out you weren’t killed like you were supposed to be,” Ximena continues, “then Kat and Petyr were gone in quick succession.” I meet Mateo’s eyes at that.
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m saying that Raffaele was careless for once—it revealed his true colors to many of us, and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to wash our hands of it.” Ximena sighs, her voice lowering. My mind begins to spin. “We want to help you.”
I create distance from Mateo, tentative excitement bubbling in my chest. “But… why?”
“Because we’re friends, Sloane, whether you want to get it through your thick skull or not.” There’s that maternal tone I know and have actually missed. “And I told you that I’ll always have your back.”
Snapping the phone shut after a quick goodbye, I give Mateo a skeptical look despite the elation scratching to be let in. I can’t get ahead of myself.
“Do you believe me now?” he says, features crumpled, as if exhausted by the events of the last ten minutes. “I really love—” His throat bobs. “—loved Kat. You can see me as the villain, that’s okay. I only want some retribution for what Raffaele did to her. And to all of us.”
I stare back, unflinching. “Even if it means you end up behind bars with him.”
“Yes.” Mateo straightens, expression hardening.
I could gut him. Fillet him like a fish and leave him for the worms.
But that wouldn’t be justice at all, not unless I’m willing to do the same to myself. I’ve executed my fair share of orders despite the voice inside screaming that something was wrong. I killed a husband and a father while he slept beside his wife.
My hands aren’t clean—they’re dipped in layers of blood, stained beyond recognition. I know who I am, now, and that also means I have to accept the parts that I’m ashamed of. Both the pain I’ve experienced and the pain I’ve doled out. They come together to create me—Sloane Walker.
I don’t want to play judge, jury, and executioner. Not anymore.
“Okay,” I say, “let’s get to work.”