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“Why’d you push him?” Chan paced the tiny distance at the foot of the bed. With his long legs, it only took him two steps before he had to turn around. The Ritz, this was not. “Now we’re stuck here, and we won’t even be allowed to leave for food. You know he’s going to have it brought here? He was finally leaving, and you, you—”

My pulse pounded in my ears, and I pointed to the corner of the room.

Camera , I surreptitiously signed, careful to keep my motions small and hopefully unnoticeable.

Chan shook his head. I don’t care , he signed back.

It took me a second to remember, but then I recalled what he’d said in the bathroom before I’d gotten us into this mess.

It was better for Holt to hear a little bit so he didn’t think we were hiding anything else. If Chan didn’t show him he was upset with me over getting locked away in our room, Holt would wonder why.

We would just have to be careful with what we said. Because if I let it slip that the real reason Chan was upset was that we couldn’t get a message to our friends at the CIA, Chan would find even more reasons to hate me.

Because I could tell he was genuinely upset. This was one time he wasn’t acting. No matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise. Still, it wasn’t like it felt great. I’d only been trying to help. It’s not my fault I wasn’t a trained spy.

I rubbed at the tension between my eyes and refused to meet Chan’s gaze. The real thing that hurt right now was knowing I’d let Chan down. I’d meant to do something good, and instead, only made our situation worse.

And now he hated me. He didn’t see me as a strong, capable woman. He saw me as someone who forged ahead by herself when she should have been a team player, and who didn’t listen to feedback even when all signs pointed to the fact that she shouldn’t have pressed her egomaniacal father to the point of no return.

My eyes burned, and I pressed the heels of my hands against them to stop any tears from escaping.

“I know, okay?” I said. My voice broke, and I swallowed. “I messed up. I…I’m not exactly used to this, you know? My whole world ended a little over a day ago, and I’m still struggling to keep up. I know that’s not an excuse, but I promise I’m doing the best I can.”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. But then I was surprised to feel his arms circle around me. I dropped my hands and stared numbly into his shoulder. I didn’t deserve his kindness.

“You’re doing great,” he whispered into my ear. “I’m sorry. Sometimes you’re so good at everything I forget that you’re not some kind of superstar.”

The familiar nickname made me all too aware of how I was anything but super. In any area of my life.

I choked out a laugh. “Hardly,” I said. “You saw how spectacularly I failed back there.”

He relaxed his hold and leaned back so he could better look me in the eyes. “On the contrary.” Chan tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You were very good back in the lab. Or very, very bad. Take your pick.”

He raised his eyebrows, and I smacked him playfully in the arm.

Sometimes it was hard to believe I’d only just met this man and we were, quite literally, acting for the camera. There was something about this high-stakes situation that made me feel bound to him in a way I wasn’t sure was exactly healthy. Sure, we had sexual chemistry. I didn’t deny that. But it wasn’t like you could build a relationship on that alone. I wanted something more. Something real. I needed to know the actual man, and with all the pretending, I wasn’t sure how to get that.

I stepped away, gathering my wits that had scattered like flower petals at our feet.

“So, what now?” I asked, stuffing my hands into my pockets.

Chan shrugged. “We’re going to be here awhile. We get comfortable.” He motioned to the bathroom. “Do you want to shower before we sleep, or are you too tired?”

Okay, so I realized it was probably only midafternoon and thus way too early to go to sleep. But honestly, after the day I’d had, I felt like I could sleep for an entire year.

Still, a shower sounded heavenly. Even if it was a shower without a curtain.

Of course, that was when my brain caught up with the whole “covert ops” of the situation, and I realized Chan was probably trying to tell me something without the camera picking it up. A real shower would unfortunately have to wait.

“A shower would be great,” I said, trying to hide the longing in my voice.

“I’d like to brush my teeth,” Chan said. Yep, definitely a code.

We moved to the bathroom, and Chan turned on the faucet while I shuffled to the shower side, away from the mirror. Chan reached across me to grab the toothbrush.

“What was in the papers?” he whispered. “Dumb it down for me.”

I rubbed my temples. I really was too tired for this.

“Holt’s been developing some kind of drug for the last decade. This lab is just one satellite. The operation is much larger, and has a lot of manpower and money behind it. Likely a lot of political backing as well. There was a lot of chemical composition and formulation information you probably won’t care to know, but basically it’s gone through a lot of iterations over the years. It has something to do with the body’s cardiovascular system.” Chan was watching me patiently, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he was no longer following or not, so I simplified, just to make sure.

“The heart,” I said. “Holt’s developing something that will mess with people’s hearts.”

Chan leaned against the wall with a thump. “And according to him,” Chan said with a wry grin, “he has a final product.”

He closed his eyes like he didn’t want to see this future in front of us and scrubbed a hand down his face. “This is so much worse than him simply escaping prison.”

I knew there wasn’t a camera in this part of the room, so it wasn’t like we needed to pretend for anyone. But I still reached out and took Chan’s hand in mine. He looked like he needed the comfort, and friends still did that. Right?

Chan squeezed my hand once and then let go.

Well, okay then. I could take a hint.

My chest tightened, and I swallowed hard. Then I moved over to the shower, because surely Holt and his minions would get suspicious if they didn’t hear the shower turn on soon. And if it got Chan out of this bathroom so I could have some time alone with my thoughts, all the better.

But my fake boyfriend didn’t take the hint, and a second later he was back at my side, whispering in my ear.

“Taking the pills was risky,” he said, “but I have to admit, you have nerves of steel. Where’d you hide them?”

I furrowed my brows. “I thought you took them?” I handed him the toothpaste. Chan took it with a shake of his head.

He looked innocent enough. But spies were trained to lie. He’d told me himself he wasn’t above lying to me. I didn’t really think I’d be able to tell if he was being honest now.

A tiny seed of doubt burrowed itself in my chest, sinking its claws in until I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe there was more to Chan than met the eye. I kept trying to get him out of this situation, but what if he didn’t want to leave? What if he’d arranged things so that he was exactly where he wanted to be?

I’d thought he was flirting with me at the bar, but really he was sent there by Agent Mendez to retrieve me. What if my bringing him here was another setup? Just another long con to get him into the lab so he could get his hands on the pills he claimed to know nothing about, using me as his pawn in a game where I was woefully unprepared and underskilled.

But if Chan took the pills…why? And what was he going to do with them? Did he want them for himself or someone else? Could he be some kind of double agent?

Well, that was a comforting thought.

“At least we know for sure there aren’t any cameras or recording devices in the lab,” Chan said, and my head whipped around.

“How?”

“They would have found us much sooner if there were,” he replied. “And they’d know who took the pills.”

Somehow, I didn’t find that reassuring.

“I’m going to get some clean clothes,” I muttered. I turned and shimmied my way around the divider back into the room. I was out of things to contribute to this conversation anyway.

Chan had finished brushing his teeth by the time I returned to the bathroom, which was a good thing. I didn’t feel like stripping for an audience for the second time that day.

The shower was cold, but at least I was clean as I changed into my pajamas and braided my wet hair. My hair was so long it’d take forever to dry this way, but without a blow-dryer, it was the best I could do. Besides, who was I trying to impress? It wasn’t like I was going to leave this room, and I shouldn’t care about the secret agent I was stuck with enough to worry about things such as hair frizz.

But I did.

Chan took his turn in the shower, and I did my best not to picture him naked. And wet. You weren’t supposed to fantasize about those kinds of things when the person in question might be a bad guy.

Did I really think that?

I wasn’t sure.

Everyone else here was.

Chan came out wearing only a towel. When he saw me sitting on the bed, he smirked. Like he’d forgotten his clean clothes on purpose.

My mouth went dry, and I held my breath. It wasn’t intentional. It was just a by-product of me trying my hardest not to say something I would regret later.

Maybe he knew I was onto him and he was using his body as a way to lure me back in. “ Andee’s getting suspicious, it must be time to kiss her. Oh, look, she knows I lied about the pills, I’ll just walk around half-naked. ”

Was I that easily played?

I rubbed my eyes, taking the two-second break in my vision to collect my thoughts. Once the contact was broken, I refused to look in his direction again, instead focusing on the camera in the corner of the room, seeing if there was a blinking red light or anything that gave any indication of when it was actively monitored.

I heard Chan whistle as he walked toward the bathroom, but I leaned back on the bed and stared up at the tunnel ceiling. Nope. I wasn’t going to look.

Of course, I’d already seen Chan without his shirt. So my mind could conjure up a perfect image of Chan’s washboard abs even with me staring at the water stains in the stone above my head. I could picture the towel hanging loosely on his hips and the way his bicep had flexed when he’d pulled open the drawer to get a fresh set of clothes. But the worst part of it all was that I could smell his clean scent from here, and it made me want to close the distance between us and finish what we’d started back in the lab earlier today.

It was just soap. The same scent I’d used on myself. But for some reason this was different and I couldn’t understand it. The science didn’t make sense. Stupid science.

Chan came back wearing a pair of my ex’s basketball shorts and a T-shirt. Suddenly it was like a bucket of cold water had been dumped on my head. All men were the same. In this case, Chan literally fit my ex’s clothes. That’s how similar they were. And my ex had been a lying, self-serving, horrible person. For all I knew, Chan probably was too; he was simply better at hiding it. As well he should be. He was trained by professionals, after all.

I scooted to the right side of the bed, not caring whether Chan might have a preference for one side over another. He studied my face for a second before reaching up and pulling on the cord that turned off the light. I remembered him saying his right ear had better hearing and wondered whether he liked sleeping with his good ear up or not. Would he be facing me the whole night? Would he instinctively wrap his arm around me once he fell asleep? Too late to ask his preferred side now. Then I realized there was something I could ask.

“You’re sleeping with your hearing aids in?”

I’d heard that wasn’t typical. And if Holt thought we were boyfriend-girlfriend, it’d be okay if I asked Chan why he was doing something out of the ordinary.

“I want to be able to hear, no matter what time it is. No matter what’s going on,” he said. “Just in case.”

I wasn’t sure if that was to protect me or to further his own agenda. I frowned, but said nothing.

“You okay?” He settled in beside me, his weight causing the bed to dip a little. In the darkness, I was hyperaware of how small the full mattress was and just how close we were to each other. It was a feeling, rather than sight, that made me aware of the mere inches separating us. With the light off, it was completely dark in the room. There wasn’t any illumination from a streetlamp or a passing car. When they’d retrofitted the doors to these catacombs with technology, they’d sealed them in completely so even the light from the tunnels didn’t enter our room.

One time, when I was about twelve years old, my mom took me on a road trip across the United States. We saw the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty. It was one of the few trips we’d taken, so it was forever burned in my mind. But the thing I remembered most was when we’d visited the Lewis and Clark Caverns. Our tour guide had taken us deep down into the belly of the mountain, and when we’d taken so many turns I thought for sure we’d never find our way back, he’d turned off all the lights and asked us to hold our hands in front of our faces. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out my own fingers an inch away from my nose.

This was like that.

But in the Lewis and Clark caves, I’d had my mother to make me feel less alone. Here, I had a spy named Chan, who had his own secrets I could only guess at.

“I’m just tired,” I answered him, resisting the urge to hold out my hand and see how close he really was.

So close, but so far away.

My body felt the weight of the mountain on top of me, but it wasn’t just because of exhaustion. I didn’t know whether I could trust Chan. And that, more than anything, was what made me turn over and face the wall.