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by Genevieve Valentine

  She looked up the long way to Bo’s face, held his gaze until she was sure of him.

  She said, “I’d like to speak to your employer.”

  × × × × × × ×

  The employer was waiting for her in the living room past the dusty shop and the creaky stairs that Suyana couldn’t imagine Daniel taking seriously. She imagined Daniel took the woman in charge very seriously. Despite the hour, her black suit was crisp, and she sat with her shoulders canted just backward from straight, the position you learned when an IA trainer came by twice a week to strap you into the yoke until you lost the will to resist it. Hakan would have been proud of posture like that.

  Suyana could have asked Bo to relay this over the line; she was sure enough of her offer sight unseen, and Bo would have just nodded and it would have been agreed. But there had been enough unseen things. Sometimes you wanted to look the enemy in the eye.

  Suyana’s instinct was to wait through that first edged silence until Li Zhao introduced herself properly, but one look at Li Zhao changed her mind. They’d stand all night in silence waiting on information they both already knew. Suyana didn’t have the time.

  “I’m here to offer you an exclusive,” she said.

  “For how much?”

  “Let’s not make this about money,” Suyana said, as pleasantly as she could manage. Money spent too easily. It was better to be owed.

  Li Zhao raised her eyebrows and stood. “Then what are we making this about?”

  Bo shifted beside her, little more than an inhale that wavered on the way out, but the hair on the back of Suyana’s neck stood up when Li Zhao stopped moving and glanced at him. Suyana didn’t dare look over; whatever Bo was suggesting, it was between him and Li Zhao. Suyana could do nothing but go on.

  “I’d require open communication with every snap currently in Paris, including Daniel Park.”

  Li Zhao folded her arms across her chest—carefully, practiced. If her thumbs weren’t trembling, you’d never know she was nervous.

  But this wasn’t a challenge; it was merely a defense against poor negotiation, and that much Suyana understood. Li Zhao was still listening—she was a professional—and tonight Suyana would rather deal with business than ideals.

  “He’s been forbidden to contact you. He can’t maintain objectivity.”

  Suyana imagined the floor of the Assembly, a year of not quite looking up at the balcony so he wouldn’t have to not quite look back.

  “I didn’t ask for his life story,” she said, hoping it sounded as arch as Magnus. “I asked for his contact and cooperation.”

  Not unkindly, Li Zhao said, “What could you possibly be offering me that would mean opening up my employees to such dangerous exposure?”

  Suyana tried to smile, but she was tired, and it came out like it had when she was thirteen, sitting in a jail cell and listening to a stranger explain the rest of her life; lips pulled a little tighter over her closed teeth. She’d become a decent diplomat, for someone whose first instinct was how to make her enemies vanish.

  She said, “I’d like to start a revolt. You’ll want to be there.”

  × × × × × × ×

  Magnus’s message had come in while she was at Bonnaire, and reading it gave her the same muted, infuriating calm of his cadence as if he’d told her in person.

  He made a phone call. With him now.

  He and Ethan were sitting at opposite sides of Ethan’s dining room table, and though both Magnus’s hands were visible, she had the sense Ethan was at gunpoint when he turned slowly, deliberately, to look at her.

  There was no way Magnus would have announced his intentions. He’d have let this play out with her here, for maximum effect. But Ethan’s eyes were red and glittering—the wait and his guilt must have worn on him—and he looked exhausted past the point of defense.

  She was thankful for the hired killer. The wait had done more to break Ethan than she could have. (She wasn’t sure what she’d have been willing to do to break him; it was better to leave some lines untested.)

  “Evening, Suyana,” Magnus said, without looking up from his paperwork. Of course he’d found paperwork somewhere.

  She pulled off her silk shirt. It was a single motion, too fast—she hissed when the yank on the dried blood tore the wound on her ribs open—but it did what it was supposed to do. Ethan stood up and stepped toward her; even Magnus rose halfway before he could stop himself, and pressed his palms to the table.

  “Suyana, Jesus, that’s—oh God, there’s blood everywhere—Suyana, what happened?”

  She closed the distance, so Ethan could reach out and touch her whenever the last of his dignity left him.

  “Margot sent someone to find me, after you called her and told her you’d left me alone.”

  Ethan had been reaching out a hand toward her, but it dropped like she’d cut a string. “No,” he said. After a moment, less certain, “No.”

  “Ethan.” She took another step; he shrank away as much as he could without stepping backward. “You know it’s true. You knew it was true when she encouraged you to sign the contract last year, after I got shot by someone they never traced back to his employer.”

  The sound of his mouth clicking shut punctuated her last word, a door closing behind him.

  She didn’t dare look away—this was important, it was important to look at him while all the parts fell into place—but she was sorry to miss Magnus, to whom this was also occurring (maybe not for the first time, one of them was cleverer than the other), and who was realizing the depth of his mistakes.

  “Oh. Oh my God.” Ethan was so shaken that he practically pushed himself back into his chair as his legs gave. He wiped a hand over his face, eyes to jaw, like it could keep the truth from coming out.

  But it wouldn’t, and she waited.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said finally, the words wet and scraping. “At first I thought it was just—I mean, just Margot, you know how she is, a suggestion from the chair making sure I went through with it so America looked good—but I was going to offer you the contract anyway, Suyana, I promise.”

  “I believe you.”

  “And then later, when she asked me to keep an eye on you, I thought she had to be mistaken—I mean, you never did anything under the table. I thought she’d gotten you all wrong about just being in this for the cover story.” As he trailed off he was looking at her, and as close to resentful as she’d ever heard him, he said, “That’ll teach me.”

  The scratch on her ribs was beginning to ache.

  “By tomorrow she’ll know Magnus has been here, Ethan. Leili’s already got her plane ticket. Whatever happens now, you’re finished.”

  His eyes were lit practically gold when he looked up at her. Barely, still; she was barely taller even when he was sitting down. He’d spent the last year absently tilting his head lower, the better to hear her.

  “Yeah,” he said, in a tone she’d never heard from him. “She cuts her losses.”

  Magnus was already in the living room, having gotten someone on the phone. She guessed who he was calling; he was hard to trust, but he’d never been slow to catch the direction of events.

  Her eyes stung suddenly. It had been a long night and was only going to get longer, and her stomach was a bag of acid, and for a moment she forgot all her dignity and put her hand on Ethan’s hands, as loose and open as those of a man whose life wasn’t forfeit, just to feel his fingers closing around hers like a fly trap.

  Ethan’s fingertips were warm, and damp as if from tears, and his voice was gentler than she deserved when he said, “So what happens now?”

  She said, “You’re going to marry me.”

  19

  “Daniel, if you’re not planning on a threesome tonight, Li Zhao has a new assignment for you.”

  Kate had waited until Grace was already back home to say anything; relatively gentle, as Kate went. It must be time to test bringing his camera offline. He turned up his collar against the rain, wished ther
e was a mirror where he could fix his hair with his middle fingers so Kate could get the message. “Go ahead, Kate.”

  “Suyana got attacked a few hours ago.”

  The next seconds were a little fuzzy; he knew he didn’t make a sound, mostly because he tasted blood from biting his lip, and he was at the edge of an intersection with people looking at him like he’d nearly walked into traffic.

  He knew why she’d had to put that on the record. He took a deep breath, let it out; Li Zhao would be watching to see how he handled the shock, this wasn’t a betrayal by Kate, he knew why. He swallowed around a sour lump in his throat.

  “Does Grace know? Should I go back?”

  She huffed, disbelief down the line that made him angry until she said, “Negative. There’s been a change of organization.”

  “Oh shit, you killed her?”

  In the background, Dev coughed.

  “You might wish,” Kate said. “We’ve all been redirected to a single assignment.”

  “Oh. For the session?” Proceedings started in under forty-eight hours. It would make sense to wrangle them all together beforehand.

  After too long, Kate said, “It’s preparation, sure. You should look at the attacker first, in case you have an ID.”

  He stood in the doorway of a town house and watched the footage on his phone—a smear of a face and then a jerky step forward and then Suyana slowly turning to look into the camera as she realized she’d been spared. There wasn’t a good look at the attacker’s face until he was already dead and Bo looked down at the corpse. Probably for ID purposes. Bo didn’t miss a trick.

  “So, Bo—”

  “Don’t finish that sentence, please,” said Kate, and he remembered a discussion a long time ago about what sort of work hired guns went into if they lived long enough to retire. “Was he one of the men Margot met with?”

  Daniel shook his head as he tried to decide which lie would keep them least suspicious of Suyana.

  “Margot must be hiring out the job to new people,” he said. “We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Well, then keep a lookout on your way to the church.”

  He put a hand out for no particular reason, nearly jammed a knuckle against the stone wall under his fingers.

  “The church?”

  “Saint-Merri,” Kate said slowly. “For the wedding.”

  Four heartbeats knocked against him so hard he swayed. He pressed his hand harder against the wall, the stone rough against his palm. The doorway was too cramped—his breath echoed in static.

  “Daniel?”

  “No. No, yes, I read you. I don’t—sure. We’re all being called in, fine.”

  “Daniel, she asked for you specifically.”

  “Oh, I bet.” Li Zhao knew how to bring a lesson home, he’d give her that. He was going to get his shit together before he showed up at the parish, though. She wasn’t going to get the satisfaction.

  Kate ground her teeth together twice, like she was chewing her answer.

  “I mean, Suyana asked for you.”

  × × × × × × ×

  If he was shaking when Bo opened the red door and ushered him in, Bo was too nice to mention it. He only said, “Are the others in place outside?”

  “I recognized two,” Daniel said—tourists sitting near the fountain.

  “That might be enough. So. You can sit anywhere you’d like. The city clerk who’s making it legal is sitting in the front row, avoid her. I’m nearer the door, in case the groom tries to run.”

  Daniel couldn’t feel his hands. “What?”

  “Suyana has plans for how all this is going to go,” Bo said, caught somewhere between business and concern. “I’m not sure who shares them.”

  The answer almost burst out of him—it doesn’t matter, once Suyana has plans—but Daniel closed his mouth. He wasn’t good at predicting the future. The past was a dangerous place to draw conclusions from.

  They were already at the altar, Suyana and Ethan and Magnus and a priest. Suyana was saying something to Magnus in a voice too low to carry, but Ethan was sniffling into his sleeve, and the soggy, despairing sound bounced off the ceiling every so often.

  “Daniel, think about this,” Bo said, but he was already moving forward, past the hulking columns and their paintings, toward the altar.

  She stopped and looked at him even though he didn’t think he’d made any noise, and it was the stupidest thing in the world to imagine she’d known it was him before she looked up, but damn if she didn’t meet his gaze like she knew just who she was expecting to see.

  He’d only been apart from her a few weeks, but when she walked toward him (midsentence, and Magnus stared after her a moment), she looked like a different person. The circles under her eyes were a sunken purple, the unhappy lines around her mouth like a battle carved into a stone. Her dress was the pale gray of a storm, and she wore no makeup, not even on her scar.

  No wonder Ethan was terrified; Daniel was fighting the urge to run for it, and all she’d asked him to do was watch.

  But it wasn’t a surprise to Daniel the way it must have been for that poor asshole. This wasn’t the first time Daniel had seen what she looked like when she was preparing to turn a story around.

  He was angry—he was furious, a year of disappearing inside the act and where had it landed her, what good was all this—but somehow the only thing he could think to say was, “Are you all right?”

  She took in a low breath, like now she had to recalibrate, and for a second the mask slid into a face he almost recognized. But it passed, and whatever answer she might have been looking for escaped her. Instead she said, “After the wedding, Ethan’s on his own for a while. Li Zhao is arranging for someone to cover him just in case he decides to make a run for it, but it won’t be live.”

  “Live?” He resisted the urge to cover the camera.

  “We’re sending a feed of the wedding ceremony directly to Closer TV and half a dozen news stations.”

  It took him a second, but he caught up. “So the IA and the Americans can’t pretend it didn’t happen. With six stations competing, it will have aired somewhere by then. Fuck.”

  “The new American Face is on a plane taking off in five minutes,” Suyana said. “Margot has America’s blessing. She’s retiring Ethan before the first day of session.”

  That was the day after tomorrow, and a wedding wasn’t going to save him from being kicked out if Margot had made up her mind. “So why—” He stopped as he realized.

  Ethan. That big, dumb grinner. All that attentive care of Suyana, done for the benefit of someone else.

  “But he stood with you when the UARC bad news broke.”

  “He thought he was using leverage against her, for my sake. He didn’t understand her.”

  The church’s scattered points of light floated in her dark eyes, and when they moved, it was his only sign she was still thinking and not just delivering conclusions. “After we drop off Ethan, we go dark while I talk to Grace and Martine.”

  “Jesus Christ, what about? Who’s we?”

  “You and Bo and me.”

  “Fuck you, why don’t you ask me first?” It was quiet—he didn’t have the breath for more—but it was a year of anger all at once, and she flinched. Good, he thought, somewhere deep and horrible.

  He expected some rejoinder about how she’d assumed he was used to following her around. Maybe something about how Li Zhao made the decisions, not him.

  Instead she just said, like she hadn’t slept in two years, “I have to go get married,” and it turned out that was the worst thing she could have said.

  She was moving to go; she was already the sliver of her face he always caught when she was trying not to be seen.

  He picked the name that would sting. “And Magnus?”

  “I don’t know what he’ll do,” she said, and before he could point out what a terrible fucking idea it was not to be certain about people’s loyalties before you decided to stage a coup with them, she
was back in front of the gold-plated altar, taking Ethan’s hands gently away from his face and holding them in hers, gazing up at him as steadily as any other snake with something it’s decided to kill.

  Magnus was looking sidelong at Daniel. “Who’s that?”

  “My brother. Let’s get started.”

  The priest was confused, but at least it made him brief, and it was going normally until Suyana said her “I do” with such quiet, warm conviction that Daniel startled. He shouldn’t have, he knew what kind of actress she had become, but still, he was happy Bo was over his shoulder and out of sight. (He hadn’t looked around for any of the others. He didn’t care where they were.)

  At least he wasn’t alone; Magnus looked twitchy about her sincerity until Ethan took a heavy breath and echoed “I do,” and it was too late for second thoughts, at which point Magnus started typing into his tablet, because of course he would.

  Ethan’s voice was steady, and his hands closed around hers as she spoke in a gesture—apology, acquiescence—just for her. One edge of her mouth twitched with her effort to hold it still, and suddenly the eye contact turned into something softer, something shared instead of a demand. Daniel wished he’d been looking elsewhere.

  But the priest was invoking God, and the pronouncement was echoing in the rafters of the silent church, and everything around them was gleaming gold, and that was a moment to end a broadcast on. Just as well Daniel had gotten it. He’d take any victories he could come by.

  He missed the kiss—he was looking up at the golden sunburst and didn’t want to drop his head too fast—but it didn’t matter. He’d gotten the shot that would sell. Anybody could kiss. Didn’t mean anything.

  × × × × × × ×

  It was nearly dawn when they filed out of the church, almost like a real wedding procession.

  “Blackout,” Kate said on an exhale that sounded like Li Zhao was out of hearing. “Comms are clear.”

  A woman who had been having a lively conversation on the phone slid a packet into Magnus’s hand as she passed by, and Ethan (with Suyana’s hand tucked into the crook of his elbow like this was a real wedding) took it from Magnus without even feigning surprise that he was going to have a ten-second honeymoon.