Chapter 35

35

Eva

We don't make it to Barcelona. I fall asleep, and when I wake up, Jonathan is parking the car on a narrow street in a picturesque village.

"Where are we?" I ask, blinking sleepily at the white cottages with red accents and overflowing flower boxes. It's like the setting of a European Hallmark movie.

"Burguete," he says. "It's a Basque village near the border." He unfastens his seat belt.

"Why have we stopped?" I ask.

"So you can sleep. There's a hotel here. Hemingway played the piano downstairs."

"Oh God, you like Hemingway?" I shake my head. "That is such a red flag."

"You're not wrong." He says things like that all the time—wry, under his breath, like they're a joke. I don't think they're a joke. I'm sweating him out. He's releasing little weaknesses all the time. I just need him to release something I can use.

He gets out of the car and hurries to open my door. He helps me, like I've never gotten out of a car before.

"Thank you," I say.

Jonathan threads his warm fingers through mine as we walk down a sidewalk lined with sparkling aqueducts. This village was designed for romance. It was designed for fantasists and fly-by-nighters and assassins pretending to be in love.

I'm not gonna lie; part of me really wants to run right now. This whole thing is starting to feel too much like the dreams I never let myself have. Dreams that I would meet a guy who wanted me and only me. That he would whisk me away—not just on vacation but away from my actual life, like reality was a thing I could discard if I just found the right man. Like if we got together, I would become someone else. I wouldn't be a killer. I wouldn't be afraid. I would be a girl who was loved. I would be a girl who could love.

It's all a little overwhelming.

There's love bombing and then there's whatever this is. People like Jonathan and I keep ourselves separate from the rest of the world. That's probably what drew us to each other in the first place. That's probably what keeps us drawn to each other.

Normally we exist in our own little bubbles. When we do try to be like everyone else, we do it wrong. We run too fast. We dance too hard. We want too much. We crash. We burn. And we retreat to our little bubbles again, to stay longer, to hide more, until we die, always alone, because we couldn't love the world just a little. We had to love it too fucking much.

Jonathan leads me to a hotel with a steep roof and green shutters. There's a night manager watching Lupin on his laptop.

Jonathan knocks on the hotel windowpane. The night manager notices us but doesn't seem interested until Jonathan presses a few large bills against the glass.

The night manager lets us in. He leads us to the front desk.

"Do you want your own room?" Jonathan asks me. His eyes go bright, then dark again.

"No," I say. "Why bother? We're here for a limited time only."

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Jonathan was gone in the morning. If he went out to get milk and never came back. That's the thing about people like us. We love hard, but we fear harder. We scare easy. What scares us the most is intimacy, which is what is making finding Jonathan's weaknesses hard.

So far I've established that he has a guilty conscience, but I'm pretty sure the agency already knew that. It's probably part of the reason I'm here, because of the bad things he's done.

I also know he doesn't like himself, but who fucking does? And that probably ties in to whatever bad thing made him a mark in the first place.

Physically, he's in impressive condition. He's smart. He's sharp. He's very handsome. He puts up a fairly competent front. To find weaknesses I can use I'm going to need to go deeper. I'm going to need to find out what's behind his front.

I need to create real intimacy, not just the sexual kind. I know how to do it. There's only one way. People create intimacy by telling the truth. I'm a liar, so I know. The truth just tastes different. You can't fake it.

But if I want Jonathan to tell me his truth, I have to create intimacy. I have to tell him my truth first.