I even waited for the old nightmares to show up while I was fully awake.
But they didn't.
All I could see was her face, the echo of her voice, the ghost sensation of her hands clutching me over the rough leather of my jacket. I could still feel her presence behind me, hours later. Warm and alive.
It wasn't sexual. Just the clean, panicked grip of someone who believed—at least in that one moment—that I could deliver her from danger.
That made me feel powerful.
I stared at the ceiling. The burn above my right hip itched as it always did when I was in a mood, but I didn't scratch it.
I just let it ache, hoping one day the memories would return and explain how I'd gotten this scar.
But tonight, a different memory—more recent one—played itself in a loop. The coffee shop, the way she barely hesitated at the sight of me. She should have run. Instead, she took the helmet, jammed it on with her small hands, and straddled the Ducati. The weight of her chest on my back, her fingers digging at my ribs, the way her legs clamped to the seat.
At every red light I expected her to bolt.
But all she did was hold on.
She trusted me.
I'd been taught never to break protocol. Never to meet the client, never to engage unless it was a life and death situation, potentially damaging the outcome of the job. I wasn't certain today this was the case. She could have called 911. Instead she called me.
The girl could have been paranoid. People with PTSD often imagined things.
And yet I'd gone to her without thinking. Worse—I'd wanted to.
There was no tactical justification for putting myself in her path, for watching her window after she went inside, for feeling anything at all when I saw her shadow pass behind the curtains. That was weakness, and in the Bureau, weakness got you dead.
But why had I continued to observe her?
Was it my curiosity, my desire to see what an ordinary life looked like?
My fists opened and closed on the thin sheet. I flexed the knuckles until they whitened, then let go.
I was a tool. A better tool than most. Someone who lived in the shadows, someone who didn't exist. But tonight I'd wanted to be seen. I'd wanted someone to look at me and know I was the reason they'd made it home alive. She'd given that to me, even if she never meant to.
I had no right to remember any of it.
Yet I did.
And I knew it would stay with me, burned in as deep as the scars I bore. Because if I hadn't managed to get rid of this feeling by now, I probably wouldn't be able to in the nearest future.
16 seven
The day before the event, I was on the roof of the venue, dressed in the same uniform I wore previously. Jumpsuit, rubber gloves, goggles, and a respirator covering half my face. The ultimate return of Jose Rivas.
No one except the janitor had asked me why I came back so soon when I was making my way through the bowels of the building.
"Management requested," I muttered out on my way to the stairs. Because elevators were always unpredictable as far as the headcount inside went. No one took stairs. Lazy was the trend. As for me, an extra set of steps was never a problem.
The massive square shaped power sprayer I'd brought in today was designed differently from the one I carried last time. It did hold some fluid but had a secret compartment that hid the forged Picasso.
Technically, I was there to kill a million roaches and needed an actual sprayer to pretend I was doing my job should someone see me.
But frankly, nobody looks at exterminators, especially not the rich. And the last thing they want to know is what you're eradicating.
I started at the top and worked my way down. The building was old—or historical according to the internet—but rehabbed to hell, full of marble and bad taste. A perfect place to show off an expensive painting, or to humiliate a man in front of two hundred witnesses.
