She’d seen through all of it.
Of course, she had.
She is Riley.
And now she is lying somewhere in that house, in Clemente’s house, in Clemente’s bed, in the role she has been performing every single day for months, knowing that Ryan Lismore is alive. Knowing he is a quarter mile away in a villa within the same walls. Knowing that everything has just changed, none of it can be acknowledged or said, and it can’t exist anywhere outside the two of them until the time is right.
That is going to cost her something.
I hate that it is going to cost her something.
I look at my left forearm in the low light, the compass ghost barely visible, and the needle pointing north like it always does.
‘Find your way back. You always do.’
Lying back on the bed, I stare at the ceiling and listen to the ocean move beyond the walls. I think about Riley holding that recognition behind her eyes for the rest of dinner, the discipline of it, the control it required, the years of training, and the specific quality of a woman who could absorb something that enormous and fold it away without leaving a trace.
She is the best I have ever worked alongside.
She is going to be okay.
She has always been okay, even when nothing else was.
I close my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-One
RYAN
Sleep won’t claim me. Not properly, not the way you sleep in a place that’s yours, in a bed that’s safe, even though I checked the entire villa for listening devices and cameras, only to find nothing. Surprising, but not completely unexpected. Lying in the dark with the ocean moving beyond the window, my hand within reach of the weapon tucked under the pillow, and my brain doing what it always does in hostile territory, running quietly in the background, listening, never fully letting go.
You don’t sleep deeply in your enemy’s house.
Not if you want to wake up.
So when the knock comes, three times, soft and deliberate, at the window rather than the door, I am upright with the weapon in my hand before I am fully conscious of moving.
I hold completely still.
Listen.
The ocean. The guards at the perimeter, their footsteps in their pattern, unchanged, nothing broken in the rhythm of them. The wind moving through the gardens.
Then again.
Three knocks.
Soft and deliberate.
Someone who doesn’t want to be heard.
Crossing to the window in the night, no lights, moving by memory and instinct, I stand to one side of it, weapon raised, and look through the edge of the glass.
Riley.
She’s standing in the garden in a silk robe that the desert night wind is doing nothing to keep properly closed. Her arms are wrapped around herself against the cool air, and her dark hair isloose around her shoulders. She’s looking up at the window with an expression I can read even from here because I have always been able to read her face in any light.
Controlled.
