Chapter Two

Campbell

THIS IS THE first time I’ve ever been on vacation.

I grew up too poor to entertain the concept, and what few weeks of leave the military offered were spent on base in a country I never should have set foot in. Of course, contracts provide plenty of reasons to travel, but I’m not the kind of killer who stops at tourist venues in between executions. What would be the point?

Justine gives me a purpose for everything. When she smiles, when she laughs, I can hold a piece of it inside myself for a while and let the feeling resonate, unfiltered. I’ve spent most of our trips over the last few months following her as she uncovers reasons for joy, some long buried, others through sudden, ecstatic revelation. Thinking about death is more difficult when Justine burns with life beside me, taking back the decade she lost with shameless abandon.

So here I am, with nothing on the books now or for the foreseeable future. The process hasn’t always been clean—the first time I left my guns in New York, I numbed out for two solid weeks and almost put a knife through my own hand—but in a strange way, the breakdown made me even more determined to stick the landing. That lockbox is full of spotless relics I can never truly leave behind, but respecting old friends shouldn’t put me in an early grave. They wouldn’t want me to go out that way.

At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

Water splashes against my stomach and brings me back to the ocean, the cold and infinite promise I’m standing in.

Justine’s brow wrinkles with worry when I meet her gaze, but there’s nothing but softness in her voice when she says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I echo.

How long did I tap out this time?

No point in dwelling on it. I scoop a hand under the surface and launch a wave of water back at her. Justine’s jaw drops before she retaliates, dousing me with a much harder splash, only to laugh and stumble back when I start wading toward her.

“You are not allowed to carry me off to win a splash fight!” she insists, but delight puts a glint on dark brown eyes, polished and precious.

“Are you sure about that?” I tease with another flick of water, watching gravity draw a sleek caress down her stomach.

Justine is aglow. Months of travel and open sun have drawn a golden tint across her skin, but the rest of her shines too: the black gloss of her hair left to grow unheeded and the bright crescent of her smile, luring me in time and again. Even when everything else freezes inside me and the last bit of light goes out, I love her.

It’s enough. In some moments, it might be the only truth keeping me sane.

Her desperate splash manages to get me in the face before I sweep Justine into my arms, prompting a sigh as water drips down my face, hair soaked through. Any pretense of struggle dies off as she laughs, slipping an arm around my shoulder to stay close.

“That went right up my nose,” I note.

My flat affect sends her into a full-on fit of giggling before she leans up to kiss me. “My bad. I’ll aim lower next time.”

That’s worth a smile. “You usually do.”

Justine’s faux-offended Campbell spikes in pitch when I change my grip, bringing us face-to-face. Her legs lock around my hips, hands laced together behind my shoulders, and I forget to think or speak. If I could always hold her like this, away from everyone else and the damage they do, I would. An idle, impossible fantasy, but I’m trying to indulge those more often. The other things I fantasize about are far too real: the satisfying snap of a target’s neck under soft leather gloves, veins collapsing as poison strips away oxygen and hope, eyes turning to dull panes of glass when they can no longer beg me to stop.

I bite my tongue and blink away the imagery. Justine is here and real, too, grounding me with her weight as I take us out of the water. The temperature today is just shy of perfect, but even a level seventy degrees makes volcanic sand warm to the touch. Our towels are long white strips beside each other, mimicking an equal sign under the broad span of the beach umbrella.

When I lay Justine down in the shade, she stretches from head to toe and fetches a bottle of water from the drawstring bag I bought from the Concón gift shop. For a few minutes, I can’t hear anything but her slow and even breath, almost in perfect time with the measured collapse of the waves in front of us. Blue water kisses black shore like the rush of blood under wounded skin, bruising the surface but never quite breaking free.

Despite my malignant trauma constantly giving its two cents, Chile is a gorgeous country. I find it’s a good habit to visit actual democracies once in a while, just as a reminder that they exist somewhere in the world. No one at either side of the border gave the X on my passport a second glance, and beyond a general sense of embarrassment at being unable to speak Spanish, the amount of local friction is minimal.

“After we dry off, do you want to go get lunch?” Justine asks. “For some reason, I seem to have worked up an appetite.”

I spied a stall selling humitas and mote con huesillos on our way down to the water. A mix of sweet and cold would be the perfect chaser to our morning out here. “Sure. Then maybe we can start—”

Three dark blue dots on one side of the beach, four on the other. Each wearing windbreakers, rippling in the gentle breeze. I would know the look anywhere, but they shouldn’t be here, although the contradiction has no time to reconcile. In ninety seconds or so, my priorities have to shift toward the apocalyptic.

Justine frowns. “Campbell?”

She’s still looking at me, and only me. I sit up and reach for my shirt and tug it over my head before fetching the sunglasses from my bag. The last distraction I need is a jolt of dysphoric misery in the middle of everything else. My phone comes out of the bag, too, although I hide the gesture behind Justine’s body, leaning over like I mean to kiss her.

“You can’t react to what I’m about to say,” I whisper against her lips. “Do you understand?”

Alarm flares through her pupils, but Justine murmurs in quiet agreement.

“There are seven federal agents coming our way. We’re the only people on the beach, so I can’t imagine they have any other target. What I don’t know is whether they’re coming to arrest me, or both of us.”

“Fuck,” she grits between her teeth.

“It’s okay.” I give one of Justine’s hands a tight squeeze. “You and I planned for this. A hundred times, a thousand conversations. The important part—”

“—is not to give them anything,” she finishes.

I nod. “If they know who you are, don’t say a word until Sofia’s with us. It could be hours, if not days, but the feds will weaponize whatever you say, with or without context. If they don’t know who you are, what’s the story?”

“You picked me up at a bar in New York,” Justine says, the answer long memorized. “You seduced me. After losing my husband, it felt like a dream come true. Then—”

Her breath catches hard; she’s fighting back tears.

“Listen.” We’re running out of time. “I love you, Justine. And I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she chokes out. “I love you too.”

After one more strained inhale, Justine’s face relaxes, calm as can be. The hint of moisture around her eyes vanishes, blinked away. I want to praise her for doing so well, but the scrape of Rockport dress shoes on spotless sand falls into earshot.

As I get to my feet, calm and casual, irritation bobs to the surface. One of the reasons I brought Justine here is because Chile has a habit of rejecting American extradition requests, despite the treaty between both countries. Paranoid on my part, perhaps, but also justified considering this present situation.

Unfortunately, that means whatever evidence led to this arrest warrant has enough bite to cross international lines.

With the slip of a nail, I pop the back of my phone’s case open before palming the battery. Once the SIM card is between my fingertips, I turn my back on Justine and start walking toward the water. In the distance, someone’s safety clicks off their federally-issued firearm.

I’ve never been much for sports—the bioessentialism built into most of them is off-putting—but I like to think I do a fair pitch of my cell and its pursuant pieces into the ocean. The footsteps coming toward me break into a stampede.

A howl of get down breaks tone with put your hands up and the contradictory chorus of don’t make a fucking move before someone tackles me from the left. I don’t resist, hitting the warm bed of sand like a practice mat, but unambiguous consent doesn’t stop the agent in question from wrenching one arm behind my back until my shoulder threatens to pop from its socket. He eases up—barely—as handcuffs snap into place around my wrists, and a choking tug on the back of my shirt pulls me up onto both knees.

One of the group opens their mouth to speak, and hellish static spills out. A torrid, crackling burst resonates through my skull, burying into a part of my brain that’s been collecting dust for years. Bile rushes up my throat, but I have to swallow it back down, staring at the shining circle of guns and badges surrounding me from every side.

“—you are under arrest for the first-degree murder of Miceli La Rosa and Giovanna La Rosa through U.S.C. 1958 and felony aggravated arson. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you—”

Giovanna? Arson?

What the hell is going on?