Page 59 of Six
“I… Can we go outside?” she asked, suddenly wanting to feel the cool ocean air on her skin. He studied her, then nodded and stepped back again, gesturing her to go ahead of him. She grabbed a blanket from the back of a chair as she passed and as soon as they stepped out, she wrapped it around her shoulders. Gavin remained in just his shirt.
She took a seat on the swinging bench, and he sat in a chair beside her. Gently, she pushed herself into a slow, rhythmic sway.
“About eight years ago, I was on an op,” she started. “He was another AISE agent. We were both undercover at the time, and I was playing his weekend girlfriend. I flew back and forth between Italy and the US regularly for over a year so that I could keep my job here and play the role AISE needed me to play.
“After several months, the relationship stopped being fake and started to feel more real. Well, as real as those things can get when you’re both undercover. I think we both relied on each other to be the other’s anchor—we were the only two people who knew that we weren’t really the horrible people we were portraying, and we, well, it brought us pretty close.”
She rocked in silence for a few more minutes, remembering that year—the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.
“He didn’t make it, did he?” Gavin asked, his voice quiet in the night.
She shook her head. “No, he didn’t. At the end, his cover was blown by a double agent from another country who knew him. We were on a yacht in the Mediterranean, and we managed to escape, but he’d been shot. And stabbed. I was in the bathroom during the first attack and staying in that room, in the dark, hearing what they were doing to him, was one of the worst moments of my life.
“But he’d begged me to stay in there.” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat before continuing. “He knew they were coming, and they believed me to be up in the lounge with the owner’s girlfriend. If they found me, they’d kill me, too, he said. If I lived, at least I could try to get his body back to Italy. Back to his family. He was right, of course, but that didn’t mean it was what I wanted.”
Her mind drifted back to that night as she continued to talk. “There were four of them and we had no weapons—we’d been searched before we’d boarded so had nothing. Both of us were good at hand-to-hand combat, but there was no way we could go two against four. Not when the four were armed and had no intention of doing anything other than fire their weapons. If they’d been untrained thugs, maybe. But these weren’t thugs.”
They hadn’t been thugs at all. In fact, they’d been trained by the military of her—their—own country. They’d been as brutal and as efficient as any Special Forces soldier she’d ever encountered. Only they’d had none of the honor or loyalty that was so common among that elite branch of the military.
“They shot him in the stomach. They wanted him to bleed out slowly. Painfully. When they left, we managed to make our way out of the stateroom. I was about to drop the Zodiac boat into the water from the back of the yacht when one of the guards discovered us.
“He came after me first since it was my hand on the lever that was lowering the boat, but Giorgio stepped in front of him. To this day, I don’t know where he found the strength, but somehow he did. In the process of deflecting the blow from the guard’s knife, Giorgio was stabbed in the shoulder. He managed to break the man’s neck, though, and the two of us scrambled into the boat. I had to let minutes, so many precious minutes, tick by before we were far enough away from the yacht that I dared start the engine and make our way to shore.”
Again, she paused, reflecting on that night. From the moment they’d realized his cover had been blown, she’d known—they’d both known—that Giorgio wasn’t going to make it. He’d lasted an hour in the small boat, clutching her hand the entire time, before he breathed his last breath.
“By the time we made it to Sicily, the closest island, he’d been dead for four hours,” she said.
“Do you blame yourself?” Gavin asked.
And that was the crux of it. Some days she did. Some days she hated that she’d stayed in that bathroom. She hated that she hadn’t come out to fight even though it wasn’t a fight they ever could have won. But in the quiet moments, she knew that she’d done the right thing. That Giorgio had made his choices, and she’d made hers. He hadn’t wanted her to die with him, and she wouldn’t have been able to save him if she’d come bursting out of that bathroom. But at least she’d been able to get his body home to his family and provide a detailed report to AISE.
She shook her head.
“I’m glad,” he said softly.
“But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, Gavin,” she said. “That night, more than any other, messed me up. I took a few months off and went to Greece to lick my wounds. I know Giorgio and I did the best we could in the circumstances we were in, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt to lose him. That it didn’t hurt like hell to hold his hand as he died. To promise him I’d tell his family that he loved them. He might not have been the love of my life, but he was a good man and a damn good agent.”
“Do you see him when you look at me?”
She turned her head and looked at him. No, she didn’t see Giorgio. She saw a man she could care about in ways she hadn’t cared for Giorgio. She saw a man she could honestly share her life—all of it—with. But she didn’t ever want to be in the same position as she’d been in with Giorgio again.
She shook her head, but held his gaze. “I don’t,” she said. “But after that night, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t ever get into a serious relationship while I was still with AISE. I know life holds no promises for anyone, but I’m not prepared to go through that again. I don’t want to experience that kind of pain, that kind of hurt, again.”
“And you think you will if we let this thing between us develop into something?”
The moon was dark that night, and she could barely make out his features in the ambient light coming from inside the house. From what she could see, though, his face held no judgment, just concern, and maybe curiosity.
“I don’t know, Gavin. But why would I invite that chance, that pain, into my life again?”
He studied her for another long moment, then rose from his seat. Her eyes tracked him as he took the few steps that brought him to her. Slowly he leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“You don’t invite pain into your life, sweetheart. You find something that’s worth pushing through your fear for.” He drew back and searched her face as her eyes stayed locked on his. He leaned back in again and brushed one more kiss across her forehead, then he straightened. “Good night, Violetta.”
And she watched as he walked away.
* * *
Several hours later, and despite her fatigue, Six tossed and turned as Gavin’s words echoed in her head. She and Giorgio might not have been soul mates, but there was something about sharing that mission together—having the same goals and being in lockstep on how to achieve them—that had brought them together in a unique way. And they’d grown close. Very close.
