Chapter 44 Two Tables

Chapter 44 Two Tables
They split at the corner of Rue de la Roquette, no discussion left to have, only the shape of the plan they’d already agreed on.

Marco took the original café. Gia took the new one, six blocks east, alone for the first time since Los Angeles.

Tonight she liked it less than ever, walking fast under streetlights that felt too far apart, one hand in her coat pocket wrapped around a phone she wasn’t supposed to need.

The café Reyes had chosen was small, warm, half-full of people who had no idea they were sitting inside someone else’s surveillance operation. Gia took a table near the back, ordered a coffee she had no intention of drinking, and watched the door without staring at it.

Reyes was already there. Two tables over, alone, a newspaper open in front of her that she wasn’t reading.

Neither of them acknowledged the other.

Forty minutes passed. The waiter refilled Gia’s coffee twice. A couple argued quietly near the window and made up before dessert. A man in a wool coat came in, shook the rain off his shoulders, and turned out to be nobody, just someone meeting his daughter for dinner, laughing too loud at something on his phone before he put it away.

Gia caught herself almost relaxing once, somewhere around minute thirty, and made herself stop. Almost relaxing was how people missed things.

Nobody who looked like danger walked through the door.

Then Gia’s phone buzzed once, and she knew before she looked at it that something had gone wrong at the other table.

He’s here, Marco had written. Original café. He just walked in.

Gia’s hands went still around her cup.

Is Reyes safe, she typed back.

Reyes isn’t here. She’s with you. That’s the point.

Gia looked up, across the room, at the woman two tables over who was not, in fact, Special Agent Katherine Reyes’s federal partner but Reyes herself, exactly where she was supposed to be, exactly where the new plan had put her.

Which meant he hadn’t been tracking Reyes. He’d been tracking the original location… the one that existed nowhere except in a text between her and Marco.

Gia’s stomach dropped through the floor of the café.

He’s not after Reyes, she typed, fingers clumsy with adrenaline. He’s after you. He followed the wrong plan on purpose. He wanted to be wherever you were, not wherever the evidence was.

There was a pause before Marco’s reply came through, longer than she wanted it to be.

I know. He’s looking right at me.

Gia was moving before she finished reading the message, coat half on, chair scraping back loud enough that Reyes looked up from her newspaper for the first time all night.

“What is it,” Reyes said quietly, not moving from her seat.

“Marco,” Gia said. “He found Marco. On purpose. He wasn’t tracking the evidence or you. He was tracking whoever was protecting me.”

Reyes was on her feet in under two seconds, the newspaper left open on the table, phone already at her ear.

“Go,” Reyes said. “I’ll get agents moving. Do not go in that café. Do you understand me? Whatever you do when you get there, you do not walk through that door.”

Gia was already outside, already running, the cold Paris night cutting through a coat she hadn’t fully buttoned.

She counted streets instead of thinking, because counting streets was something she could control and everything else wasn’t. Two blocks. A man walking a dog stepped aside for her without being asked. Four blocks, her lungs starting to burn, her phone gripped so hard in her fist it hurt. Six blocks. The corner.

She reached the street outside the original café out of breath, chest burning, and stopped dead at the corner because what she saw did not match anything she had prepared herself to see.

The café was lit, ordinary, full of people drinking wine and eating late dinners like nothing in the world was wrong.

Marco was standing outside it. Alone. Whole. Watching a car pull away from the curb at the far end of the street, taillights disappearing into traffic.

She reached him and grabbed his arm before she could stop herself, her hands checking him the way her eyes usually did.

“He was inside,” Marco said, before she could ask. “Sat two tables from me. Didn’t order anything. Didn’t say anything. Just watched me for maybe ninety seconds.” His voice was steady, but his eyes weren’t, not quite. “Then he got up, walked past my table close enough to touch, and said four words.”

“What words,” Gia said.

Marco looked at her, and something in his face made the cold night feel colder.

“He said, ‘Tell her I’m patient.’”

Neither of them moved. The traffic kept going past the end of the street, ordinary, indifferent, as if a man hadn’t just told them, from three feet away, that this wasn’t over and had never been about to be.

“Patient for what,” Gia said finally.

Marco didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.