My lovely betrayal

Chapter 4: The File

The first page was a photograph of a man I knew.

I stopped breathing. My fingers tightened on the edges of the paper, crumpling it slightly before I forced myself to relax. Staring back at me, frozen in a grainy surveillance still, was Marcus Webb. My handler. The man who'd recruited me out of the academy, who'd held my hand at Mira's memorial service, who'd assigned me this mission with tears in his eyes and a promise that we would finally get justice.

He was walking into a building in Geneva alongside a man I didn't recognize—tall, silver-haired, expensively dressed. The date stamp was three days before the fire.

"Keep reading," Dante said quietly. He'd retreated to his chair on the other side of the desk, giving me space but not leaving. His presence was a low hum at the edge of my awareness, steady and solid and infuriatingly reassuring.

I turned the page. Bank records. Wire transfers from an account in the Cayman Islands to one registered under Webb's deceased mother's name. Amounts that made my stomach turn. Five hundred thousand. A million. Two million. The payments started six months before Mira died and continued until three months after.

I turned another page. Encrypted emails, decrypted and printed out in neat blocks of text. Webb's voice jumped off the paper, unmistakable in its clipped, paternal tone even when discussing things that made my blood run cold.

The Vasquez woman is getting too close. She's identified three of our assets in the past month alone. I need authorization to handle the situation.

The response, from an address Dante's notes identified as belonging to a shell company linked to the silver-haired man: Handle it. Make it clean.

I looked up. Dante was watching me, his gray eyes unreadable.

"This could be fabricated."

"It could be," he agreed. "I have the originals in a safety deposit box in Zurich. Digital forensics reports. Witness statements from two of Webb's former operatives who fled when they realized he was cleaning house. Everything in that file has been verified by an independent investigator I hired. A very expensive, very discreet one."

I turned back to the file because I couldn't look at him anymore. His sympathy was worse than his cruelty. His cruelty I knew how to fight.

Page after page of evidence spilled across the desk. Webb had been selling agents' identities for nearly a decade. Mira wasn't his first victim—she wasn't even his tenth. He'd built a side business trafficking in the one commodity intelligence agencies valued most: their own people. And when Mira got too close, he'd arranged to have her erased.

But he hadn't done it himself. He'd used someone else's infrastructure. Someone else's safehouse. Someone else's fire.

"The safehouse in Switzerland," I said, my voice hoarse. "It was yours."

"Yes."

"He used your location. Your men. He made it look like your operation killed her."

"Yes." Dante's voice was flat, but something burned underneath it, a cold fury that matched the one building in my chest. "He framed me for her murder, and he used my own resources to do it. The mole in your agency is also a mole in mine. Webb has been playing both sides for years, and neither of us knew."

I closed the file. My hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat against the desk to steady them.

"Why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn't you go to my agency, present this evidence, clear your name?"

"Because I didn't know who else was compromised." He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, his voice dropping. "Your agency isn't the only one with a mole problem. Webb has tendrils everywhere. The moment I started asking questions about the fire, two of my senior lieutenants turned up dead. Someone inside my organization is feeding him information. Until I know who, I can't trust anyone."

"Except me." The words came out bitter.

"Except you." He didn't blink. "You're the one person Webb would never expect me to trust. You came here to destroy me. And yet here you are, sitting in my study at four in the morning, reading classified documents I've never shown another living soul. If that's not trust, I don't know what is."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to throw the file in his face and tell him I'd rather die than ally myself with a man who ran an empire built on blood money. But the evidence was sitting in front of me, and the man who'd sent me here was the same man who'd ordered my sister's death, and the only person in the world who seemed to want justice as badly as I did was the devil I'd sworn to kill.

"Webb is still my handler," I said slowly. "He checks in every seventy-two hours. If I miss a check-in, he'll know something's wrong."

"When's your next check-in?"

I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. "Six hours."

Dante nodded, his expression shifting into something tactical. "Then we have six hours to figure out how to use this to our advantage. You're not going to miss your check-in. You're going to answer, and you're going to tell him exactly what I tell you to say."

"I don't take orders from you."

"It's not an order. It's a strategy." He stood, coming around the desk to stand beside my chair. Looking up at him from this angle felt like standing at the base of a mountain. "Webb thinks you're here to gather evidence against me. Let him keep thinking that. Meanwhile, we work together to find the proof we need to take him down—proof that will also expose the mole in my organization."

"And what do you get out of this?"

"Besides revenge for two of my best men and eighteen months of watching my back?" He paused. "I get to sleep at night knowing the man who used my name to kill an innocent woman is rotting in a grave I put him in."

His voice had gone dangerously soft, and I believed him. God help me, I believed him.

I stood, bringing us nearly chest to chest. I refused to crane my neck back, so I stared at the hollow of his throat instead, where his pulse beat steady beneath tan skin.

"If you betray me," I said quietly, "I will kill you. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I will make it last, and I will make it hurt, and I will smile while I do it."

"Noted." His breath stirred my hair. "If you betray me, I'll let you."

I looked up, startled, and found him smiling—a real smile, tired and crooked and completely disarming.

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't a joke." He reached past me and closed the file, his arm brushing my shoulder. "Get some sleep, Lena. Real sleep, not pacing-the-halls sleep. You're going to need it."

"I told you, I don't sleep in enemy territory."

"Then it's a good thing I'm not your enemy anymore." He walked to the door and held it open. "East hall. End of the corridor. The bed is obscenely comfortable, and I give you my word no one will disturb you."

I hesitated in the doorway, the file clutched to my chest. "Your word doesn't mean much to me yet."

"Then take the file with you. Read it until your eyes bleed. Just do it horizontally."

Despite everything—the grief, the rage, the world-upending revelations of the past hour—I felt the corner of my mouth twitch.

"Fine," I said. "But if you're lying about the bed, I'm adding it to the list of reasons to kill you."

"Understood."

I walked down the east hall alone, the file heavy in my arms and his gaze heavy on my back. When I reached my room and closed the door, I leaned against it for a long moment, listening to the silence.

Then I crossed to the bed, lay down fully clothed, and opened the file again.

I read until dawn. And when the sun rose over Lake Como, painting the water in shades of fire and gold, I finally let myself believe that my sister's killer was still out there—and that I'd just made a deal with the devil to find him.