Chapter 3

By the fourth date, Maya had stopped counting the lies and started counting the minutes until she saw him again, and she hated herself a little more each time she noticed.

The small place he’d promised turned out to be a converted boathouse on the north shore, no sign out front, a chef who apparently only cooked for twelve people a night and had never once been photographed doing it. Nico ordered in Italian without looking at a menu. Maya filed that away with everything else. Not showing off. Just a man who’d been coming here long enough that showing off wasn’t necessary.

“You’re doing it again,” he said, halfway through the second course.

“Doing what.”

“Cataloguing me.” He said it without heat, turning his wine glass by the stem. “You’ve done it since the gala. You look at me like I’m a room you’re trying to memorize the exits of.”

Maya kept her face still, the way three years of undercover work had taught her, and reached for the version of the truth that would cost her the least. “Occupational habit. My family’s business made me careful young. You learn to read a room, or the room reads you first.”

“Boat money makes people paranoid?”

“Boat money makes people targets,” she said. “Paranoid is what keeps the targets breathing.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she had the unsettling sense that he wasn’t deciding whether to believe her. He was deciding whether to let her think he did.

“I read something once,” he said instead, changing course so smoothly she almost missed the door closing behind them. “Neruda. There’s a line about how love is so short and forgetting is so long. I used to think that was self-pity dressed up as poetry.” He turned the glass again. “Now I think he just meant that the forgetting is the part that actually takes the work. Anyone can fall into something. Getting back out of it is the labor.”

“That’s a strange thing to quote on a fourth date.” “You strike me as someone who’d rather hear the strange thing than the easy one.”

He wasn’t wrong, and that was the problem. Maya had built Elena Voss to be charmed by wealth and boredom and the particular thrill of a dangerous man’s attention. She hadn’t built her to notice that he chose his words the way a craftsman chose wood, testing the grain before he cut. She hadn’t built her to want to keep pulling at the thread of him until she found where the performance stopped.

“Tell me about prison,” she said, because it was in the file and because she needed, badly, to remember why she was sitting across from him.

Something closed in his face, briefly, before he let it open again on purpose. “That’s forward.”

“You said you liked strange.”

He was quiet long enough that she thought he’d deflect, the way he deflected everything about the business, the family, the parts of himself that mattered. Instead he set the glass down and looked at her with an honesty that felt, for one disorienting second, more dangerous than anything else he’d shown her.

“Five years,” he said. “I went in for putting a man in the hospital. I’m not going to tell you he didn’t deserve it, because he did, and I’m not going to tell you I regret it, because some nights I don’t. But I watched what five years does to a person who has nothing left to lose. I watched men become exactly what everyone already assumed they were, because it’s easier to become the thing people expect than to keep fighting to be something else.” He turned the glass one more time. “I made a decision in there. I wasn’t going to be my father. Whatever that cost me.”

“And has it cost you?”

“Every day,” he said, and there was no performance in it at all. “He doesn’t understand a man who doesn’t want the empire. He thinks it’s a phase. He thinks prison broke something in me that just needs fixing.” He looked up at her. “It didn’t break anything. It just showed me what I already was, underneath the parts he built.”

Maya thought about her sister, about a needle and an apartment and a phone call that came four hours too late to matter, and for one terrible second the two truths sat side by side in her chest, indistinguishable. She could have told him then. Some reckless, unprofessional part of her wanted to.

She didn’t.

“I believe you,” she said instead, and the terrible thing was that she did, at least in that moment, at that table, with the candlelight doing something unfair to the scar through his eyebrow.

“You say that like it surprises you.”

“It does,” she admitted. “I don’t usually believe people this fast.”

“Good,” he said. “Neither do I. Which should tell you something.”

He drove her home himself, no driver, and didn’t try to come up. At her door he stood close enough that she could smell cedar and something like varnish underneath his cologne, workshop smells, and for a moment she thought he might kiss her and didn’t know which answer she was more afraid of giving.

He didn’t. He tucked a strand of hair back from her face with a care that felt entirely too specific for a man who was supposedly still deciding whether to trust her, and said, “Goodnight, Elena,” in a voice that made the false name sound almost like an apology.

Maya went inside, locked the door, and sat down hard on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand and Agent Reeves’s number already dialed before she’d decided to call it.

He picked up on the second ring. “Progress?”

“He’s careful,” she said. “Careful in a way that doesn’t track with the file. Five years in and the only thing he seems angry about is being expected to become his father.”

“Good,” Reeves said. “Careful men make mistakes trying to prove they’re not careful. Keep pushing.”

“There’s something else,” Maya said, and hesitated, turning the words over before she let them out. “He asked me tonight what I actually wanted. Not the cover story. Me.”

There was a pause on the line, brief, but long enough that Maya noticed it the way she noticed everything.

“What did you tell him,” Reeves said, and something in the careful flatness of his voice made her sit up straighter, the same instinct that had kept her alive through three years of rooms exactly like this one.

“I told him the truth would take too long to explain,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason,” Reeves said, too quickly to be nothing. “Keep me posted.”

He hung up before she could ask him what he’d actually meant.