Chapter 50
CHAPTER
FIFTY
Months later, I’m curled up beneath a centuries-old desk in Graham’s family estate in Paris. It’s been what feels like hours, my neck is cricked into an odd position, and I’m beginning to think that I need to spend more time stretching now that I’m no longer in the field every week.
A problem for another day.
I’m not breathing when the door on the other end of the study swings ajar. In walks two dress shoes, polished and immaculate as ever, pausing in the threshold before entering.
He’s accompanied by someone else, a pair of boots that creep behind with practiced stealth.
I roll my eyes.
This will be messier than I anticipated.
The rug fibers shift softly underfoot with each step. Above me, a drawer slides open, papers shift, and I hear him laugh.
“It was here all along,” he’s saying when my knife jams into his thigh.
I lurch out of my hiding place in a flash, neck screaming, firing my gun before anyone has the time to properly react.
The man that was meant to be guarding him drops to the floor.
I slink toward him and rid him of his weapons, but he’s properly incapacitated by the bullets in his shoulder and his knee.
Raffaele has ripped my knife from his leg and is pointing at me when I turn on him.
“Seriously?” I say. “Has no one ever told you not to bring a knife to a gunfight?”
He grimaces, pressing his wound with his other hand. “How?”
“Well, it helps when you don’t rely on others to do your dirty work,” I retort flatly.
“How?” Raffaele snaps.
“Oh,” I drawl innocently, tossing my 9mm from hand to hand. “You want to know how I knew you’d be here.”
He winces and slumps into the leather desk chair. “If you’d be so obliging.”
“Your pride,” I reply. “It’s why you decided to confront me yourself in London, instead of sending someone else to do it. You always liked to have us do the hard work, saving the good stuff for yourself, yeah?”
Tapping the barrel of my gun against my chin, I continue, “And you had this sick obsession with seeing us squirm—I mean, that string of missions that put me in the worst possible conditions?” I rip my knife from his hand and wipe the blood on my pants.
“They were all punishments for not behaving fast enough after Chelyabinsk. I was a… nuisance,” I say, using Manon’s word.
He squints at me. “Look who’s gone and grown a brain.”
“You should know it’s also frowned upon to insult the person pointing a gun at your head.” I tilt my head at him. “Funny, you managed to turn a worthless nuisance into your worst nightmare.”
Raffaele motions impatiently, as if urging me to go on.
“Right—the matter of the hard drive,” I mutter, tapping the rectangular device left on the desk where Raffaele dropped it.
“The pesky thing about catching criminals, it turns out, is that you need evidence in order to catch them.” I spin to him.
“And you were always good at ensuring we were set up to take the fall if it ever came down to it. So good, in fact, that even the Consultant couldn’t trap you. ”
I sigh, jumping to perch on the edge of the desk. “When you heard that Sophie Baudelaire’s encrypted drive would be at her family estate—unattended—you couldn’t help yourself.” He moves to stand, freezing as I lazily point my gun and lift an eyebrow.
“Impossible,” Raffaele replies, lips curling in a smirk like he’s about to declare checkmate. “I was informed by trusted colleagues.”
“Oh, right—my bad.” I slip from the desk and cross my arms. “But, hold on, would that be Mateo, the man whose girlfriend you murdered? Or Ximena, the woman I’ve worked with for over a decade?”
His mouth flattens and he swallows. I crack a smile. Sometimes it takes several near-death experiences to find out who your friends are, I guess.
“No… you’re referring to the people no one knew you were working with,” I say innocently. “Graham’s friends.”
“Oui, mon amour—friends.”
Graham strides into the study, dressed in a three piece suit and a new watch.
Our eyes lock and my heart does an outrageous leap as he steps over the incapacitated, bleeding man, pulling me by the hand to graze his lips across mine.
I slump against the desk and he reaches for the drive with a wink in my direction.
“You’re alive,” Raffaele spits.
“Dreadfully so, it seems,” Graham replies. “And this?” He waves the drive. “I’m afraid the real thing was destroyed months ago, in Calais. It was my final move to keep it from falling into the wrong hands—yours or my sister’s.”
I smile sweetly at my former boss. “We needed you to believe he’d died in Scotland so you’d leave me alone to finish what his mother started.”
Raffaele pales. “You couldn’t—not without the drive.”
“Finally, you’re correct on one point.” Screwing my face up, I glance at Graham. “What do you think the score is now?”
“One to a million, darling.”
“Sickening,” Raffaele mutters.
I turn back. “Do you want to hear a joke?”
“All signs point to no.”
“Right, well—” I motion to the gun and his bleeding leg. “—captive audience, and all. You could’ve killed him when I delivered him to HQ, and no one would’ve ever known your secrets. The drive would’ve stayed lost where Graham hid it, and you wouldn’t be on your way to several life sentences.”
Raffaele’s throat bobs, but he doesn’t make a sound.
“Oh, was that not funny? I haven’t had much time to practice my jokes.” I drop my chin into my hand and sigh. “You’re probably wondering where you went wrong—Graham, do you want to take this one?”
“Well, the critical error would’ve been ever trusting my sister,” Graham replies casually. “She had you pull strings to release me from prison with the intention to trade the drive for my freedom, which kept you from killing me… but I’d gotten rather distracted.” He winks at me again.
Raffaele’s eyes flit darkly between us, as if he’s struggling between boredom and outrage.
“So, let me get this straight—Manon double-crossed the ISA, and you double-crossed the Consultant?”
He grins. “That about sums it up, Sloane.”
“And Raffaele…” I turn back to him like I’ve only just remembered he was there. “You thought you would get rid of me and have the drive returned to you. My guess is that you planned for Graham to die in some… accident?”
“You destroyed the drive,” Raffaele repeats, ignoring me.
“In a way,” Graham chimes in. “I had a mate in Calais decrypt it, like the hacker in Chelyabinsk did before you had him killed.”
My stomach turns. “An innocent man.”
“And my friend who had the good sense to inform me of what he’d found.
I imagine it drove you insane, combing through his family home after his death, searching for a drive that was already gone.
” He sighs. “It took several hours in Calais, but I was able to memorize the highlights—treason, war crimes, paper trails from money you accepted from criminals—all dating back to when my mother was alive. Just enough to know where to look.”
“Before you learned not to be so… messy,” I say. “From Graham’s memory, and help from Mateo and Ximena, I was able to tie it all into a pretty bow.”
Behind him, Carmine pops his head through the doorway. “You done with the hero monologue, kid?”
A few NCA officers funnel into the study, flipping the guard on his back and cuffing his hands.
When they start to reach for Raffaele, I hold a hand up to halt them, holstering my weapon and stepping in front of my former employer.
He tilts his head back and glowers at me.
He’s slightly pale from blood loss, or maybe the shock of failure, far from the figure that loomed larger than life for so many years.
Raffaele was only ever a man. A man—merely human, not infallible or unassailable—despite what he tried to have us think.
I grab him by his necktie and yank him to his feet. He’s gasping for air when I twist his arms behind his back and cuff his wrists.
“This is for Noah,” I say in his ear, “for Kat and Petyr, for Sophie Baudelaire and the teams of agents you murdered. They shouldn’t have died as the weapons you made them.”
Raffaele whirls around with murder in his gaze. “And yet you’ll always be what I made you.”
“No,” I reply, pushing him into the waiting hands of an NCA agent. “I’m going to be whoever I want.”
He doesn’t see my wide smile before he’s hauled away.