Chapter 43

Lina's POV

When preparing to leave school, I ran into Cecelia in the bathroom.

She stood behind me without a word, and I remained silent too, using the running water to try to wash clean the blood-stained sleeve.

"Lina." She suddenly spoke.

"Mm."

"What you said just now, was it true?"

"What?" I frowned, not knowing which sentence Cecelia was referring to.

"That you would lock me up, interrogate me, then make me disappear."

I turned my head to look at her.

Cecelia's face looked particularly pale under the bathroom's fluorescent light.

"Yes." I said.

She must have known the answer too. After all, as one of Raven's most outstanding assassins, making someone disappear without a trace really wasn't difficult for me.

So Cecelia fell silent for a long time.

So long that I had given up on this unwashable sleeve and was about to turn and leave when she finally spoke.

"Lina," she said, "what if I said I don't want to kill you?"

I stopped and looked at her.

"What if I said," Cecelia's voice lowered, carrying a tremor, "I was forced too. Dmitri captured my family. If I don't comply, they'll die. Would you believe me?"

Her eyes reddened, tears swirling in them. Her expression was very real, so real it made one's heart ache.

But I hadn't forgotten what Dmitri taught.

"Tears are also weapons, even sharper than knives. Because killing with a knife leaves traces, but tears don't."

"No." I said.

Cecelia's tears immediately fell. She stood there, crying like a helpless child.

I didn't comfort her. That wasn't in my code of conduct. I just gave her a cool glance and turned to walk out of the bathroom.

Luca called to say he had an impromptu meeting today and couldn't pick me up. I thought this was a good opportunity to observe the area around the apartment, so I declined his offer to send a driver.

After saying goodbye to Maggie, I took a small road I didn't usually take back to the apartment. Sure enough, I inadvertently discovered several lookouts, and my heart sank.

Not just Raven's—Verona had also planted a few.

It seemed I needed to handle this quickly. Thinking this, I walked into the apartment acting as if nothing was wrong.

I pushed open the door. Cecelia wasn't sprawled on the living room sofa as usual.

Her room door was tightly shut, a thin line of light seeping through the crack—indicating she had the lights on inside but wasn't making any sound.

No music, no old Italian love songs, no chattering sounds of her pretending to talk on the phone with friends.

I didn't knock on her door. The person I needed to see now wasn't her.

Luca was in the study. I listened at the door for a while, confirmed the meeting was over, then gently knocked three times and pushed open the door.

He sat at the desk, several documents spread before him, a fountain pen in his hand, in the exact same posture as every ordinary evening before.

But the moment he saw me push the door open, his expression instantly changed—because he saw the bloodstain on my sleeve and the tear cut by a blade in my school uniform collar.

He put down the pen, pushed the chair back, and stood up much faster than usual.

Luca reached me in just a few strides, his gaze sweeping from my face to my sleeve, then from my sleeve back to my eyes.

He didn't touch the arm I'd injured, only gripped my wrist—very lightly, but I could feel his fingertips trembling slightly.

"It wasn't Verona." I said before he could ask. "It was Cecelia."

I recounted everything that happened on the field from the beginning.

From when I discovered her disappearance, to the confrontation under the oak tree, every sentence she said—about Raven, about Dmitri, about the orders she received—"Luca won't be there on the weekend, only she and I at the apartment, can consider making a move on Sunday."

I took out that slender blade from my pocket and placed it on his desk. The blade reflected a line of cold light under the desk lamp.

Luca listened to the entire account.

His expression changed from tense to stern, finally settling into something I rarely saw on his face—not anger, not killing intent, but a calculating calm.

He leaned against the edge of the desk, hands folded across his chest, silent for a moment.

"You're not surprised." I heard my own voice squeeze out from my throat.

This wasn't a question.

Luca looked up at me. Those deep brown eyes had undercurrents surging beneath, but the surface still maintained a spine-chillingly calm.

"You already knew she was Raven's person." My voice dropped a bit lower than before, as if afraid that saying it aloud would make this fact even more real. "Since when?"

Luca was silent for several seconds, long enough that even the sound of wind outside the window seemed particularly harsh.

Then he said: "Her first week at school."

No excuses, no preamble, he admitted it straightforwardly, just like that night in the car when answering "you planned all of this from the start, didn't you."

The difference was that night he had been silent for a long time. Tonight he wasn't.

Luca directly threw the answer in front of me, letting me pick it up myself.

I stood in place, feeling the silver rose on my chest pressing against my skin with each heartbeat.

My cheeks weren't hot, my heartbeat was steady.

This wasn't a good sign.

When my heartbeat slowed during missions, it meant my body was compressing emotions into a sealed container, screwing the lid on tight.

You already knew she was Raven's person. You put her in the room next to mine. You had her attend school with me. You custom-ordered school uniforms for her in my class. You shared the same plate of cookies with her at the dining table. You let her call me "dear Lina." You let me discover it myself, let me investigate myself. You knew everything, but you didn't say a word.

I pressed these thoughts down one by one, stuffing them into that cage at the bottom of my heart that hadn't been opened in a very long time.

Tonight's cage was particularly heavy. The lock made a harsh metallic scraping sound, like a gate being arduously shut.

"Tell me why." I said, my voice sounding fairly steady.

But Luca probably heard the tremor underneath my voice, as he always could.

He took half a step forward, standing less than an arm's length away from me.

"I need Cecelia to draw out Dmitri."

He looked into my eyes when he said this, without flinching.

He told me that Dmitri contacted Cecelia through encrypted communications, signals passing through over ten layers of encryption. The Moretti family's intelligence team spent months before cracking it to a level where they could track and locate.

The Raven bases on New York's outskirts had already been locked down by his people, but Dmitri himself never showed up—he changed safe houses every few days, every instruction transmitted through one-way encryption. The only clue to determining his location was the signal Cecelia received.

"As long as he sends one more encrypted instruction long enough," Luca said, "my people can complete triangulation. The last time he sent instructions was last Thursday. The next window is between this Thursday and Saturday. I need her to stay in position the moment she receives the instruction, can't let her realize she's already been discovered by us."

"So you kept her, let her think we hadn't discovered anything, just to wait for this instruction."

Luca nodded slightly.

"If you had told me in advance," I said slowly, "I could have responded more naturally at school, wouldn't have let her realize I already knew her identity. You played friendly in front of her, I played calm in front of her, but you didn't tell me."

"If you knew," Luca's voice was heavy, "you wouldn't have been able to help yourself."

"How do you know I couldn't help myself?" I countered.

"Because you care about me too much."

This sentence was like a bullet, precisely hitting the place I least wanted to be struck.

He didn't say "you care about me"—he said "too much."

"Too much" meant your instincts would act before you, your body would react faster than your reason, all the disguise techniques you trained for fifteen years at Raven would fail when it involved him.

His hand reached toward me, fingertips lightly touching the edge of my injured arm's sleeve, not directly touching the wound, just stopping on the fabric where the blood had dried.

"If we don't play out this scene, Dmitri will replace Cecelia as his line and find another channel to approach you. I don't know who he'd replace her with, what method, where he'd strike from."

"At least Cecelia is still within our sight, her every move monitored. Replace her with someone else, I might not even be able to catch up." He paused. "I don't want to lose you again."

Although what Luca said made sense, I couldn't accept the fact that he had deceived me, so I turned to leave.

Behind me came the sound of a chair being suddenly pushed back, followed by footsteps.

Luca's hand pressed against the study door, blocking me from opening it.

I was forced to stop, one hand still gripping the door handle, the other hanging at my side, the bloodstain on my sleeve looking particularly glaring under the hallway light.

The distance between us was closer than before—close enough that I could smell the faint cologne at his shirt collar, close enough that I could feel his breath falling on the top of my head.

"Seventy-two hours." He lowered his voice. "Wait another seventy-two hours. Dmitri's next encrypted instruction transmission window is within this time frame. Once we've locked down his location, Cecelia will no longer be of any use. Then whether you want to make her disappear or trade her for intelligence, either is fine."

I looked up at Luca, our gazes so close it was like burning away those few centimeters of distance between us.

His eyes had red veins from staying up late, a small patch of gray-blue exhaustion accumulated under them, and some other things I didn't want to identify.

He didn't say things like "do you understand" or "can you forgive me." He just told the truth—laid all his cards out on the table in front of me.

After speaking, Luca's fingers moved away from the door, no longer blocking me.

My thoughts were in chaos at this moment. I took a deep breath, chose to temporarily escape, opened the door and walked out.