That was it. Just good.
He turned to the terrace doors and opened them, letting in the smell of salt and bougainvillea and the crash of the Aegean far below. The afternoon light was going golden, the kind of light that made everything look like a painting. The kind that had absolutely no business existing in a situation like theirs.
He stepped out onto the terrace and leaned his forearms on the railing, needing something between him and the room. Between him and her in a room with no cameras.
Below, two of Stavros’s men moved through the lower gardens, neither of them doing anything a groundskeeper wouldactually do. One was positioned at an angle to cover the gate. The other had a line of sight to the cliff path. Dom tracked them without moving his head, using the view as cover.
Behind him, he heard her move. The soft sound of her sandals on tile, then the terrace door, and then she was beside him at the railing.
She didn’t say anything for a while. Just looked out at the water, her hands loose on the iron rail, the cream dress pressing against her legs in the breeze.
“We need to nail down a plan,” she said eventually.
Back to work. Right. That was the right call. That was the only call. “Yeah, about that. As much as I love blowing stuff up, there’s got to be an easier way for me to get into Vaut 485 than blasting a hole through multiple levels of concrete and reinforced steel. There’s no way to do that stealthily, and no matter how I crunch the numbers, the amount of explosives I’d need…” He shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
She was silent for a long moment. “There’s a secondary sublevel entrance through the wine cellar. Maybe you can get in through there while I keep Stavros distracted.”
“I didn’t see that on the schematics.”
“It’s not on the schematics. Stavros doesn’t put the real entry points on anything that leaves this property. I only know where it is because Sabin bribed one of the staff members the first year we had the vault. It took three visits before the man finally talked, and it cost us a very good bottle of Burgundy.”
“How old is the intel?”
“Six years. But Stavros doesn’t change the structure. He changes the security layered on top of it.” She paused. “The door will have been upgraded. Biometric, probably. But the location will be the same.”
Dom turned that over. Six-year-old intel on a facility whose security had been upgraded at least once since then. It wasworkable. It was also the kind of gap that got people killed if they weren’t careful.
“We need eyes on it before we make any moves,” he said.
“Stavros runs wine tastings for guests on Tuesday evenings. It’s part of the experience. We’d have legitimate reason to be in that corridor.”
“That’s tomorrow.”
She glanced at him sideways. “It is.”
“All right. Game on.” He looked back out at the water. The sun was lower now, the light shifting from gold to amber, and the sea below had gone from brilliant blue to a deep navy. He glanced over at her. “Viv?—”
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to say something about what Sabin told me.” She kept her eyes on the horizon. “I can always tell. You get this particular look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’re about to say something you’ve rehearsed.”
He hadn’t rehearsed anything. He’d spent the last forty-eight hours with his brain occupied entirely by seismic sensors and biometric bypass protocols and the logistics of blowing a hole through reinforced concrete without registering on a grid calibrated to detect exactly that. He hadn’t had a single free moment to rehearse.
But the words were there anyway, waiting.
“I should have told you,” he said. “When it happened. I should have told you it was Sabin’s call, not mine.”
She was quiet.
“I didn’t because—” He stopped. Started again. “Because he asked me to. And because I thought you’d hate him for it, and you didn’t need that on top of everything else. And because Ithought eventually you’d—” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I made the wrong call.”
The breeze moved through the jasmine trailing from the loggia above them. Somewhere below, a gull called once and went quiet.
