"That's it?" I ask. "Just finish it?"
"He’s given all control to me, with title transfer upon his passing.” Leone turns from the window. His face is the mask again, neutral, commander, Don-in-waiting. But his eyes are red at the edges and the skin under them is dark and the man who told me to sit down five minutes ago looks like he hasn't slept in a week because he probably hasn't. "Tuesday night. The marina. Find Vidal, confirm the operation, and get back alive. All of you."
He walks out and Alexandra follows. Claudio pushes off the wall and pauses beside me.
"You need sleep," he says.
"So does Leone."
"Leone is a lost cause. You are still salvageable." He looks at the bandage on my face. "Barely."
“Yeah, have a good night.” I don’t feel like talking anymore. I just want to go to fucking bed.
"It's four a.m. There's nothing good about it." He leaves.
Carmelo finishes cleaning his knife, folds the rag, puts both in his pocket, and stands. He walks past me without speaking, which is standard, but at the door he stops and turns and looks at me with those dead-gray eyes.
"The bartender," he says.
"What about her?"
He doesn't answer. He just looks at me for three seconds and then nods, once, and walks away. Savannah just made Carmelo's list. That list is short and the people on it tend to stay alive longer than the people who aren't, which is the closest thing to a blessing this compound offers.
I walk back to my room. Her door is closed, her light is off. She's either asleep or pretending to be, and either way I'mnot knocking at four in the morning with blood under my fingernails.
I stop outside her door and press my ear to the wood. Long enough to hear nothing, which means she's quiet, which could mean she's sleeping or could mean she's sitting on her bed with the bottle cap in her hand and her shoes on and her back against the headboard.
I want to knock. I want to open that door and sit on the edge of her bed and tell her about the marina operation and Kreiss's money and Aurelio's oxygen and the fact that Tuesday night I'm going to sit in a van on a dock and watch for a man I've never met because of information she gave us over eggs at a diner.
I want to tell her she changed the trajectory of this war by being brave enough to talk.
But I don't knock. She needs sleep more than she needs me right now, and the selfishness of wanting to wake her up just so I can look at her face is a kind of weakness I can't afford the night before an operation.
Tomorrow night, the marina, and with any fucking luck… Vidal. Kreiss's money flowing toward something none of us can see yet. Aurelio dying in the private wing while the empire he built shakes under his feet.
I go to my room and stand in the middle of it and realize I still smell like her. The compound soap that smells different on her skin. The sweat from the gym that morning that never gotwashed off because Leone called before either of us showered. She’s everywhere.
I strip and get in the shower because I need to get clean and because standing in my room smelling her while she sleeps three doors away is going to make me do something stupid.
The water is hot. I put my hands on the tile and let it hit my back and I close my eyes and I last about fifteen seconds before the images start.
Her hips rolling against me in the gym. The slow, intentional grind that dragged her body along the length of me. The sound she made, bitten off in the back of her throat. The way her fingers dug into the back of my neck and pulled. Her mouth opening under mine and her tongue finding mine and the taste of coffee and salt and her.
The heat coming off her through her jeans when I pressed my palm flat against her and the sound, God, the sound that came out of her, loud and raw and the single best thing I've ever heard in my life. Her against the wall in the corridor. The red light on her face. The way she grabbed the front of my vest and hauled me in.
I wrap my hand around myself, and I don't pretend I'm doing anything other than what I'm doing. My forehead against the tile, hot water running down my spine, and Savannah Cole behind my eyelids, panting against my mouth, saying don't you fucking dare stop in a voice that went straight through me and settled at the base of my spine.
I think about what would have happened if Leone hadn't called. My hand sliding inside her jeans instead of pressing against them. My fingers finding her wet, because she was wet, I could feel the heat of it through the denim. Her back arched against the wall and her thighs opening for me and the sound she'd make when I pushed two fingers inside her, that same raw noise but longer, drawn out, with my name somewhere in the middle of it.
Her coming on my hand and her face when it hit. Her body clenching around my fingers. The way she'd look at me after, flushed and furious and wanting more.
It doesn't take long. My hand moves fast, my grip tight, and when I come it hits hard enough that my knees buckle and I have to brace against the wall with my free hand. Her name is in my mouth. I don't say it out loud because the walls in this building are thin, but it's there, behind my teeth, pressing to get out.
I stand under the water until it runs cool. Wash my hair. Wash the blood from under my fingernails. Wash everything off me except the memory of her, which isn't going anywhere no matter how much soap I use.
I get out and dry off. Pull on shorts and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and for the first time all night my brain is quiet enough to think about what's ahead instead of what just happened.
The operation that starts the endgame. And somewhere between here and there, the woman three doors down who changed thetrajectory of this war because she was brave enough to talk and stubborn enough to stay.
