Page 64 of The Rook’s Obsession

Now I’m looking at a picture of two children whose father isn’t coming home tonight, and the pride is nowhere to be found.

My hands are steady when I stand up, because they always are. That’s what training does. It keeps your hands steady even when the rest of you is falling apart.

Nick is beside me, checking the street, confirming we’re clear. He’s doing all the practical things that need to be done while I stand here holding a dead man’s cash and thinking about all the other wallets I never opened. All the other pockets I went through without looking at the photos. The families I never thought about, because thinking about them wasn’t part of the job description.

How many of them had children? How many of them were someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s son? I never asked, because Vincenzo never told me, and I never wanted to know. The targets were names on a page. Coordinates. Schedules. Vulnerabilities to exploit. They were never people. They couldn’t be people, because if they were, then what I was doing had a weight to it I couldn’t carry.

Now I’m carrying it. All of it, all at once, standing in a narrow alley with blood on my hands and a dead man’s family staring up at me from behind a plastic sleeve.

Were the reasons even real? The justifications Vincenzo gave me for each assignment—were any of them true? Or was every job just another move on his board, another piece removed because it served his interests? Did the man in Prague deserve what I did to him? The woman in Lyon? The couple in Budapest?

I’ll never know. That’s the worst part. The man who gave the orders is a liar, and liars don’t leave records of their reasons.

We’re three blocks away before either of us speaks. Nick dropped Marco’s phone down a storm drain. The cash is in my pocket. The blade is clean and back in my jacket. From the outside, we’re just two people walking home from the market. Inside, I am somewhere very far away.

“Well,” Nick murmurs, breaking the silence. “We make a hell of a team.”

I don’t look at him. He lets the silence stretch for another half block before trying again, quieter this time. “Ivy. Talk to me.”

“He had kids.” My voice is flat. The professional version of me, the one that gets through things by turning off everything that isn’t essential. “A boy and a girl. Both young. There were photos in his wallet.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I saw.”

“I used to be able to do this without thinking about it. That was the whole point. You don’t think, you don’t feel, you do the job and move on.” I stare at the street ahead of us. “I can’t stop thinking about how many times I moved on.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“Did I? Every time?” Jesus, there’s an edge of hysteria in my voice, and I can’t soften it no matter how I try. “Or did I do what Vincenzo told me to do and call it the same thing because it was easier than asking questions?”

He doesn’t answer right away. That’s one of the things about him. He doesn’t fill silence with noise just to make it more comfortable. He lets it breathe. He even lets it hurt, if it needs to.

We cross a small bridge. The water catches the afternoon light and throws it back in scattered pieces. Everything looks normal. The world doesn’t rearrange itself when you take a life. It just keeps going, indifferent, while you’re the one who has to figure out how to keep going with it.

“This time was different,” he finally decides. “You know that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.” He stops walking. I take two more steps before stopping, too, and turning to face him. His pale blue eyes are steady, the way they always are, but there’s something harder underneath the calm. Something that isn’t gentle. Something that brings to mind the man he was in the years we spent apart. “This time, you did it to protect yourself. To protect me, too. You did it to protect everything we came here to do. That man would’ve picked up his phone and made a call, and within the hour, Vincenzo would’ve known exactly where we are. And then what? We run? We lose the only chance we have to stop him? What happens after that? I’ll tell you. We would spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.”

“That doesn’t make it⁠—”

“It makes it necessary.” He steps closer. It’s not aggressive. He’s not crowding me. He’s stepping closer like he wants to make sure I hear what he’s about to say and let it sink in. “I will never feel sorry for someone dying if it means protecting you. I won’t. You can ask me to feel a lot of things, and I’ll try, because it’s you. But not that. There is nothing in this world more important than your life. Nothing.”

When the words hit, they don’t land gently. It’s more like I just fell from a great height and all the air got knocked from my lungs.

“You didn’t know those people, Ivy,” he reminds me. “The ones from before. And you might never know. But this one, you did know. You know exactly why you did what you did, and the reason is that you deserve to be alive. That’s it. That has to be enough.”

Here’s this man who spent twelve years thinking I was dead and still came looking for me. He let me shoot him and fight him at every turn, and he never once stopped showing up. He watched the street while I did something terrible, and he’s not judging me for it. He’s still standing in front of me, telling me my life is worth more than my guilt, and he means it. I know he means it.

I don’t know how to cry anymore, not really. Still, there’s a burning sensation behind my eyes that I haven’t felt in a long time. “Okay,” I say quietly.

He doesn’t ask if I’m all right, because he knows I’m not. He probably knows I won’t be for a while. Instead, he takes the paper bag I’m still carrying so my hands are free, and we walk together back to the safe house. The city is still moving around us the way it always does, completely oblivious. Somewhere behind us, a man in a blue jacket sits in an alley and will never go home again.

I’ll make dinner tonight. I’ll boil the pasta and grate the cheese. I’ll do something completely ordinary with my hands, because ordinary is the only antidote for what’s crawling through my chest right now.

I didn’t know until now how much I need the ordinary.

NICK