Page 72 of The Rook’s Obsession

This is the man who created her. This is what she comes from.

I turn back to Ivy, who’s looking down the street where the car disappeared. There’s something in her face I can’t read. It’s not shock or relief. It goes deeper, something that doesn’t have a name. I’ve spent weeks learning every expression she has, and this one is new.

“Let’s go home,” I offer.

The silence that follows is only a few seconds long but feels like an hour. “I am home,” she replies. Her voice is flat. Stripped of everything. There’s no warmth, no edge. No trace of the woman I came here with tonight. It’s the voice of someone who finished the only mission that mattered, and now that it’s done, she doesn’t know what comes next.

Or worse, she’s already decided.

“The mission is over now,” she adds, before turning and walking away. Not toward the safe house. Not toward me. Just away, down the slick cobblestone street. Her boots click against the stones, and the long coat sways around her legs. She moves the way she moved the first time I ever saw her: alone, deliberate, a woman who doesn’t need anyone and has spent years proving it.

“Ivy.” She doesn’t stop. “Ivy!” She doesn’t turn around.

I stand there in the mist with two dead men on the ground and the taste of something bitter in the back of my throat as I watch her walk away. Every instinct tells me to follow her. To run after her, grab her arm, and make her look at me. To make her hear me say that this isn’t over, that we’re not over, that the mission being done doesn’t mean we’re done.

But I know her. I’ve spent weeks learning her, and I know chasing her now will only make her run faster. She isn’t walking away because she doesn’t care. She’s walking away because she does, and caring is the thing that scares her more than Vincenzo ever could.

She reaches the end of the street. For a single second, she pauses. Her shoulders rise with a breath, then fall. She doesn’t look back before turning the corner, and then she’s gone.

I stay put long enough for Liam’s team to arrive and the bodies to be handled. Long enough for the mist to turn into actual rain, which soaks through my jacket. I pull out my phone and call Liam. He answers on the first ring. “How’d it go?”

I set off down the empty street toward the corner where she disappeared. The rain pools in the gaps between the cobblestones. She’s gone. There’s no trace of her.

“We got the footage,” I tell him. “Vincenzo backed down. It’s over.”

“And my sister?”

There’s only one way I can answer the question. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

IVY

Three days. It’s been three days since I walked away from Nick on a wet street in Milan with my ears still ringing after those gunshots. Three days since I turned the corner and kept walking and didn’t look back, because looking back would’ve meant staying, and staying would’ve meant trusting. Trusting is the thing that breaks me every time.

I’m staying at a hotel near the Duomo. Not a safe house. I’m not looking for safety right now. I’m looking for anonymity, which is different. Safe implies you’re being protected. Anonymous means no one knows you’re there, and no one is coming to find you.

No one is coming to find me.

That’s the part I keep coming back to, no matter how many times I tell myself that’s what I wanted. He let me go. I walked away, and he didn’t follow. He didn’t chase me down the street or do any of the things he would’ve done a month ago when he was still operating under the delusion he could keep me if he just held on tight enough.

He let me go.

Which is what I wanted, right? It’s what I told myself I needed, in fact. Space, distance. A clean break so I could find out who I am without a mission to define me. The freedom I fought for. The thing I blackmailed a mafia patriarch in order to get.

So why does it feel like I’ve been gutted?

I lie on the hotel bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the city outside the window. Hating myself for checking my phone every twenty minutes. He hasn’t called or texted. There’s nothing. No messages or missed calls. No sign that the man who flew across the ocean and took a bullet for me, held me in a bathtub, bought me gelato, and stood on a bridge at sunset is making any effort whatsoever to reach me.

This only confirms what I already knew. It was a mission. It was always a mission. He came to Prague because Liam sent him. He stayed close because I was the objective. He was patient and persistent, yes, and impossibly kind. That was his strategy. Now the strategy worked, the mission is over, and I am no longer the objective.

I served my purpose. I know how that story ends. I’ve lived it before.

The voice in my head that sounds like Nick—the one that says things like you’re more than an asset and there’s nothing more important than your life—tries to argue, but I shut it down. I’ve been shutting it down for three days, and I’m getting better at it each time. Practice makes perfect. Vincenzo taught me that.

On the morning of the fourth day, I get dressed and leave the hotel because the walls are closing in and the ceiling has no more answers to give me, not that it ever had any in the first place. I walk with no direction, the way I used to walk in the years before Nick found me, back when walking was how I processed things and solitude was my only companion.

My feet take me to the piazza before my brain catches up. To Lucia’s restaurant. The outdoor tables are half-full with the late-morning crowd. The smell of coffee and something with rosemary makes my stomach ache. Not because I’m hungry. Because the last time I smelled it, Nick was sitting across from me, choking on his wine.

I should really leave. I should turn around and walk in the other direction and find a different restaurant in a different neighborhood where nothing reminds me of anything.