After searching for the better part of an hour, I find Claudio on the roof.
I didn't know the compound had a roof you could stand on, but it does. A flat expanse of concrete and gravel with a low wall around the edge and a view of the city that stretches to the horizon. The buildings, the highways, the docks where the Castillo war is still grinding on, the waterfront where a club sits empty because its bartender is now sleeping in a room two floors below me under the protection of a man who took her to a diner on the way home from a rescue.
Emilio and Savannah. I've seen them once. He brought her to the compound last night, and I caught a glimpse of them in the corridor. She's tall, dark-skinned, with the sharp eyes and the rigid posture of a woman who's been through something and hasn't decided yet how she feels about the people who pulled her out of it. Emilio walked beside her with his hands in his pockets and his usual grin conspicuously absent, replaced by something quieter. Attentive. The way a loud man goes quiet when he encounters something worth listening to.
They're going to be a story. I can feel it the way I feel weather changes, the shift in atmospheric pressure, the charge before the storm.
But that's their story. This one is mine.
Claudio is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his face turned toward the city. He's in his usual black. Henley, jeans, boots. Gun on his hip. He looks the same as the man who walked into my room on the first night and told me I was lying with the calm certainty of a man who has never been wrong about anything.
He looks the same. But he's different.
I'm different.
We're different.
I walk to the wall and stand beside him. Pull my cigarettes from my jacket. The new pack Emilio bought me, because despite how far I’ve come, old habits die hard. I tap one out. Light it with the yellow Bic that Claudio gave me in the car, which I've kept in my pocket every day since because some things you keep.
The smoke curls in the cold morning air. The city sprawls below us.
"Kreiss is still out there," Claudio says.
"I know."
"The Silent is still functioning. We've damaged them, but not destroyed them. The Castillo mole is identified but not contained. The war isn't over."
"I know that too."
"It could take months. The kind of work that's ugly and slow and doesn't come with a clean ending."
I take a drag. Blow smoke toward the horizon. "Is this the part where you give me an out? The speech where you tell me it's going to be dangerous, and I should think carefully about whether I want to be here?"
"No." He turns his head. Looks at me. Those pale green eyes, wrong-colored, unsettling, the eyes of a man who sees through every wall I've ever built and chose to walk through them instead of around. "This is the part where I tell you that whatever comes next, we decide as a unit. Not me. Not Leone. Not Aurelio. Us."
"Us."
"You and me. Whatever we decide."
The word settles between us.Us.Small word. Two letters. The smallest unit of something bigger, the atom of a partnership that started in an interrogation room and survived motels and highways and a farmhouse kitchen and a county road in Virginia and a shower where I said three words I hadn't said in years.
"I talked to Aurelio this morning," I say.
"He found you?"
"He finds everyone. It's unnerving."
"What did he say?"
"That I remind him of his wife. That you're fragile. That he makes two cups of espresso every morning."
Claudio is quiet. His jaw tics and his nostrils flare. The muscle rolls once, and I watch it because I've learned that Claudio's jaw is a weather system. When it moves, something is happening inside him that his face won't show.
"He's never told me about the espresso," Claudio says.
"He told me because I'm the crack."
"The what?"
