Page 8 of Riggs
“Move,” I murmur, and we do—smooth and unhurried, like we planned the whole thing. Like we’re those people. My hand at her back is hot. She fits under it like she belongs there.
The crowd parts in the oldest ritual there is. People make space around what they think is love. They gawk and they film and they sigh, but they also blink and hesitate and in that heartbeat I thread us through the gap. Down the escalator, onto the moving walkway, off again near the rideshare sign. A couple of civilian Good Samaritans smile at us with “aww” faces, unknowingly blocking the angles I don’t love. I use them like chess pieces. My job is ugly when it’s done right.
“Left,” I say softly, and she lefts. “On my mark, we pick up the pace.”
“Mark,” she echoes, a ghost of a laugh in the word.
Now. We break into that not-quite-jog designed for airports—fast enough to chew distance, slow enough to look like we belong. Nolan chirps on comm that he’s in position. I steer us through a service corridor cut-through that smells like fryer oil and old mop water, and then the doors blow open to the outside. Cold air slaps. Rain needles my neck. The departures level is a string of red brake lights and impatient horns.
The Suburban noses into view, black and gleaming like a shark. Nolan pops the rear door before I even look at him. I sweep the lane—no hostile tails, no crouched feet where there shouldn’t be—but someone is sprinting to our right with his phone already at shoulder height.
I pivot, stepping into his space. “Not today,” I say, and let him see it in my eyes—polite, firm, unmovable. He stutters to a stop like he’s hit a glass wall. Vanessa slides into the back seat. I go in after her, slam the door, and Nolan shoots the gap like he was born to it, merging, signaling, all of it clean and boring to anyone who might be paying attention. The kind of driving that keeps you invisible.
For a block, nobody talks. The wipers thwump. The interior smells faintly of leather and the citrus cleaner I approve for vehicles. Rain pebbles the glass. I feel her next to me, small in the oversized hoodie, the hood now off. Her hair is a little mussed. I have the stupid, caveman urge to smooth it.
“I’m okay,” she says first, a little breathless, like she’s checking with herself and then me.
“You did good,” I say. My voice is rougher than I mean it to be. “You did perfect.”
Her mouth slants. “That’s because my security guy kissed me in front of half the Pacific Northwest.”
“That was a tactic,” I say. I keep my eyes on the side mirror. “It took away the shot.”
“It did,” she agrees, and then she looks at me in that way she has, the look that makes it feel like the car is smaller than it was a second ago. “Also… it was not terrible.”
Understatement of the year. The memory of it hits me like a second delayed impact—the give of her mouth, the soft inhale right before, the way my hand wanted to span her waist and never move. My chest tightens, a pressure I don’t like because it doesn’t belong to the job.
I force a breath through my teeth. “We’ll debrief in the room,” I say, because that’s the safest sentence I own.
“About the kiss?” she asks, too innocent.
“About the route,” I counter, but I can’t quite keep my mouth from kicking up.
Her phone buzzes. Another. Then it goes from buzz-buzz to constant. She unlocks it, and her eyebrows shoot up. “Oh.”
“What?”
She turns the screen so I can see. It’s a blast furnace of notifications. Mentions. Tags. Headlines already cropping up from accounts that exist only to be first. The image on top is a blurry still from the terminal—my shoulder, the hood, the angle of my hand. A caption:VANESSA MERCADO’S NEW MYSTERY MAN?followed by three fire emojis and a heart.
“Viral,” she says, half-amused, half-not. “We’re trending.”
I close my eyes for half a second, then open them. I’m already pulling my phone, already thumbing open the encrypted app we use for internal traffic. I type fast.
SEA arrival compromised. Pap presence heavy. Used cover to extract. Photos everywhere. Need direction. Potential reassignment to reduce risk?
The reply is nearly instant. Dean doesn’t sleep, and if he does, it’s with one eye open.
CALL.
I tap the phone icon and he answers on the first ring. “Talk to me.”
I lay it out clean. He grunts once when I reach the kiss. That grunt could mean a dozen things, but with Dean it usually means something like good thinking, bad optics, we’ll deal.
“Option A, we fight the story,” I say. “We deny, we firewall, we try to reset. Option B, we lean in and use it. Option C, you put someone else on point and move me off the line.”
“You want off the line?” he asks, bluntly.
I look at Vanessa. She’s scrolling, eyes wide, cheeks pink, trying to keep up with a hurricane that decided she’s a coastline. Something in my chest makes a decision without me. “No,” I say, then clear my throat. “Negative. I’m invested.”
