Chapter 4

The call came from Reeves on a Tuesday, and by Thursday Maya’s whole operation had a new deadline stitched into it like a stitch pulled too tight.

“Marchetti’s moving a shipment in six weeks,” Reeves said, no greeting, the way he always started when the news was bad. “Guns, product, enough to lock down distribution for a decade if it lands clean. We need you inside the house before it does.”

“I’ve had four dates with the man,” Maya said. “Four. You don’t get invited to live somewhere on a fourth date without it looking like exactly what it is.”

“Then make it look like something else.” A pause, the particular silence Reeves used when he was choosing his next sentence carefully. “You’re the one who told me he’s careful. Careful men respond to threats they can solve. Give him something to solve.”

Maya understood what he meant before he finished saying it, and she hated how quickly the plan assembled itself in her head, clean and cold and workable, the way all her best ideas did lately.

Three nights later, she was walking home from a restaurant Nico didn’t know she’d chosen specifically because it was four blocks from a stretch of waterfront with bad lighting and worse camera coverage, when two men stepped out of an alley she’d scouted that morning.

They were good. She’d requested good, the kind of federal agents who could throw a convincing grab without actually hurting anyone, and the one who caught her arm did it with just enough force to make her stomach drop before her training kicked in and reminded her this part, at least, was choreographed. She screamed on cue. She let herself be shoved against brick. She did not, when the moment came, have to fake how loud her heart was pounding, because some old animal part of her body didn’t know the difference between real and staged, not really, not at two in the morning with a stranger’s hand on her arm even when that stranger was on her own payroll.

Nico arrived nine minutes later, which was either bad timing on the Bureau’s part or exactly on schedule, she never found out which.

She heard him before she saw him, a car door and then footsteps that didn’t hesitate, didn’t calculate, just came. Whatever she’d expected from a man who chose his words like a craftsman testing grain, it wasn’t this. He put himself between her and the two men without a flicker of the careful stillness she’d spent four dates cataloguing, and the fight that followed was short and ugly and entirely real on his side, whatever it was on theirs. One man went down holding his jaw. The other ran.

“Are you hurt.” Not a question, again, the way nothing he said seemed to leave room for a question mark. His hands were on her shoulders, checking, and up close she could see something in his face she hadn’t catalogued yet. Not just adrenaline. Fear, plain and unguarded, the kind a man didn’t usually let a fourth date see. “I’m fine,” she said, and her voice shook in a way that wasn’t entirely acting. “I’m fine, I just.”

“You’re not fine. You’re shaking.” He pulled his jacket off and put it around her shoulders before she could argue, and it smelled like cedar and something underneath that she was starting to recognize as simply him. “Where do you live?”

“Twenty minutes from here.”

“Not tonight,” he said. “Not alone.” He looked at her, and whatever calculation he was running behind his eyes, she couldn’t read it, which unsettled her more than anything that had happened in the alley. “Come to the house. Just for tonight. I have more security in one wing than most embassies, and I would like to actually sleep instead of picturing this.”

This was the door Reeves had built the whole staged mugging to open, and Maya knew it, and some small traitorous part of her wished, just for a second, that the invitation had come from anywhere else. That it was just a man worried about a woman he’d had four dinners with, and not the exact hinge her entire operation had been engineered to swing on.

“Okay,” she said, and let him lead her to the car.

The estate, when they arrived, was nothing like the file’s satellite photographs had prepared her for. Floodlit and enormous, gates that took a code and a retinal scan, a house that looked less like a home than a fortress that had been dressed up to apologize for itself. Nico led her through a side entrance, past two guards who nodded at him without a word, up a staircase to a wing that felt worlds away from whatever lay behind the doors she couldn’t see.

“This is yours for tonight,” he said, opening a door onto a guest room bigger than her apartment. “There’s a lock on the inside. Use it if it makes you feel safer. Nobody comes in here without my say, and I’m not going to give it.”

“You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said. “I wanted to.”

He lingered in the doorway a moment too long, the way he had at her door after the boathouse, and Maya thought again that he might close the distance between them, and again he didn’t. He just looked at her, something unguarded and almost sad in it, like a man already grieving something he hadn’t lost yet.

“Get some sleep, Elena,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

Maya sat on the edge of the enormous bed for a long time after his footsteps faded, listening to a house full of men who would kill her without hesitation if they knew what she really was, and pulled a compact mirror from her bag that was not a mirror at all. She thumbed the hidden switch on the back and watched the tiny light blink twice, confirming the signal, confirming she was in.

She was inside the house.

She had never felt less like she’d won anything in her life.