Chapter 269: Leaving Rome
(SASHA)
We leave Rome as early as we can, after I buy tickets for a high- speed train north. We don’t talk much about anything that happened overnight until we’re safely in our first-class seats—Tyler refused to travel in anything but—and I’m happy enough to have time to process and think. I asked him, as we packed, to explain to me exactly what steps he had taken, and his reasoning behind them, and he gave up all the information readily, succinctly.
I ran it through my mind again and again, in the hotel room, in the taxi to the train, and after we boarded and were waiting to leave. And at the end of all that thinking, I really couldn’t fault anything in his approach.
Refusing to let the enemy dictate the terms of engagement is a classic strategy. He’d been right that they would not expect an attack; he’d been right that they’d underestimate his grit. He’d been right to keep it quiet; Miles could have pulled together a crew or called in a favor from an extractor to pull me out, but probably not before six a.m. the next morning, and not without significant damage to my own reputation, which I can ill afford right now. Appearing weak is the one thing I have to avoid, and Tyler is smart. He understood that.
No. The person who fucked up here is me.
I’m the one who missed the signs. I was tunnel-visioned, hyper-focused, worrying about the wrong things. It could have gotten me killed—or worse, gotten Tyler killed.
Once the train is beyond metropolitan Rome and speeding through the countryside, I get up to ostensibly use the restroom, but instead take the opportunity to eyeball our fellow passengers.
None seem familiar. And it’s not even dawn yet, so there are few of them, and no one is sitting near to Tyler and me. So when I get back to the seat, I take his hand in mine, and wait until he looks at me.
"Don’t do that," he says, before I can start to speak. "Do what?"