My skin went hot. When I felt like this about him?
And if I lost focus for one second, if I did something Christina wouldn’t do, or didn’t do something she would do, and he found out I was spying on him, he’d kill me. There’d be no mercy this time.
I imagined being in the mansion with him, cut off from my friends and with no backup, maybe for weeks or months. The fear hit me fully, then, like someone was pumping ice water steadily up through my veins. This is Konstantin Gulyev we’re talking about.
A little voice inside me whispered, no one has to know you thought of this. Carrie hadn’t even considered me for the mission. All I had to do was keep quiet and the mission would stay cancelled.
But...I’d know. When people started dying, when Konstantin took over... I’d know.
I forced my shaking legs to stand and walked to the elevator.
Carrie’s office is right up on the top floor, which gave me far too much time to think. I nearly stopped the elevator three times and walking down the long hallway to her door was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. This is crazy. I’m not brave enough to do this.
By the time I reached Carrie’s door, I didn’t dare stop to knock: if I stopped, I’d just turn around and run. So I barged in and then stood there, eyes wide and chest tight.
Carrie was sitting behind her desk, in the process of unwrapping a sandwich. An antique clock was just chiming one. She looked up, startled. “Hailey?”
I couldn’t speak.
She stood, trying to fill the awkward silence. “I always shut myself in here at this time and turn my phone off. It’s the only way I get to eat.” She walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows of thick, bulletproof glass that formed one end of the room and looked out at the fantastic view of New York. “For five minutes, I just stand here. Reminds me what we’re fighting for.”
Today, though, she didn’t look inspired. She looked defeated. She loved this city and its people and most of them never even knew her name, or the lengths she’d gone to to protect them.
If New York has a guardian spirit, it’s Carrie.
And now she’d lost. She let out a long sigh and dropped her eyes to the floor—
“I can do it,” I blurted.
Carrie turned to me and looked blank, which made me falter. That’s how completely unsuitable I was: she didn’t even understand what I meant.
“I can be Christina,” I told her.
She cocked her head to one side... and then her jaw dropped. “You—” She looked me up and down and I could see the battle on her face. She wanted it to be possible but she also didn’t want it to be possible. She’s really grown to care about me. “No. No, I mean…. No, you’re not tall enough.”
“I am. I’m exactly the same height as Alison and Christina. They just wear heels and I... slouch.” I stood up straight.
Carrie looked ill. She called in Doctor Franklin, maybe hoping he’d rule out the idea. But he cupped my head in his hands, felt my jawline, compared a photo of me to a photo of Christina..., and nodded. “It would work,” he told us. “Any tattoos we should know about?” I shook my head. “Any scars?”
I froze. Calahan is the only one who knows about my childhood. We were working on a case involving children and one night I just broke down and told him everything. He got this fiercely protective look in his eyes and I think he would have gone straight out and hunted down my stepfather if he was still alive.
But if I was going to do this, they had to know. I lifted my suit jacket and my blouse to reveal the ugly burn scar on my side.
Doctor Franklin stooped and took a look at it. “Not a problem,” he said cheerily, and scribbled something on a clipboard. “We’ll say some hot metal burned you while they were freeing you from the wreckage.”
Carrie’s reaction was completely different. She must have read the pain in my expression because for a second, she looked as if she was going to wrap me up in a hug. She settled for taking my hand and squeezing it tight. She held my gaze for a moment longer and then sighed and shook her head, still undecided. “You have no undercover experience,” she said. “You’re not even a field agent.”
“But I do know Konstantin,” I said quietly.
“Hailey... you’d be his girlfriend. You’d have to—”
I flushed. “I know.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
For a second, I flashed back to Konstantin asking me the same question. I shook my head. Men don’t notice me... except him.
Carrie closed her eyes. “I—No. No, this is beyond crazy. No.”