Page 42 of The Rook’s Obsession

“Son of a bitch.”

I’m on my feet before the words finish leaving my mouth, ignoring the fire in my leg, scanning for confirmation of what I already know. Her shoes are gone. The whiskey bottle’s on the nightstand, half-empty now. The closet is open, and the jacket she was wearing is missing.

She left. She actually left.

I press both hands against the dresser and lean into them, my head bowed, breathing through the rush of something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite grief. It exists somewhere in the middle. A hot, sick feeling in my chest that tastes like failure and feels like a door sliding shut.

I didn’t cuff her, goddammit. I made a conscious choice not to restrain her last night, because something in me believed, after everything we’ve been through, she wouldn’t run. After the cabin and the attack, the car chase, then the tracker; something stupid and hopelessly optimistic that shouldn’t exist wanted to honestly believe she would stay.

The woman who fought beside me. Who let me cut a device out of her back with a pocketknife and kissed me like she meant it. I wanted to believe that same woman wouldn’t wait for me to fall asleep and disappear into the night.

What a fucking fool I am.

I should’ve known better. Hell, I do know better. This is who she is. Not Laura. Not the girl who curled against my side and fell asleep listening to my heartbeat. This is Ivy. The trained operative who sees trust as a vulnerability and intimacy as a tool. I gave her an opening, and she took it. It’s exactly what I would’ve done in her position.

That doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

It’s going to hurt a hell of a lot more before Liam flat-out kills me. After everything, I had her, and I let her walk out the door because I thought one night meant something.

I’m pulling on my boots when the door handle turns. I freeze, staring, watching the door swing open as she walks in carrying two cups of coffee and a small brown paper bag.

When she sees me, she stops. I’m standing in the middle of the room, one boot on, one boot off. Phone in hand. Wearing an expression that probably looks exactly as wrecked as I feel. Her eyes move from my face to the phone to the boot and back to my face before something moves in her expression. It’s not quite amusement, and it’s not quite guilt.

“You thought I left,” she murmurs.

I don’t trust my voice. I settle for setting my phone down on the dresser and staring at her.

“There’s a coffee shop down the road—we passed it on the way here, remember?” She sets the cardboard carrier on the dresser next to my phone and takes out one of the cups. “The coffee in the room looked terrible. They had food, too, so I got a couple of muffins and some scones, too. They looked too good to resist.”

She pulls out what looks like a blueberry muffin before sitting on the foot of the bed and crossing her legs. She then takes a sip of her coffee like she didn’t just take ten years off my life.

I pick up my cup and take a big gulp. It’s excellent, though even if it wasn’t, it would taste that way. I guess relief has something to do with it.

“I thought about it,” she admits after a moment in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. She’s a woman who’s thought something through and come out on the other side. “After you fell asleep last night. The keys were right there, waiting for me. I had the angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other.”

I’m glad this all seems funny to her. It didn’t feel so funny from where I’m standing. “Why didn’t you?” I ask, because I have to.

Now she’s quiet, staring into her cup before breaking off a piece of muffin, popping it into her mouth, and chewing slowly. She looks a hell of a lot better than I expected this morning after everything she drank yesterday, but then again, she could be used to it. Hard drinking and being able to keep a calm head afterward could have been one of the many lessons drilled into her, and it would be easy to understand why. One never knows when the situation will call for sitting down with a bottle of whiskey before pulling off a job.

Finally, she breaks the silence. “Running means starting over alone. I’ve been alone for the last twelve years. I just didn’t know it until a few days ago.”

She looks at me, and her green eyes are clearer than I’ve seen them since Prague. Still sharp and focused, yes, but without the hostility. There’s still a wall between us, but that wall has a door in it now. Cracked open, just enough. “I’m tired of being alone.”

My hands are still trembling when I sit down next to her. I wrap them around the coffee cup to hide it, though I think she notices and pretends not to.

“So,” she continues, straightening up, all business again. Whatever vulnerability she just showed has already been folded up and tucked away, stored somewhere I can’t reach. “What are we doing next?”

“About?”

“About everything. Vincenzo’s not going to stop. With or without a tracker, he won’t leave a loose end. I know too much about his operation, his network, his people. I know every safe house and every asset he’s run through Europe in the past five years. That’s not the kind of information he can afford to have walking around in someone else’s head.”

She’s right. The clinical way she lays it out, through an assassin’s perspective, treating herself as a liability to be neutralized, makes my stomach clench. “First things first,” I decide, forcing myself through a bite of muffin, which quickly turns into a second, bigger bite because this thing is damn good. “I need to talk to Liam.”

She watches me pick up my phone and pull up his contact. The fact that he answers on the second ring tells me he’s been waiting. These days, he’s always waiting.

“Where are you?” His voice is clipped, intense. The voice of a man who’s been running scenarios in his head all night and is only waiting to find out which one turned out to be true.

“South. New location. We had company yesterday.” I give him the rundown—the diner, the tattooed man, the car chase, the truck in the ditch. With every detail, his silence gets heavier. I can hear him absorbing it before trying to process it.