Page 139 of The Lies We Play

“You were.”

“I just want to know if she lives somewhere safe.”

“She lives somewhere we are about to make safer. Do not ask for her address. When the burner gets to her, and she chooses to give it to you, you can ask her yourself.”

I close my eyes.

The wanting is so bad it makes my hands hurt.

“Is someone watching her?” I ask.

“We don’t know. We are going to assume yes.”

“I should go to her.”

“No.”

“I should be on a plane. I should be there in the morning. I should be —”

“You should be in your apartment, eating, sleeping, and showing up to my office tomorrow at ten. Other than the fact that you would flush your career and abandon Halston’s window of communication, you would also turn Livia from a quiet senior conservator at a respected institute into a public scandal involving a hockey player. The Saint Claires would have her on local news by lunch. You go to Italy tonight, you make her visible.”

The truth lands like a check against the boards. I hate him because he is right.

“We’ll assign an asset to her,” Lang says. “Tomorrow morning. She will not know she has been assigned. The asset will be near enough to intervene if anything moves on her, far enough not to crowd her. Standard protective protocol. We do this more often than you would like to know.”

“Who is it?”

“A woman. Your age. I trained her. She is good. She also speaks fluent Italian, which most of our assets don’t, which is why she gets Florence.”

Not sure if I should be calm. A stranger is going to be near her tomorrow, and the stranger is not me. The stranger is going to know what her routine looks like. What time does she leave for the institute? What route she takes. Whether her left hand still does the thing it does when she is upset, which I don't know about because I have not seen her in a decade and have no business assuming she still has any of the same tells.

I might not even recognize her on the street.

The thought is a hit to the chest.

“Okay. Send the asset. Get her the phone. Do not⁠—”

“Yes?”

“Do not let anything happen to her.”

“We won’t,” Lang is the one who assures me.

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

We sit with that for a second.

Then he says, quieter, “Creed, I'm not going to let it happen again.”

I put my hand over my eyes.

“What did she sound like?”

He is quiet.

“Don’t lawyer me.”