Cloak and Dagger

chapter sixteen

It felt as though the following week passed in the blink of an eye.

Having put any feelings of animosity behind me, I had multiple training sessions scheduled with Joe, who worked with me to sharpen my mental abilities when it came to thinking in the field. This included lessons on how to smartly tail someone, which common places made the best spots to place bugs, and how to spot when I was under surveillance. Each lesson was in depth, including previous cases to study and hypothetical situations in which he expected me to run through a play by play of how I'd handle different hardships.

On top of that, I was spending time with Kira in the lab, working on my French, and meeting up with Beckett almost nightly for training sessions. Everything was becoming routine, and it felt like I barely had a spare minute to breathe.

However, through it all, the one thing that prodded at the back of my mind was Finn. The morning after finding him deep underground, I had wanted to talk to him about it. I hadn't wanted to confront him per se, I was just looking for some sort of reassurance that my suspicions about him weren't warranted.

But it didn't take me long to figure out that he was avoiding me.

The first clue came that first morning when, as I stood in line for breakfast in the Grand Hall, I noticed Finn get up from a table across the room and make his way out into the hallway. I tried to follow him, but by the time I reached the hall, he was already long gone.

He pulled the same disappearing act two more times that day, and continuously as the days wore on. With each day that passed, I struggled to hold back my frustration while going about my day as though nothing had changed, even though it had.

I could no longer trust Finn, and though I wasn't yet jumping to the worst-case scenario, my mind was going haywire at the possibilities. Whatever he was doing, he clearly wanted to keep it private, but not wanting to make a big deal about something that could end up being nothing more than a high security assignment, I decided it was best not to tell anyone about my suspicions. Not yet.

After all, for the moment, all I had was an uneasy feeling in my gut to go off.

Strangely enough, the only thing that succeeded in distracting me from the chaos inside my head were the nights I spent training with Beckett. When his schedule permitted, he would spend an hour or two working with me – sharpening my skills and narrowing down the technical aspects of self-defense, and even though it hadn't been all that long, I could tell that his lessons were making a difference.

It'd only been once so far that he'd mentioned having to go on a late-night stakeout, therefore canceling our usual meet-up, which was why, when I walked into the training barn just after midnight on a Thursday night to find the space empty, my forehead creased with a mixture of confusion and concern.

Beckett was always the first one here, mainly because he'd normally have spent the majority of the hours leading up to our lessons working on his own abilities. He was nothing if not dedicated, which made it all the more worrying that he was late.

Not wanting to sit around and waste time, I grabbed a pair of gloves from the pile to my right before getting into a fighting stance in front of one of the training bags to warm-up. The first punch I threw was a standard jab, and from there I went through a quick combination of hits each time the bag came back towards me. After every combination, I took a quick breather, stretching out my arms before going at it again, and when I finally stepped back twenty minutes later, Beckett was still nowhere to be seen.

I stood, breathing heavily and gulping down water from the bottle I'd brought, wondering why he hadn't shown up. It was unlikely that he forgot, or that he was out on another assignment, as he should've just returned –