We now know that Enya is not connected to what Lowell was doing. Hell, her father wasn’t involved, and we’d suspected him.
“Then why are you doing that thing?” she remarks as she smooths my forehead with her fingers.
I jerk back.
Kiera and I have had sex.
Many times.
On-again, off-again operational lovers.
But not for a long while, and I haven’t touched her or anyone else since Enya. Before Enya, it wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t committed to a woman, and in any case, I always thought monogamy was for idiots.
Guess who’s the idiot now?
“What am I doing?” I demand.
“Brooding. Looming. Acting like a wild animal someone forgot to sedate.” She shifts her weight, crossing her arms. “You want to talk about it?”
That elicits a jagged laugh from me. “Talk about it?”
She sighs. “You just seem very upset.”
I want to say the Tom Cruise line from Mission Impossible—“You’ve never seen me very upset”—and the Dom from my last mission could’ve pulled it off. This version of me can’t. This is the man who fucked up, who let emotions he didn’t even know he had knock him off balance.
Since I don’t have anything to say to Kiera, I look through the two-way mirror at the ghost of my reflection layered over Enya.
I’ve gotten old, I think, when I see the gray in my beard and sideburns. I haven’t shaved in a couple of days. My hair is a touch too long because I missed the last cut.
No, you didn’t, Dom. She said she likes your hair long so she can run her fingers through it.
My eyes are a cold, flat blue, which people don’t forget once I’ve interrogated them—or so they say.
I’m built for this work, inside and out.
Today, though, I’m off-kilter.
“Quit staring at yourself,” Kiera mutters under her breath.
“Don’t you have something better to do than bust my balls?” I keep my tone light. Just because I’m feeling all these emotions doesn’t mean she or anyone else needs to know.
“If I don’t do it, who else will?” she retorts with a grin.
She looks relieved now. The Dom Delacour she understands—the detached, unfeeling version—has resurfaced. She’d hate knowing I can’t hold onto him.
My gaze finds Enya again.
She shifts in her chair, adjusting her chocolate brown cashmere jacket. It makes her brown eyes look darker. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear—it’s a nervous gesture, one the agent talking to her will catch right away, knowing that her confidence is false bravado.
My chest aches, hollow and sharp—and a burst of fear runs through me. A man like me doesn’t really get afraid, but not long ago, I almost died, and since then I’ve been contemplating my mortality, which, no surprise, makes you scared.
The mere thought of my brush with death makes my shoulder throb, a phantom ache from the bullet I took a year ago behind a bakery in Le Marais. I was saved by the woman whom I had bullied and crushed, and by a man whom I mercilessly used but now call a friend.
When I woke up in the US Embassy’s medical bay three days later, the doctors called me lucky.
I didn’t feel lucky. I felt tired.
And lately, that weariness has started to feel like a warning.
