Page 111 of A Lady's Handbook of Espionage
“You’re bleeding,” he said, his thumb brushing her neck where Favreau’s blade had grazed her.
“It’s nothing. I had everything under control before you came barging in.”
“Right. My mistake. I should have let you handle the eighteen armed men and the bastard with a knife to your throat.”
“I’m glad you’re learning.”
“You need that cut looked at. And maybe a drink.”
“Or six,” she muttered.
She glanced at Favreau’s body. In death, with the blade sticking out of his eye socket and the bullet hole in his forehead, he looked smaller somehow. Less the towering monster of her nightmares and more just . . .
A man. Flesh and blood and bone, fragile as anything.
“I always thought it would be me,” she said softly. “In the end. That I’d be the one to kill him.”
“Does it bother you that it wasn’t?”
She considered it for a moment – all the times she’d imagined this exact scene. “No. I think . . . I’m glad you were here. That I didn’t have to face him alone at the end.”
His expression softened. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”
But Isabel couldn’t move. Something clutched at her heart, squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. All the things she’d never dared say, all the vulnerability she’d buried – it rose up, impossible to contain another second.
“I love you.”
The words burst out of her, graceless and artless and raw as an open wound. Isabel didn’t try to take them back or soften them with excuses or explanations. Just let them stand, naked and terrifying.
Callahan went very still. “Say it again.”
Isabel fisted her hand in his shirt, tugging him down until she could feel his breath against her lips.
“I love you.” She said it against his mouth. “I’ve loved you for so long, I don’t remember what it was like before.”
His hands came up to frame her face. When he kissed her, it wasn’t gentle. It was hungry and urgent andnecessary. She opened for him with a sigh. Lost herself in the slide of his lips. In their shared breathing. It was a claiming, taking everything she offered and demanding more.
When they finally broke apart, they were both panting. He dropped his brow to rest against hers.
“I have loved you,” he said, each word deliberate and rough, “since you first tried to cut my throat.”
Isabel laughed.
33
The thing about ghosts was that they never really left you. Even with their bones salted and burned, their spirits consigned to the aether, some small, gibbering part of you still expected to find them lurking around the corner. Waiting. Watching with hungry eyes.
Louis Favreau was dead – a fact Isabel had witnessed firsthand.
And yet.
Three days. Seventy-two hours since that confrontation, and Isabel still found herself tensing at unexpected sounds, still jolted awake in the night, the ghost of Favreau’s fingers wrapped around her throat. He’d left his marks on her.
Wherever you run, I’ll find you. I’ll always find you. Even in death.
And it killed her to admit he’d been right. He was there in every shadow and noise, spreading through her like a poison. Like a hidden knife waiting to slice her open when she least expected it.
She shook off the thoughts as she mounted the steps of the British Museum. This wasn’t a heist. She wasn’t casing the place or planning which treasures to steal; she was here to see Emma.
