I run, blood singing through my veins, cutting through the shadows toward the sea-facing side of the compound.
Another guard spots me—draws too slow. I take him down with a hard blow to the jaw, leaving him crumpled on the floor.
More yelling behind me now. Footsteps pounding on the stone.
“Remo è morto!” I hear someone yell.
Now they know Remo is dead. Now they’ll hunt me in earnest.
I slip through a service door and sprint into the night.
Shots ring out behind me, bullets slicing the air too close.
I dive over the wall just as floodlights fill the courtyard. The fall jars every bone in my body. I roll, tuck, and keep running down the cliffside, into the scrub, disappearing into the night.
I hit the edge of the city, and get into the helicopter waiting for me.
“You need medical assistance?” the pilot asks.
I perform inventory. Blood stains my shirt. There’s a gash over my ribs from a lucky shot. A few knife wounds here and there.
I’m breathing. Remo is not.
“Flesh wounds,” I tell the pilot.
He speaks into the headset as we take off. Less than an hour after I put a bullet into Remo, I’m on a private plane, headed back to New York.
A Maddox medic patches me up on the flight while I nurse a scotch.
My wounds throb in time with my heart.
I close my eyes and think of her—my Calista, safe, free, living without fear—and somehow, the pain in my body feels like a promise kept.
17
BECAUSE HE WON’T TELL YOU
CALISTA
The shelter looks the same.
Same chipped tiles.
Same flickering light in the hallway.
Same quiet desperation folded into every bed and blanket.
ButI’mnot the same.
I walk through it like a ghost now—smiling when I’m supposed to, nodding when someone speaks, but there’s nothing real behind it. Just glass.
I’ve rebuilt these walls before. Brick by brick. Grief by grief. But this time, I don’t even wait for the mortar to dry. I avoid the window. I pretend I don’t hear footsteps on the roof late at night. I pretend I don’t know he’s still out there.
The man who was hired to kill me. The man who saved me. The man who made me feel safe. The man I fell in love with.
I go to the small office to work on grant paperwork. I don’t have the wherewithal to sit with people, serve them. I just want to go to bed and be unconscious, not think of or dream about Lucian.
“You’re so beautiful.”
