Page 53 of The Rook’s Obsession

He goes to her and says something low that I don’t catch. She listens, nods, then looks past his shoulder to me. Her steady gaze is probably meant to be reassuring, and somehow it is.

Then she looks back at Liam. “Do you want to go?” she asks him quietly. “You can tell me the truth.”

He hesitates, then nods. “Yes.”

“Then you should go.”

“No.” He says it the same way. Quiet, certain. Taking her hand, he turns it over in his, looking at it like there’s something important in the lines of her palm. “You’re here. My place is with you. Nick will keep them safe.”

She holds his hand with both of hers and doesn’t argue. Something tells me she knows better than to argue with a decision that was never really up for debate in the first place. He made it before she asked. He made it the moment she told him she was pregnant, probably, and every day since has only confirmed it.

The moment feels private, so I look away. Something aches in my chest, quietly, persistently.

Nick appears at my elbow. He says nothing. He only hands me a fresh latte from the kitchen, and when I take it, we exchange a look that contains more than I think either of us could ever put into words.

NICK

Here we are again. This time, though, we’re on her home turf.

The safe house is tucked above a leather goods shop on a narrow street that smells like canal water and fresh bread. From the outside, it’s nothing. A nondescript door between two storefronts, a buzzer panel with faded names that probably don’t belong to anyone real. The kind of place your eyes slide right past.

Ivy doesn’t buzz. She produces a key and lets us in. The stairwell is clean but bare, lit only by a single window on the landing. She takes the stairs without hesitation, two flights up, to a second door with three separate locks. One key, a second key, then a code punched into a pad so fast I only catch the last two digits.

“Welcome to my office,” she says as she pushes the door open.

I don’t know what I expected. Something sparse, maybe. Functional. A cot, a table, a weapon rack. The kinds of places I’ve set up for short-term operations over the years. Bare bones, nothing personal. In and out.

This isn’t that.

The apartment is small but organized with a precision bordering on surgical. The main room serves as both living space and workspace, and it’s the workspace that stops me in the doorway. One wall is lined with shelving units, and on those shelves is everything a person would need to become someone else entirely. Wigs on foam heads. Contact lens cases in a row, each marked with a color. Makeup kits, and not the kind you’d find at a drugstore. Theatrical grade, professional. Below it, there’s a rack of clothing spanning everything from business formal to evening wear to what looks like a nurse’s uniform still in dry-cleaning plastic.

Below the shelves sits a locked cabinet, which she opens with another key. Inside, arranged in neat rows like library cards, are passports. At least a dozen of them. Different countries, different names. She fans through them with casual efficiency, like she’s done it countless times before.

“Italian, French, Czech, Austrian,” she lists without looking up. “The German one is expired, but it served its purpose.” She pulls one out and checks the photo, then sets it aside. “Greek. That one was a good time.”

There’s nothing I can do but lean against the wall and watch her work. This is Ivy in her element. Not the woman who let me hold her in the bathtub at Liam’s penthouse or the one who ordered pancakes without thinking about it at the diner. This is the version of her that existed for more than a decade without me. The version built from the ground up to disappear and reappear as needed. Watching her is like watching a musician pick up an instrument they haven’t touched in a while. There’s no rust, no hesitation. She moves through the space like it’s an extension of her body.

It should unsettle me. Some of it does. But if I’m being honest with myself—and I’m trying to be—there’s something else underneath the discomfort. Something closer to admiration. She’s good at this, better than good. She operates at a level I’ve only seen in a handful of people, and most of them had entire governments behind them.

She had Vincenzo Russo. The rest, she built herself.

“Stop staring,” she murmurs without turning around.

“I’m not staring. I’m admiring.”

“You’re staring.” She opens a drawer and pulls out two small cases, both about the size of a contact lens container. When she pops them open, I see they hold earpieces. Compact, flesh-toned, nearly invisible. “These are good for about three hundred meters,” she tells me, holding one up. “Longer than that if there’s no heavy interference. We’ll be able to hear each other the entire time we’re inside.”

“You have military-grade comms lying around in a drawer?”

“I have a lot of things lying around in drawers.” She sets the earpieces aside and turns to face me, leaning against the edge of the desk with her arms folded. “Let’s talk about how we’re getting you inside.”

We’ve been circling the membership issue since the jet landed. An establishment like the one Gabriel described doesn’t exactly hand out guest passes. “Liam’s people came through,” I confirm, checking his message again. “One of his contacts in Milan located a member who’s been having financial difficulties. Gambling debts, the expensive kind. In exchange for a very generous and very quiet settlement of those debts, we now have his membership credentials, his entry protocols, and his PIN for the door. The team will leave them for me to pick up on my way in. He’s been encouraged to take an extended holiday somewhere far from Italy for the next month.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Encouraged.”

“Strongly encouraged. Liam’s people can be very persuasive when the situation calls for it.”

“And if someone at the door recognizes that the man walking in isn’t the man whose name is on the membership?”