Page 48 of Dual Destruction

“Rosetti is hard to find.”

“He has a cabin in the mountains,” Sharp said, drawing out the syllables as he spoke. “But you remember that, don’t you?”

I knew the cabin was in the file, but the time stamp indicated it had been taken after I’d been there, so I tried my best to offer Sharp a passable look of deniability, which I apparently failed at.

“You want to play games with me?” Sharp snapped, the tone of his voice completely at odds with the casual way he held his body. With his hands folded together in his lap, he took steady breaths, his stare leveled at me across the table.

“I didn’t know who he was when I met him,” I admitted.

“But you know now.”

“I know now.”

“And he’s alive,” Sharp hedged.

“Not for lack of trying.”

Sharp pulled back the front of his coat and reached into the inside pocket. I had the fleeting thought that this was it, that I was going to die. It didn’t matter he had one pointed at me on top of the table. He was reaching, and I was going to die with Sage’s gun in my hands in pieces. I closed my eyes, a long and slow blink, but death didn’t come.

I licked my lips and forced myself to look down, finding a stack of pictures in front of me. The top one was damning enough. I didn’t need to see the rest, but I fingered through them anyway, blood running cold.

“How does Sandro Rosetti take his coffee, Foster?”

I swallowed and picked up the pictures, arranging them in a neat stack and pushing them back toward Sharp.

“He was under your roof and he’s still alive,” Sharp accused.

“It’s complicated.”

Sharp leaned over the table and messed up the stack of pictures, searching through until he found the one he wanted, the one I didn’t want to see. I didn’t need a picture to remember what Sage looked like, collapsing into my arms and covered in blood. I saw the memory every time I closed my eyes.

“Ask me where I got the pictures,” Sharp said, pushing them back at me.

“Where did you get the pictures?” I asked.

“Not from someone who was trailing Rosetti, which was surprising.”

“What?”

“Things are getting complicated,” Sharp said, leaning back in his chair and gesturing to the neatly arranged parts on the table. “Put those back together and we’ll talk.”

I could assemble them both with my eyes closed, even though Sage’s felt foreign in my hands.

“When did you get a Sig?” Sharp asked when I finished, lining them up together on the table.

“Recently.”

He made a noise I couldn’t decipher, then reached back into his jacket and pulled out a manila folder. The folder landed in the middle of the table, the air displacing the stack of photos into a messy pile.

“How long have we known each other?” Sharp asked me.

“Too long for both of us to still be alive.”

His mouth twitched into something that, under other circumstances, might have been a smile. “I’m telling you this because you’re as much of a friend to me as a man in our line of work can have.”

“Okay…”

“First, you need to know the hit on Rosetti has been rescinded.”