THINGS OF WHICH I WAS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN ONCE WE ARRIVED AT THE AMBASSADORS’ BALL
- Romania is breathtakingly gorgeous, even, and perhaps especially, at night.
- My legend’s name was Anna Alexander, Countess of Adria and daughter of the Adrian Ambassador to Romania.
- Luke Collins does not look tragically horrendous in a suit.
- My bra was really, really strapless.
- My dress was also very strapless. And form fitting. And black. Oh, and it had a slit up the side—a slit!
- The next time I saw him, I was going to kill Matthew Goode.
Sibiu’s buildings seem to grow straight from the ground. Every time we passed a building, it felt like I was watching a living, breathing thing that came straight from the grass, carved from the very stone it sat upon. This ballroom was no different, ivy colored pillars rising up above everything else in that towering room. Massive, bricked walls and smooth wooden banisters that ran along the second floor balcony. Wealthy golds and rich reds dripping and draping from every available surface—crystal shimmering every time I turned my head. The spy in me was scanning balconies and plotting escape routes, but the girl in me, god help her, was swooning. Until then, I’d never known that it was possible to fall in love with a place.
It looked like the Gallagher Academy, but amped to the nth degree. As I looked down across the crowds, made up of plump old men and bored teenagers, I remembered my prom night at Blackthorne. I had always known that my schools were the foremost in operative development, but until then, I had never really appreciated just how spot-on the curriculum really was.
I found myself wishing that I could stand at the top of that plush staircase for the entire night, looking down upon all of the potential threats. It was the ideal post—not a single blind spot. Next to me, I heard Collins let out the smallest sigh and I was fairly certain that he was thinking the same thing.
But, alas, the dance was a floor below and there was a mission afoot. We had some serious distracting to do, although if I’m being honest, it felt like I was doing plenty of distracting from where I was. I felt eyes on me—too many pairs of eyes. It seemed like everywhere I looked, someone had turned to watch the girl in the black dress make her decent. “Smile,” Collins reminded me, holding his arm out for me to take. “I think someone might be watching you.”
I wrapped my hand around his sleeve and couldn’t help notice the fact that Collins was probably far too fit to pass for the nephew-in-law of an American ambassador. “By ‘someone’ do you mean half of Romania?” I asked through a smile that would have made even Miss America jealous. “Because I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to run an op here again without someone recognizing me.”
“Don’t worry, Goode,” he said, taking the first steps down that grand staircase. My heels sunk into crimson, making me wish that I had worn my tennis shoes. “You’re barely recognizable in this get-up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked, not daring to let my smile fall. An old man wearing tinged gloves waved as if he knew me, so I graciously returned the gesture. I was surprised by how often Madame Baudin’s lessons rang through my head and how few times I heard Professor Woods.
“It means,” he said, taking that final carpeted step and landing with confidence on the stone below. He turned to face me, trapping me there at the end of the staircase, and I was almost as tall as he was just then. “That you would never wear this if it weren’t for the mission.”
He held his hand out to me and I had to take it. He was, after all, my date. My cover. “I’ll have you know that I am perfectly comfortable in skinny black dresses,” I told him, not mentioning the slit that ran up my leg—have I mentioned the slit? There was a slit in the side of my dress that was designed to show off things that I had not been prepared to show off. I mean, if I had known that I would be sneaking off to Romania to show the world my legs, then maybe I would’ve shaved above the knee.
But Collins just smiled, not even bothering to look down at me as we wove our way through the crowds, sweeping and swaying all the way to a door marked Ieșire de Urgență in bright red letters. Emergency exit.
In one, fluid motion, Collins backed me into a wall, his shadow falling over me as he turned his back to the party, leaning in close with one hand over my head and another along my waist, sending fire snapping all the way up my side. “What are you—?”
“I can see right through you, Goode.” He whispered, too close. Too present. Without pulling away, he reached into the pocket of his jacket, taking out a wallet far too slim to belong to anyone at that particular party. “Don’t lie to me.”
If Collins possessed the ability to hear things like I could, he might’ve heard my gulp right then. He might have heard my heart skip a beat as I remembered the slit running along my leg or he might have heard me take in a breath as I remembered just how little support my dress had. Collins might’ve heard that I was lying and that he was right and that I would never wear something like this outside of a Romanian ballroom.
Collins couldn’t hear these things, I was sure, but somehow he still knew about them. He still knew about the slit and the bra and all of the insecurities that came with a little black dress and I realized that if I could hear the truths of the world, then Collins could see them.
He flipped open the wallet, pulling out a thin card with no writing. No stripe. Just a plain black rectangle with a chalky grey sheen to it. A magnet, I realized.
He leaned in even closer, both of his arms around me now, one holding himself up and the other reaching for the emergency door, jimmying the magnet in between the latch and the alarm. Suddenly, I knew what this was. I was cover—a girl in the arms of a lovesick teenage boy, the two of them sneaking off into the shadows with nothing but giggles and a sense of adventure. We were anything but two spies trying to unlock the back door.
“Besides,” he began again, his careful hand still going at the latch. “You don’t need to worry about any of them remembering your face.”
“Oh?” I said, watching over his shoulder. Acting as lookout for a boy who didn’t know the first thing about looking back. “And why’s that?”
His eyes flashed to me, that crooked, knowing smile on his lips one more time, but then he looked back to the job at hand, careful not to set off any alarms or else risk blowing the mission. “Because none of them were looking at your face.”
I thought back to the onlookers. To the women with their sneers and the men with their jaws gaped. I couldn’t recall a single glance that had made it higher than my shoulders. But no. That couldn’t be right. “A third of these guests are women,” I argued.
But Collins just smiled like it was a fact he knew all too well. “And if that’s not a testament to how good you look tonight, I don’t know what is.”
I heard the door click and my breath caught, waiting for the blaring sirens and flashing lights. When they didn’t come, both of us let out a sigh. “That was almost a compliment,” I noticed.
He shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. “Almost.”
The job was done, but he was still leaned up against me, searching me for something. He was always searching—like he’d lost something in my eyes and was desperate to get it back. The crease retuned to the center of his forehead and I wondered what it was doing there. Wondered what it would take to straighten it.
My comms unit crackled to life in my ear and despite our years of training, the two of us both jumped, breaking our gaze. I heard my brother’s voice in my ear, lower than it had been the last time we had shared comms. For just a second, he sounded like Dad. “Is it done?”
I looked up to Collins, expecting an answer, but he was already looking back at me. I had to wonder how many times he’d glanced my way without my knowledge. How many times those very eyes had been cutting into me and I hadn’t known. When he looked at me, I could feel it. It was hot and intense and hard to meet, so I watched his lips as he responded to my brother.
“Magnet is in place,” he confirmed. No one on the outside would have been able to tell that he wasn’t talking to me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t even all that sure. He was staring right at me as he spoke, looking at me exactly how you’d expect a boy to look at a girl. “Alarms disabled for the southeast entrance.”
“Got it,” Matt said. “You know what you have to do.”
Collins nodded ever so slightly and I had to smile. Rookie mistake, nodding into your comms. “Got it,” he said. “I hope you like dancing.”
That last part was meant for me, but I didn’t realize it until Collins already had my hand in his, holding it high as the two of us floated to the center of that grand ballroom. Cream and crimson tiles alternated at my feet. Dresses of every color fluffed up with each spin. Ambassadors danced with their spouses and their kids, all of them seeming completely unaware of the events happening just under their noses.
We reached the middle of the dance floor, Collins placing his hands where they were supposed to go. My dress was suddenly so much tighter—or maybe, I realized, my breaths had just gotten heavier. For just a second, my mind went blank, but he bent down, catching my eyes with his as he said, “Don’t freeze up on me, Goode,” and then he took my hands and put them where they were meant to be.
Focus, Goode. There it was. Finally, Charlotte Woods was in my head again. Focus.
I snapped out of whatever spell he had managed to put me under and, as if working off of some sort of cue, the quintet in one of the balconies shifted from a swift waltz to a hot tango. Just my luck. As soon as I’ve got to dance with Luke Collins, the music changes to a tango.
Almost immediately, half of the couples retired from the floor, too intimidated by the tune to stay. The notes were quick and heavy, suiting Collins perfectly. I followed his lead as he glided across the floor, taking up as much space as he could—drawing in as many eyes as possible.
He was good on his feet, but not exactly like he was a trained dancer. Collins danced like a fighter, but the people on the floor couldn’t tell the difference as the two of us twirled and tiptoed. It seemed effortless to him and it wasn’t until he started speaking that I realized it probably was. “What happened in the hotel room?” he asked me.
The tango is full of a lot of tension followed by a lot of outburst. Long, drawn out steps followed by short, quick ones. Slow, slow, two quick, slow—over and over and over. I chose to believe that this was the reason I felt so much tension before I answered, “I don’t know. You kissed me,remember?”
But you can’t start off too fast with the tango, otherwise you just look silly. It has to be drawn out. Torturous. “It wasn’t a kiss,” he said, pulling me in closer by my hip. I slid down along his torso, letting my legs split, before he tore me up again on the downbeat. He felt closer, then, his breath wisping across my skin as he spoke. “But I was talking about your freakout.”
My heart turned over at his words and I missed a step in our dance, causing a few decorated guests to take in a breath. Only then did I realize that people had started to watch. I recovered, but it didn’t seem to matter. The collective gasp had made even more people turn to see what was going on. I couldn’t have planned it better if I had tried.
“Am I good?” Matt wondered.
“Not yet,” Collins said, looking across the crowd as if willing them to watch us with his very mind.
But I couldn’t focus on my brother. Couldn’t focus on anything except the dance—how close Collins was and the last time the two of us had let this happen. In a hotel closet with a woman on the other side of the door. I didn’t dare let myself remember how it felt to drown. I didn’t dare recall what it had felt like to live without breath and stand without legs because if I did, it would have happened again. Right there. I was sure of it.
And so it was the kiss. The kiss was the only thing left to talk about. “If it wasn’t a kiss, then what was it?”
He looked down at me, his eyebrows raised and one corner of his mouth ticked up in something that was almost a smile. His eyes bounced back and forth between each of mine as he plotted his next sentence. “It wasn’t a kiss.”
Some say that the tango is the dance of lovers. I think it’s the dance of liars. When people are dancing around their secrets and stories, this was the music they played. Their legs get twisted up with their partner’s in an intricate game of concentration and avoidance. The two play off of each other, spinning their web—dancing their heated dance until they both, somehow, believe one another. Maybe that’s why I found it so interesting that Luke Collins was so good at it.
“Then what was it?” I asked again.
The music rose, the tension pulling apart each and every note. The cellos turned to sharp, quick beats, the two of us posing at each hit. The last pose landed with me pinned up against him, both of us facing the quintet, both of us pleading for breath. His head fit right in the crook of my neck as he whispered a worn out, “Quit trying to distract me from my question.”
The violin ripped through the melody, stringing the spicy elegance back into the air, and I turned on him so sharply that he didn’t know what was happening until we were facing each other gain, mere inches keeping us from meeting at the lips. “Not,” I bit. “Until I get an answer to mine.”
We held the attention of the majority of the room, but it still wasn’t enough to get Matt inside. We needed to do something big. We needed to spin or jump or—
My breath left as my partner dipped me, matching his movements with the unceasing squeal of the viola. It was sudden and unexpected. It was spontaneous. It was a little hot, honestly, but most importantly, it was the perfect distraction.
The women around us swooned. Maybe I even swooned a little bit. “Now,” Collins said into his comms and I knew that Matt was already in, disappearing among ambassadors and countesses.
Collins held me there for a moment as if I were as light as a feather and, for a moment, I thought that maybe I might be. That’s certainly what it felt like, staring up at that boy in that Romanian ballroom. At the boy who had found me in the shadows of Baring Cross Station and had managed to drag me back into the light.
Slowly, steadily, he pulled me up again, drawing it out as much as possible, his gaze unwavering. It was the tango, after all. The dance of lovers and liars alike. It was made to be slow. It was made to be painful. It was made to last completely and wholly throughout every squeezed out second.
“It was a device,” he whispered, pulling me into his arms again.
But my mind was still in the dip. Still upside-down. “What?”
“I knew it would shut you up,” he said. Just like that, I remembered what we were talking about. The not-kiss. How was it that I was dancing a tango with a boy who looked like Luke Collins and I was discussing a not-kiss? “It was a device to get you to stop talking.”
To anyone else, it might’ve looked like a boy whispering sweet nothing into a girl’s ear. That’s what they all thought. All of the outsiders watching that night. The women smiled, remembering their love and the girls giggled, anticipating theirs. It’s a shame they wasted hope on us though, because I knew all too well what Collins what whispering in my ear. I knew all too well what he was talking about and it was neither sweet nor nothing. I replayed the voices in my head. The sounds of them searching the room. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so reckless? I could have gotten us killed.
But then I remembered the most horrifying fact of all. I hadn’t had a choice in the matter.
It hadn’t been like throwing knives or dancing the tango. I hadn’t had any sort of control and, to be honest, I hadn’t been able to feel most of it. I didn’t know who had been controlling me, but it certainly hadn’t been me. “Who were they?” I asked no one in particular.
Collins was the only one who heard me, his next words seeming particularly careful on his cautions lips. “Good question.”
The music grew faster now. Louder. Only a few couples remained on the floor with us. A collection of aristocrats gathered around, watching. Waiting for another chance to be impressed. Perfectly distracted and entirely unaware of that fact. “Why are they after you?” I asked.
There was no hint of playfulness in him. Not even half a smile. He was contemplating this question or, more likely, contemplating his answer. Choosing from his dictionary of words in hopes of forming the perfect technicality. “Not sure,” he said finally, which I couldn’t help notice was vastly different from not knowing.
But that’s the thing about the tango. It’s not reserved for the world-class dancers or those who frequented the ballroom. Anyone can do it, just as long as they know how the dance is done.
The quintet grew stronger—more intense with each passing moment, filling out that massive room more and more as the minutes passed. I caught a glimpse of my brother, making his way up the stairs.
“Why did you freak out?” Collins asked. There was no tango in his tone. It was straight. Strict. A soldier seeking out information.
He spun me until we were at arm's length, causing guests of all ages and prominences to take a breath in. He was giving me time to think. To come up with a damn good answer before he asked again.
I twirled myself in along the inside of his arm and he caught me against his chest, holding me there for maybe a bit longer than the beat required. Not that it mattered. The quintet was watching us now. Playing to us, making our motions audible. We could have changed that song to anything. A ballet. A waltz. But that didn’t matter either. Something told me that Collins and I would always dance the tango. “Good question.”
The violin zipped over the last bit of melody, landing on a squeal, and finally the song was out of notes. Collins and I were locked into each other, both of us trying to catch our breath as the promise of future tangos hung in the inches between us. Over the cheers and applause of the onlookers, I heard my brother in my ear. “I’m in, but I think I need backup.”
“Of course you do,” Collins said, still looking straight at me as his chest moved up and down. Up and down. Breathless. He was breathless. “You’d be an idiot if you didn’t.”
“Mags, we’ll meet you at the rendezvous point,” said the crackling voice of my brother.
“I’m coming with you,” I insisted.
“No.” The word had come from Collins and Matt at the same time. Then it was just Matt, buzzing in my ear. “Your part of the mission is over and now you need to get the hell out of here. We don’t know who’s watching us and I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough surprise attacks for the day.”
The words were like metal against my skin, but if Collins shared that feeling, he didn’t let it show. “I’ll meet you at the bridge,” he said, backing away and starting through the crowd. Behind me, I heard a pack of girls sigh. Like he was some version of Romeo, off to meet me at some secret balcony and profess his love.
But oh, if only they knew the truth about the boy who tells the truth.