And, honestly, paying attention had been something of a struggle for the past ten days.
Ever since I’d watched Wes walk away from my doorstep, I could barely focus on anything. Not my classes, or my job, or even the words on the pages of my favorite novel. Even now, riding from one delivery to the next, I couldn’t help myself from replaying our goodbye over and over in my mind…
We didn’t hold hands when he walked me home. It seemed, through some unspoken agreement, we both needed a little space after so thoroughly invading each other’s privacy back on the bridge. This connection… it was new. Scary. With Wes, I was swimming in uncharted waters. Miles offshore, so far over my head I’d lost sight of any familiar points of land.
“Thank you,” I whispered finally, when we were a block or so from my apartment.
Wes flinched at the sound of my voice — he seemed far away, lost in distant thoughts I had no access to. His expression was unreadable, his dark eyes carefully averted from mine. In lieu of a real response, he turned his head slightly to glance at me, nodded once in acknowledgement, and kept walking.
This was an entirely different man than the one who’d held me in the circle of his arms on the bridge.
I had no idea what to think, to say, to do. So, heart lodged firmly in my throat, I walked the rest of the way home without breaking the silence until we reached my door.
“Well, this is me,” I mumbled, my eyes on the cobblestones by my feet. They were surprisingly shiny — worn smooth by the tread of thousands of feet over hundreds of years. When, once again, Wes failed to respond, I scuffed the toe of my sandal against a stone, abruptly angry at the turn my magical night had taken.
Lifting my eyes, I glared at his expressionless face.
“I don’t know what happened to you in the last thirty minutes and, frankly, I don’t care. You might not want to admit it to me or even to yourself, but something changed tonight. Shit got personal. We invaded each other’s space. We made ourselves vulnerable for a second. You saw me, and I saw you, Wes.”
I was breathing hard by the time I broke off — I’d become quite worked up as the words poured from me in a frustrated torrent — but that didn’t stop me from continuing.
“Maybe we got too personal. Crossed that comfortable little line of distance strangers draw around themselves to keep things superficial and fun. But, if you remember, you’re the one who dragged me across that damn bridge and across that damn line!” I threw my hands up, exasperated. “I don’t play games, Wes. That’s not me. I don’t do half-assed or hot-and-cold, high-handed or hush-hush. So, even though you don’t want to hear it, I’m going to tell you anyway…”
I narrowed my eyes at him and took a deep breath.
“Thank you. Thank you. For tonight, for the bridge. For giving me a little piece of your strength when I needed it.” I wanted to reach out for his hand but I held back, determined to get the rest of my speech out. “You did something for me that no one on this earth has ever even attempted to. You put yourself out there for me. You made me face my biggest fear. And, up until a half hour ago, when you started pulling the silent treatment on me, you gave me what was probably the best night of my entire existence.”
Almost against his will, his face softened. His dark eyes thawed a bit at my words, locking onto mine and holding in a stare I wanted to shake off in a fit of childish indignation but couldn’t quite bring myself to break.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he finally whispered, his words so low it seemed as if he was talking to himself.
I lifted my eyebrows in question, but he didn’t have any answers for me.
Our eyes locked as another moment dragged on in total silence. We stood, taking each other in as we had that first day in Heroes’ Square. Except tonight, we weren’t total strangers. There was an underlying intensity, an intimacy, in our glances now. A deeper understanding that hadn’t been there before.
He took a deep breath, as though to steady himself, before leaning forward into my space. My breath caught as he laced one hand into the hair at the nape of my neck and, to my absolute astonishment, pressed a lingering kiss to my forehead. My eyes closed automatically as I savored the sensation of his lips on my skin. I breathed in his scent — rich leather and exotic, unnamable spices.
I wondered what he’d taste like.
My heart was pounding so hard I was sure he could hear it. I should’ve been embarrassed by its rapid throbbing, but I wasn’t. Nothing in my life had ever felt so right as the soft press of Wes’ mouth against my forehead.
And yet, after a few seconds of internal celebratory cartwheels, I began to realize this wasn’t the beginning of a fairytale romance — it was the ending.
A goodbye kiss.
He pulled away, but I still felt the imprint of his lips on my forehead like a searing wound. A brand of his own making, scorched permanently into my skin like an invisible tattoo.
“Goodbye, Faith.” He stared at me for another moment, his eyes roaming my face as though they were memorizing my every feature. Then, he turned on his heel and walked away.
“So that’s it?” I called after him, unable to let him leave without some kind of explanation. “You’re just going to walk away, Wes?”
He didn’t turn around — he was almost out of sight.
“What about fate?” My voice cracked on the last word.
“Don’t believe in it, Red.” His words drifted back to me through the night, a disembodied specter. “Never have, never will.”
I pressed my eyes closed so I didn’t have to see him disappear into the dark.
Chapter Fourteen: WESTON
NO SHIT SHERLOCK
“Abbott,” I clipped into my phone.
“Identification?” The coolly detached female voice was as familiar to me as my own.
“01908.” I rattled off my personal ID tag from memory.
“Verified,” the voice confirmed. “Hold for connection.”
I waited about thirty seconds, listening to the faint buzz of white noise over the receiver as I was patched through to Command. You’d think the fucking CIA had enough left over in their trillion-dollar budget that they could’ve at least sprung for some canned hold-music.
Breathing hard, I tried to ignore the burning in my calves. The call had come in the middle of my run, and stopping so abruptly after jogging nearly ten miles of Buda’s rolling hills was enough to give even the fittest person shin splints. There was no avoiding it — when Command called, you answered. No exceptions.
Finally, Benson’s voice crackled over the line, his tone curt, sharper than a whip.
“Abbott. You haven’t checked in for twelve days. I need a status report on Szekely.”
I took a deep breath and prayed for patience. Dealing with Benson was a bigger pain in the ass than a fucking colonoscopy. Handlers were rarely a joy to work with, but Benson brought an all new level of asshattery to the job.
“Surveillance is in place on the exterior office doors.” I stepped off the deserted running path and positioned my body against a nearby tree, so I had an unobscured view of anyone approaching. “I’ve got nothing inside yet — there are armed guards posted at every exit point. Not Rent-a-Cop types, either. Paid hitters, each with a long list of bodies on his resume.”
“We need eyes inside that building.”
No shit, Sherlock.
I somehow managed to hold in the retort. “I’ve been tailing three of Szekely’s top men — all of them are Hungarian ex-army intelligence, black ops. They take care of anyone who Szekely considers a threat or who so much as looks at him the wrong way. I’ve bugged their home landlines, but that has limited value. They do almost all their business on company cell phones. I’m working on access.”
“And Szekely’s main compound?”
“Impenetrable. Cameras, bodyguards, attack dogs. State of the art security system, with motion detection and heat sensors. You put your fucking pinky toe on his property, his head of security kno
ws about it.”
“This man is running one of the biggest crime syndicates in Europe and no one’s ever seen his face. We’re the best intelligence organization in the world with the most sophisticated technology known to man, and we have nothing more than a grainy surveillance photo of his profile from two decades ago,” Benson said brusquely, as though I were somehow at fault for the agency’s twenty-year-old shitty intel.
“Man’s a ghost.” I shrugged.
Benson sighed. “Have you at least been able to confirm that Szekely is using the couriers to transfer arms and correspondence to his assets in the city?”
“Nothing definite, yet,” I hedged, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction.
“Abbott.” I could easily envision Benson leaning back in his chair, his doughy arms crossed over his chest in exasperation. “It sounds to me like you’re sitting on your ass, enjoying a Hungarian holiday. You’ve been there three weeks — I expect something more than phone taps and nanny cams. Where are you with infiltration? I assume you’ve isolated a mark, by this point.” He scoffed.
I scraped the knuckles of my free hand against the rough bark of the tree.
It was easy to be pompous and peremptory from behind a desk. With his overweight, out-of-shape ass parked firmly in a plush leather chair, the only thing that made Benson break a sweat these days was Free Doughnut Day in the company cafeteria. He wouldn’t last a day out here. He had essentially no field experience. He probably hadn’t picked up his gun since he left The Farm. And here I was, reporting my every move to him.
Bureaucracy at its finest.
“Well?” Benson prompted impatiently.
“I have a mark,” I bit out, Faith’s face flashing in my mind.
“Excellent. I expect some intel on that front within the week. And Abbott?”
“Sir.” The word curdled on my tongue, sour as spoiled milk.
“If you can’t deliver, I will assign someone else to this mission. Keep me informed.”
He clicked off.
I slid the phone carefully back into the bicep-holster I used while running, took a deep breath in through my nose, and punched the tree with so much force, every knuckle on my right hand split wide open.
Chapter Fifteen: FAITH
MARIONETTE STRINGS
I walked the dark halls of Hermes in a semi-daze. Ten days post-Wes and my anger had fizzled into depression, which in turn had faded into begrudging resignation. It was time to admit defeat, to acknowledge that he’d been right all along.
Fate was bullshit.
I’d never see Wes Adams again.
I wasn’t sure why that hurt so damn much. I barely knew the guy.
Can you miss something that was never yours to begin with?
Can you mourn the absence of someone you never even had?
My chest ached as though Wes had reached under my ribcage and removed a piece of my heart when he’d walked away. Perhaps I was grieving for our potential — for the future that might have been. Because in three short encounters with Wes, I’d felt things no one else had ever stirred in me. It sounded so cliché I couldn’t say it out loud — I could barely even say it in my head — but it was as though my soul had recognized something kindred in his. As if some facet of my innermost self had cried out because, at long last, it had found its mate.
In those briefest of shared moments, we’d come to know one another not through conversations or games of Twenty Questions, but through something far more elemental. Bound together by essential, invisible threads, we’d moved, breathed, existed as one — two twin marionettes on the same string.
But he’d cut his lines and walked away.
Now, I hung alone in empty air, as I’d done for most of my life. The solitude was familiar, but somehow seemed more unbearable now than it ever did before I’d known Wes existed.
Margot had surely noticed the absence of my usual cheerful disposition over the past two weeks, but she’d refrained from commenting or shoving an I-told-you-so down my throat. Instead, she’d been intent on distracting me — dragging me all over the city, exploring historic sites and hot clubs in equal measure. She even forced me to cross the Chain Bridge into Buda on our day off, waiting patiently as I freaked out for five long seconds before grabbing my hand and guiding me over.
As I’d counted to five, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining his face or hearing his voice.
You breathe them in, count them down. And when they’re over…
You tell the fear to go fuck itself.
I wasn’t sure whether it was his words or the memory of his dark eyes that made my fear flee. But, for the first time since I’d come to Budapest, I made it across the damn bridge without being reduced to a puddle of panic. I guess, if nothing else, he’d given me a way to get over my fears.
Too bad I couldn’t apply the same strategy when it came to getting over him.
I blew out an exasperated huff of air as I walked toward the staff room. I’d been so distracted, I’d completely forgotten my book bag in my locker after today’s shift. Typically, I would’ve seen that as a sign from the gods that I didn’t need to spend my night studying, but Professor Varga had emailed the entire class earlier this evening, warning of a possible pop quiz during tomorrow’s lecture. If I didn’t brush up on Hungarian history, my GPA would start to suffer right along with my heart.
The office was eerily quiet.
Deliveries stopped at 8 p.m. each night, and it was well past 10 p.m. by now. I’d never seen the halls so deserted — no couriers were rushing from the sorting room to their bikes, no new packages were speeding by on the now-motionless conveyor belt. The front doors had been firmly bolted, the entry lights doused. Irenka, Marko, and Istvan were absent from their usual posts. I’d had to walk around the side of the building and scan my company badge to open the small entrance by the delivery ramps.
It was strange to see what was typically a hub of endless activity totally silent — like wandering an amusement park alone after closing time, when the twirling carnival lights had gone dark and the rides had drawn to a standstill. It felt eerie. Unnatural.
I cast wary eyes around the empty office, suddenly worried I wasn’t supposed to be here after business hours.
But, surely, it was okay for me to dart in and out for a textbook. It wasn’t like I was vandalizing the place. I’d be here less than five minutes. No reason to freak out.
Still, I picked up my pace when I rounded a corner and spotted the door.
Halfway down the hallway, I started to a stop when I heard the unmistakable sounds of muffled conversation. Feet frozen, my eyes traveled to the small alcove I passed each day on the way to my locker. The double doors there were always firmly closed during my shifts, but now I saw they were slightly ajar, allowing hushed, male voices to spill into the passage and reach my ears. I couldn’t make out their words — they were speaking Hungarian — but the low, urgent nature of their tones made my feet falter and my heart begin to pound.
A little voice in the back of my mind was screaming at me to turn back, telling me something wasn’t right here. That I should forget the damned book and walk — no, run — for the nearest exit.
Curiosity killed the cat, my inner voice shrieked.
I was more of a dog person, anyway.
Dismissing my intuition, I crept forward, my footfalls soft against the carpeted floor. When I reached the alcove, I peered around the corner through the cracked door. Two men wearing the same uniform Marko and Istvan always dressed in — night guards, from the looks of it — were standing in front of a large bank of screens. Their discussion was growing more heated by the second, but my attention was focused on the pixelated wall behind them. From the looks of it, I’d stumbled upon a surveillance room.
There were six monitors, each displaying various views of hallways and exit points in what appeared to be multiple buildings. Some of the split-screen images showed what looked like the Hermes office interior; others were entirely
foreign to me. On the largest monitor in the center, there was a computerized street map of Budapest, with several red blinking dots scattered at different locations throughout the city.
I wasn’t a tech expert by any means, but it looked like they were tracking something. Several somethings, actually.
But what — the bikes? The packages?
Why did a simple courier service need so much security?
And, more importantly… was I about to appear on one of those monitors?
I felt my stomach churn with unease at the thought. It took effort, but I managed to keep my eyes from wildly scanning the ceiling above, looking for cameras trained on me, as I backed slowly away from the door.
It was time to get out of here. Screw the textbook, screw the quiz. I didn’t want to be at Hermes another moment. The guards were distracted by their argument — they’d never know I was here.
Slinking back toward the exit, I cursed my stupid decision-making the entire time. Then, I cursed Wes Adams for clouding my head and making me forget my damn book bag in the first place. And then, I cursed Professor Varga because, really, if he hadn’t threatened a freaking pop quiz, I wouldn’t be in this mess at all.
As I neared the back door, I felt some of my panic ease. I hadn’t done anything wrong — I wasn’t sure why I’d responded with such fear. Even if I’d been spotted, it’s not like they would’ve done anything to me. I’d obviously overreacted.
Or… maybe not.
Because when I rounded the final corner that would lead me to the exit, I bumped straight into Istvan’s broad chest. And he did not look happy to see me.
***
“How did you get in here?” he hissed for the second time, his hands wrapped like iron shackles around my biceps. His normally friendly eyes were narrowed on my face and filled with suspicion.
“I told you already, Istvan! I scanned my badge and came through the delivery entrance.” I tried to calm my racing heartbeat. This was Istvan. We were friends — or, if not friends, then acquaintances. I said hi to him every time I arrived for a shift. He laughed at Margot’s lame jokes. He wouldn’t hurt me.
Erasing Faith Page 9