The room was small. Really small. Government-budget-for-a-low-priority-mission small. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet from door to window, and most of the space was taken up by a bed. So, yeah. It was already pretty cramped, but it felt so, so much smaller when Collins and I were the only two in there.
The silence didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. He was perfectly content as he sat reading that newspaper with the headline I couldn’t read. I watched as his eyes skimmed over the words. As he licked his finger before turning to the next page. He was completely at ease and I wondered exactly how much time Collins had spent with the silence. Probably just as much as I’ve spent with the shadows.
“What is it, Goode?” he said, not looking up from the paper. The words made me jump and for the first time in my life, I realized why it was referred to as breaking a silence. “You’re staring and it’s freaking me out.”
Staring? Had I been staring? Definitely not. Observing, maybe, but definitely not staring.
I scrambled for something to say, spitting out the first question on my mind. It had been sitting with me for a while and I was going to wait until Matt got back to ask it, but Matt wasn’t back yet and I was running out of time for pre-mission questions. “My file says that I’m attending the ball with the nephew-in-law of the American Ambassador to Adria.”
He popped a grape in his mouth, bored. “Is there a problem with that?”
I pulled his paper down, slamming it on the table with a satisfying rip. He didn’t get to talk to me like I was a nuisance. If he wasn’t going to listen to me, then I was going to make him. “Aren’t people going to notice that the American nephew and the Adrian countess look suspiciously similar?”
He squinted, a crease carved into the center of his forehead. “What are you talking about?”
He started to pull his paper back up, already bored with this conversation, but I pinned it down to the table again. Collins glanced at my hand, then up at me. He must’ve gotten the message because he let go of the paper and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m talking about,” I said. “The fact that Matt and I look like brother and sister.”
“Well then it’s a good thing no one’s going to see you together then, isn’t it?” he bit back, leaning over that tiny table as if trying to intimidate me. Too bad for him, I don’t scare easy.
“What do you mean?” I asked, cautious. I tried to get a read on him, but it wasn’t easy. He did the same thing that Grandpa Joe always did. It’s a specific kind of poker face that makes you feel like you’re the one on trial. It turns your own accusation against you and all of a sudden, the reader becomes the readee, making you feel like you have to explain yourself. “Matt’s my date.”
This time, Collins smiled. Once side of his grin was wider than the other, giving off the general sense of lopsided smugness. Was there anything about him that wasn’t arrogant? “It’s cute that you think that, Goode. Real cute.”
I froze. In a spy’s life, you’re trained to see possibilities not as the options that are gone, but rather, as the options that remain. With Matt out of the picture, there was only one option left. “Whatever you’re about to say next,” I warned. “Don’t.”
This time, his smile stretched all the way across his lips, because when it came to Luke Collins, nothing was more satisfying than watching me squirm. “I’m your date to the Ambassadors’ Ball.”
I slammed my hand on the table—a big sound in a little room. “Nope,” I said, rejecting the statement with all my will.
Collins sat back in his chair, popping another grape in his mouth. “What’s the matter, Goode?” he said with a satisfied crunch. “Don’t trust me?”
I snapped my eyes up to his. A flame had been flicked on beneath me, causing something to boil up underneath my skin, rising and rising until eventually I had to scream. “No! As a matter of fact, I don’t trust you.”
“Of course you don’t. That would be too easy, right?”
“I was under the impression that Matt would be my partner,” I said, demanding answers. Demanding explanations. Demanding anything from him that wasn’t thinly veiled sarcasm.
Collins sat forward again, leaning his arms up against the table. Madame Baudin would’ve shrieked if she could see him, but she couldn’t. We weren’t at school. This wasn’t a training exercise. This was an actual op with actual consequences and so when Collins said, “Listen,” I shut my mouth and I listened. “Your brother blends in, right? Pavement Artist and all that.”
I nodded. The mention of Pavement Artists made me homesick in a way that I had never known before. For Matt. For Dad. For my mother. Just like that, the flame beneath me flickered off and I felt far too cold.
Collins waited a moment before starting again and for a second I was worried that he saw it. The sadness. The cold. But there was no way Luke Collins could get a read on me. “You aren’t that way,” he said finally. “Not even a little bit. You are the dictionary definition of standing out.”
He’d said it like it was a compliment, but in a spy’s life, it’s really the exact opposite. I wanted to argue, mostly because it was Collins, and that’s what I did with Collins. We would argue until we were both blue in the face and then we’d argue some more.
But then I remembered a conversation in the shadows of MI6. The boy who had joined me in London and claimed to live and die by the truth. He was right and I couldn’t deny it. I stood out. I grabbed the attention. “So… what?” I said. “Matt retrieves whatever it is you’re here to get while you and I…?”
“Distract the guests,” he finished with a nod. As he went on, it was almost like we forgot that we hated each other and I came to realize exactly how long it had been since anyone had talked to me like I was an equal. Who would have thought that Collins would be the one to do it? “You and I arrive at the ball with that invitation”—he pointed to a piece of cardstock in my file, rimmed with gold—“and I unlock the back door to let Matt in.”
“That’s it?” I asked, doubting that the way into an Ambassadors’ Ball could be so simple. “A back door?”
“There’s always a back door, Goode,” he said with an excited grin. As if he were sharing the best secret in the world with me. “Especially since the threat isn’t coming from the outside.”
“An inside threat?” I asked, my voice taking on the same eager tone. “You mean, like, a rouge Ambassador?”
He sat back like he’d just realized who he was talking to, debating how much he could really say. “That’s classified,” he told me. “But yes.”
“So you and Matt are there to stop them?”
“The three of us are stopping a trade, yes.”
“Trade of what?”
“Now that really is classified,” he told me, which was fair. He and I both knew that I’d already been told more than I should have. “Once we open the back door, Matt finds his way up to the study while we distract the guests. So I hope you like dancing.”
He did that half-grin thing again and I could tell that he was in on one of my most shameful secrets. I, Morgan Goode, am a terrible dancer and Collins knew it, which only made me despise him again. “I’m going to kill my brother—and how did you two get this gig anyways? Stopping the illegal trade of an ambassador sounds like it’s above your pay grade.”
Collins shrugged. “Matt’s a Goode. He can get pretty much any op he wants.”
“And you?”
He plucked the last grape from his plate and popped it in his mouth, biting down with a grin. “It’s amazing what a letter of recommendation from Joe Solomon can do to a guy’s career.”
And that’s when I looked straight at the boy who lived by the truth and tried to tell if he was lying. “Grandpa Joe doesn’t write letters of recommendation,” I told him.
“Well someone might want to inform him of that fact,” Collins said, brushing his hands free of crumbs. “I don’t know, Goode. Matt and I are rookies, MI6 needed some fresh faces to run the op, and here we are.”
It made sense. I’ve heard for years that rookies are an agency’s best assets. With a family like the Goodes, you learn a thing or two about familiar faces running ops. There were some ops that not even Mom and Dad could run, simply because they were too easily recognized. Matt and Collins were new to the game and there wasn’t an ambassador on the planet who knew their faces.
“That’s why Matt chose me, isn’t it?” I said. It wasn’t really a question because I already knew the answer. “Because I’m unrecognizable.”
Collins seemed to debate his next words carefully. Considering the time it took him to pick and choose, I was expecting some sort of speech. A lengthy explanation about how Matt had been rooting for me the entire time and how Collins eventually came around. But the speech didn’t come. In the end, all Collins said was, “No.”
“Then why?” I demanded. “Why did he choose me?”
Again, careful thought went into his next words as he studied me across the table, searching for something. He did that a lot, I realized. Not a thing left his mouth before he plotted out each and every possible reaction and prepared himself for it. “He didn’t.”
“What are you—?”
“I did.”
There aren’t many things that can shut me up—I’ll be the first to own up to my big mouth—but right then, Collins managed to get the job done. He must’ve sensed this or, at the very least, figured he needed to take advantage of the silence while he still could, and continued. “You really think Big Brother Matt was eager to break you out of school and bring you here?”
“He seemed pretty eager,” I said, but even as the words left me, I knew that it wasn’t quite true. Maybe eager wasn’t the right word. Maybe anxious. Ready to get this whole thing over with.
“Yeah, well,” Collins said, unsurprised. “He’s a much better liar than I am.”
“But why?” I whined. “Why me?”
Collins raised his eyebrows and immediately, I felt childish. Be cool, Morgan. Be cool. “Well wouldn’t you like to know?” he said with that crooked smile.
“Yes!” I snapped. “I would like to know. In fact, I have a right to—”
And then he shushed me as if I weren’t right in the middle of sentence. Quick and sharp as if his hiss were a blade made specifically for cutting my sentence short. “What was that?” he asked, his voice low.
“Jesus Christ, you really are unbearable,” I bit back with all the nastiness I could muster. My words barely touched him and I could tell that he wasn’t listening. Not to me anyways. He was too busy listening to something else. Something around him. “Would you just tell me why—?”
“Seriously, Goode. Shut up.”
“Quit trying to change the subject—”
But then I heard it too. A creak in the floorboards outside of our room. I dropped my voice, slouching in my chair. “It’s probably just Matt,” I told him. “He always has to come back for something he forgot the first time.”
“Goode,” Collins said, still listening. I turned an ear towards the door and heard a second noise. A rough, metallic scrape that was chipping away at our front door. “Is that…?”
“Someone’s picking the lock,” I confirmed through a whisper.
“I don’t think your brother would need to do that,” he said.
He was right of course. We’d both seen Matt jingle the keys in front of my face. He’d taken them with him, no doubt about it. So then who was knocking—or, I guess, not knocking—at our door? I turned to look at Collins, wondering if maybe he had the answer to that question. The fact that he didn’t was probably the most frightening part about those few crucial seconds.
He bolted towards the window, shoving it upwards with all of his might. When in doubt, get out. Woods had taught us that. But if the paint chips were any indication, that window hadn’t moved in at least fifty years and had no intention of starting now.
Seconds. We only had seconds—that much I knew. But our options were gone. No window. No weapons. There was no fight and no flight. We were caged and I could feel it. Wire wrapping around me, pushing in at every possible moment. “Collins,” I managed. He finally stopped pulling on the window and looked right at me. “Collins, what do we do?”
Luke Collins is a dick. Usually. I say that because this was one of the first times I had ever seen him as anything else. That night, through the dim light of that stubborn window, I watched him forget the façade. That night, I watched something crack in Luke Collins’ exterior as his training took over—his instincts kicked in. He grabbed the files from the table and slipped them under his shirt, hiding our legends. When he grabbed my wrist, I had to resist the urge to pull a way because a part of me, no matter how small or how reluctant, knew that Collins was right.
I heard the front door click open just as he yanked me into a closet and shut another door in between us and danger. It was empty aside from two suits and a few spare hotel hangers. I squeezed myself past a copper pipe that ran vertically through the space, trying to make enough room for the both of us, but it was useless. That closet was too small—too close.
Collins had his arms on the wall over my shoulders, trying to push himself off of me, but I could still feel him there, crushing me. Everything was crushing me.
“Make it quick,” said a woman’s voice. I’d never heard it before in my life and when I looked up to Collins, he had that crease in the center of his forehead again—that one he got when there was a question in that big head of his. He turned his head towards the door as if trying to see straight through to the other side, eyes racing around that tiny room like he was trying to solve a math problem and two plus two no longer equaled four.
There were two people. Two pairs of feet scuffing at the carpet. One was sluggish and lazy while the other was sharp and determined. The pair flipped through papers, tossed around blankets, and when I heard something shatter, I knew that Collins’ plate had been thrown to the ground.
Collins had his eyes closed now, letting his head fall back against the wall. He was taking long, steady breaths to keep from being heard and I could feel his heartbeat against my own, furious and harsh. He was terrified. Underneath that calm, collected agent, a teenage boy was panicking.
The copper pipe was jabbing me in my side and I started to wonder what would happen if it were to suddenly burst. I wondered if there was water inside of it and how long it would take to fill that tiny closet. I wondered what it would feel like to drown right then and there.
It wasn’t until after my knuckles had already turned to a bright white that I realized I had twisted my fingers into Collins’ sleeves, hoping that maybe he would keep me afloat. Hoping that maybe he knew how to swim better than I did. Except when he opened his eyes again, Collins didn’t look like he was afraid of drowning. He looked like he was afraid of me. As if that closet were the worst possible place for him to be—standing beside the bomb that was about to explode.
“Goode,” he said, leaning in close. I probably wouldn’t have heard the word if not for the fact that he was a literal inch from my ear. “Calm. down.”
But I could only hold on tighter, twisting the grey of his shirt as I tried to keep my head above water. It was so hot in there. So small. “I can’t breathe,” I told him, trying desperately to match the slightness of his whisper.
He shoved himself even farther from me, trying to give me more room, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was drowning. Didn’t he feel it too?
I shook my head as fast as I could, sharp, shooting pains plowing through my chest. “I can’t…” but even that was too hard to say. The water was filling my lungs and I felt myself starting to dissolve—a spoonful of salt, swirled and splashed around until I was gone. “I have to get out of here.”
I lunged for the door, trying to calculate my odds of winning a fight against the two intruders on the other side, but then Collins grabbed my shoulders, holding me in place. I think I fought against him, but I can’t remember. I wasn’t in control of my own body.
There wasn’t much else to look at except for his eyes, so that’s what I did. I looked right at them. At the plea in them as he said, “No.”
I needed him to get off of me. I needed to get out. Maybe I shoved him off again, but it didn’t matter. Collins was stronger than me. He would’ve held me there until the end of time if he needed to.
I just wanted to scream at him—needed to scream at something—but somewhere deep inside of me, I knew the risks. The part of me that was Zachary Goode’s daughter knew that I couldn’t blow our hiding place.
But I couldn’t stay. I needed to get out of the little box—out of the water. “I have to—”
“Maggie,” he breathed, shaking me once. Trying to snap me out of it. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel him. I couldn’t feel anything. Why couldn’t I feel anything—god, why couldn’t I breathe? “No.”
“I can’t breathe,” I pleaded.
Suddenly, the sounds on the other side of the door stopped. An unbearably thick silence hung over the room before the woman asked, “What was that?”
“Dunno,” said a man’s voice.
“Did you hear it?”
The man stopped to listen. Collins started taking his silent, meditative breaths again, watching me carefully as if to encourage me to do the same. He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand that my lungs weren’t working right. My breaths were shallow and loud no matter how hard I tried, so Collins put his hand over my mouth.
“I don’t hear anything,” said the man, retuning to his search. The woman seemed to hesitate, but then joined her partner once more.
Slowly, Collins took his hand away. I needed him to know. I needed him to see that something was happening to me. “Collins,” I started again. “I can’t—”
“Stop talking,” he said, so fast that I almost missed it.
The tears were there, but I couldn’t make them stop. My hands were shaking, but I couldn’t force them steady. Something was happening to me. I was coming unwound from the inside out. “I need—”
“Please,” he begged. “You have to shut up, okay? You just need to shut—”
“I’m dying.”
It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t any sort of exaggeration. I think he knew that. I think he knew that I really was dying. “I’m sorry,” he said and, for once in his life, he sounded sincere. “But we need you to be quiet.”
I had to stop myself from sobbing. I had to stop. I knew that I had to stop. So then why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I control myself? I didn’t even know who I was, much less how I was supposed to control any of it. “I can’t—”
“Goode.”
“I’m not—”
“Shut. Up.”
“Collins, I—”
But I couldn’t finish, because that was when he kissed me. Yep. You read that right. Luke Collins kissed me.
It was desperate and powerful and seemed to last forever. I finally got a full breath in, holding it there as he held me. An entirely different sort of pain rocked my heart, the friction sparking it to flame, pumping fire through every last bit of me. I felt it in my shoulders and my gut. In my fingers and toes. Not a single part of me was gone. I was fully aware of every inch of myself. I felt it. I felt it everywhere.
When he pulled away, I could feel the water creeping up on me again, extinguishing the flame. It took my fingers first. My feet. I knew that I wasn’t fixed. Collins had merely thrown me a life jacket. I still had a long way to swim before I got to shore.
When I opened my eyes again, he was watching me. Searching my eyes. Waiting for me to crumble again. I took a breath in to say something, but he put his finger of my lip, shaking his head ever so slightly, and for the second time that night, Collins managed to shut me up.
“There aren’t any keys,” said the man, digging around on the table near the front door. “They’re not even here—we should just go.”
“We need the boy!” snapped the woman.
My eyes locked on Collins—the boy—wondering if he had heard the same thing I had. He was already looking down at me, eyes wide and suddenly aware of the apparent target on his back. When he turned to look back to the door, I saw his jaw clench with a gulped and I felt his hand on my waist, twisting and pulling at the hem of my shirt just like I had done to his. I wondered if maybe he was drowning, too.
“We’ll come back later,” I heard the man say, far calmer than the woman.
“You really are an idiot, aren’t you?” she sneered, not sounding at all surprised. “We’ve trashed the place. He’ll flee as soon as he gets back.”
“Then we track him down again,” said the man. “But we can’t stay. We have to go.”
“Go where, Duncan?” she asked, significantly quieter, but just as sharp. “We’re failing. He’s our only chance, so tell me. Where are we going to go?”
My heartbeat was too fast, my head throbbing too hard. I needed to get out. I needed to leave.
“I’ll meet you in the car,” the man said. “We’ll regroup.”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute,” she replied.
No. No more minutes. I had to get out. I reached for the door, figuring that my odds against one person were far better than taking on two, but Collins grabbed my wrist before I could turn the knob. His eyes were a warning, as if he knew exactly how prepared I was to face the woman on the other side or, more likely, how prepared I wasn’t.
In that moment, maybe he was right. I was in no state for a fight.
And so we waited. I’m not sure how long it took. How can someone count the seconds when they’re not sure where one starts and another ends? Slowly and painfully, seconds stretching into hours. We waited for silence. For a door to shut. For something that told us we were alone again.
Everything was tight. Too tight. My muscles were wound, my stomach clammed. I had to get out of that closet. I needed to leave. My heart pumped faster when I heard breaths on the other side of the door, watching as the shadow grew wider across the crack at the floor. The knob turned and I held my breath, not sure if Iwas ready for a fight.
“Okay, Collins,” began my brother. I opened my eyes and saw him standing there, relief filling every part of me. “I’m about to ask you what you’re doing in a closet with my sister and for your sake, I hope you have a really good answer.”
I slid past the copper pipe, not caring where the woman was. Not a chance she could win a fight against the three of us, but when I shoved past my brother, I realized that she wasn’t there. Had she ever been there at all? Maybe I had imagined the whole thing—the crowned jewel in the Crazy Collection.
I leaned up against the table, my fingers turning white before my very eyes, but I couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t feel me. Even my breathing was back to the short, incomplete wheezes as before. It was like the bottom half of my lungs didn’t work, unable to get a whole breath.
Behind me, Collins was telling Matt about the intruders, but I couldn’t hear my brother’s reaction. I couldn’t hear anything. It was all starting to fade away—my fingertips, my sanity, maybe even me. Maybe I was fading away. I needed to feel something. Anything. Even pain would be preferable to what was happening. Maybe I needed to hit something.
Yeah.
I needed to hit something.
I stormed across the room, making a beeline for the boy in the closet. I felt the flame—that flame that always flared in the presence of Luke Collins—igniting in my chest and making its way all down my arm. Maybe I should’ve taken another swing at his crooked nose or maybe I should’ve gone for his gut. I could spend hours telling you all the things I could have done in that moment, but in the end, I slapped him. I slapped him hard and it felt good.
There was no training behind it. The only place I’d seen a hit like that had been in the old black and white movies that Grandma and Grandpa Joe watched sometimes. But it didn’t matter how much of it was government sanctioned and how much of it was just a girl with a good slap, because my mission was accomplished. I could feel the tingle in my fingertips—the sting in my palm.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I screamed at him. He had his hand cupped around his face, so it must’ve been a pretty good hit, but surprisingly, that wasn’t satisfying enough. I needed answers. I needed the world to start making sense again. I needed to be back in my father’s bed at Blackthorne, where women didn’t break in with intent to kidnap and Luke Collins didn’t kiss me.
Matt looked like he wanted to laugh, but he was a good enough spy that he could read the atmosphere around him and know that it wasn’t the time for humor. “Christ, Mags,” he said, his eyes wide like maybe he thought I was coming for him next. “The last time I saw someone hit a guy like that was when—”
He cut himself off and I watched his expression change. Suddenly, I wasn’t the only one in the room who looked like they wanted to smack Collins. “Were you making out with my sister?”
“We weren’t making out,” Collins and I both grumbled. Then it was just me who said, “But he did kiss me.”
“Did you want him to kiss you?” Matt asked.
“No!” I hollered, because that was supposed to be my answer.
Collins is quite a bit bigger than Matt. If they were athletes, Matt would be a baseball player, built to run the bases, and Collins would be the football player built to take Matt out with a single blow. Except right then, as Matt pinned him up against the wall, I knew that Collins didn’t stand a chance. “You know, Luke,” he said. “When I was fourteen, my dad taught me how to kill a man.”
Collins looked bored. “Aren’t we being a little dramatic?” he said, but Matt wasn’t having it. Instead, he shoved Collins even farther into the wall and even higher off the ground. Suddenly, Collins looked like maybe things had gotten a little more interesting or, at the very least, a little more threatening. “Hey, hey, hey. Listen. She was freaking out. I needed to shut her up before—before that woman found us.”
“And you thought that kissing her would be the appropriate way to do that, did you?” Matt spat.
“It worked!” he defended. Then he looked at me like I was going to offer some sort of backup. “It shut you up, didn’t it?”
For a second, I got lost in the memory. Lost in that cramped closet space where the nervous boy leaned up against me. Lost in the warmth he gave off when he grabbed me. I remembered the way I held my breath. Was that normal? For someone to hold their breath when they were kissed? Was it normal for someone to look up into those brown eyes—the same brown eyes looking at me now—and feel like the world was suddenly so much bigger?
“Yeah,” was my only response. I didn’t want to risk blurting out any more than that. “Matt, let go of him.”
Matt held on for just a little bit longer, but eventually let him go. I just wanted the arguing to be over. I just wanted to be done. Lay down and go to sleep. Maybe puke my guts out first. It wasn’t until Matt caught sight of me again that anyone said another word. “Mags? Hey, you’re pretty pale.”
My chest was still tight. My mind was still fuzzy. “Sit down, Goode,” Collins said.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I tried to yell, but my mouth was dry and my words weren’t coming out right. Even as I said it, my knees started to wobble.
I saw Collins scan the overturned room, searching for something. His eyes locked on a chair, kicking it my way and seending it skidding behind me just before I fell. “Could you maybe assume that I’m not a complete idiot, for just once in your life?” he asked me. I wanted to retort, as was in my nature to do, but the fight in me was gone. As he crossed his arms over his chest and watched me, I knew that he could see that. That Luke Collins could see right through me. “Take a deep breath, Goode. You’re gonna be there for a while.”
“Why. me?” I asked between struggled breaths, wanting an answer now more than ever. Why would Collins have picked me to run the op with? I was the girl who had heart attacks on missions. I was the girl who fell apart right in front of him. Who was I to be in Romania? Who was I to call myself a spy?
Matt was squatted down in front of me, his dark eyes darting across every inch of me, trying to figure out what was wrong and if I needed a hospital or not. Collins, on the other hand, didn’t look the slightest bit concerned. “Because,” he said, picking his words as he always did. “The people I trust keep telling me that I’m supposed to trust you. I don’t see why, but I’m giving you a chance to prove them all right.”
I looked past my frantic brother, up at the boy who had kissed me, and felt the fire coming back, filling the absence. I actually managed to smile as I saw the opportunity for what it really was. Not just proving everyone right.
Proving Collins wrong.