She goes out through the window the way she came in, no sound, no wasted movement, bare feet on the stone path, and I watch her cross the darkened garden until the shadows take her, and she is gone.
I stand at the window for a long time after.
The guards move in their pattern.
The ocean moves behind the walls.
Sitting back on the edge of the bed in the low light, I press my hand flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat where hers had been a moment ago, and try to locate something I can’t quite name.
She had meant it. All of it. And I had felt the pull of her, the familiarity of her, and the truth of two people who had loved each other in the wrong life at the wrong time.
Lying back on the bed, I stare at the ceiling.
The ocean keeps moving.
Somewhere in the main house across the darkened gardens, Riley is lying in Clemente’s bed, in the role, in the life she’d built around a lie, and I make her the same promise I’d made everyone else I’d left behind.
I’m coming back.
No matter what it takes.
No matter how long.
No matter what name I’m wearing when I do.
Chapter Twenty-Two
RYAN
Six weeks inside.
Six weeks of waking up in the villa as Marco Reyes, moving through the hacienda as Marco Reyes, eating at Clemente’s table, and discussing Clemente’s business and being exactly who Sam’s team had built him to be, with the thoroughness of a man who understood that the difference between a good cover and a perfect one was the difference between coming home and not.
The cover is perfect.
That is the problem.
Marco Reyes has become easy in a way that Ryan finds quietly unsettling, the ease of a second skin worn long enough that you stop noticing the seams. He wakes up in the morning and becomes Marco before being fully conscious. He moves through the hacienda, logging everything without deciding to, and sits at Clemente’s table, talking about distribution networks and New York contacts with the fluency of a man who has been doing it his whole life.
Because Marco Reyes has been doing it his whole life.
Ryan Lismore is just along for the ride.
The villa has become home in the way that no place you can’t leave ever truly becomes home. The stone path between it and the main house is worn familiar under my feet. The ocean is constant beyond the walls. The guards in their patterns are as well known to me now as my own heartbeat.
Sam calls on a Tuesday.
The phone vibrates in my pocket, three times, the pattern Sam uses when it is him, and I keep my face still, my hands steady, and say nothing to Clemente about it because there is nothing to say.
Too risky.
Always too risky.
Sam will understand.
Sam always understands.
But the call sits in my pocket for the rest of the afternoon like something with weight, the weight of a world I’d left behind pressing against my ribs, the ghost of a compass on my inner forearm still pointing north even here, even now, even in the middle of all of this.
