Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty-Four

It is a fact known throughout spydom and beyond that if a person wants to be found, the best thing they can do is stay put. A fact not as commonly known—staying put sucks.

Three days in Verona. Three very long, very stressful days in Verona. The first night had been spent at the train station, Scout and I taking turns between sleep and stakeout. Neither of us were true pavement artists, but we had learned plenty from the people we loved. We had learned that places like train stations—places made up of people coming and going—were the perfect place to hide.

Night number two had been spent at a shabby hotel along the edge of the city, where there had been less noise, less foot traffic, and (slightly) fewer rats. More tears, though. A lot more tears on the second night.

So there we were, night three, entirely on our own in Verona. I remember walking hand in hand along the sidewalk, taking cover as a young couple in love. I remember looking up at Scout and thinking that nights in Verona with boys like him were supposed to be grand and romantic, but instead we were out of money, out of time, and just about out of hope. "He's not going to find it," I finally said.

By he I meant Luke and by it I meant the letter that I had left in Juliet's wall—just off center and as high as Scout could reach. It hadn't been much. A wrinkled receipt from the sandwich shop we'd stopped at on day one, addressed to Honest Men and Shakespeare Sympathizers. Hopefully he would understand it. Hopefully he would find it stuck between two bricks and know the words were meant for him. Know that he was the one who was supposed turn to frequency three and that I was the one who would be ready to listen.

Scout and I hadn't taken our comms out since Rome. They were our only connection back to our team. We couldn't set a location due to our need to constantly change our position. We couldn't set a time because there was no way to know when Collins would find the note. So comms units it was, and we just had to wait for someone to start talking.

"We knew it was a long shot," Scout reminded me, pulling me in closer as we passed a man who had been wearing a black jacket earlier and was now in a green t-shirt. "But it's our only shot."

"There are thousands of letters in that wall, Scout," I said. "The odds of finding it are—"

"Yeah, I don't know if you've noticed, Mags," he said. "But you've got a little bit of a tendency to defy the odds."

I didn't know if that was supposed to be an insult or a compliment, but I didn't linger. My mind wouldn't let me. It was too busy playing the word letter on repeat. Letter, letter, letter. "Maybe it wasn't specific enough."

And that, apparently, was where Scout and I agreed. "Maybe," he said. "But it was as specific as we could afford to make it under the circumstances. If the right information falls into the wrong hands, you and I are going to have bigger problems than whether or not we're stranded in Verona."

He was right, of course. Scout so frequently is. Everything we put out into the world was another piece of data for the Gathering to plot. So far, we had gone undetected, but a single generous word on an old sandwich receipt had the potential to change that. And besides. As far as hiding spots went, Verona wasn't awful.

Still. I missed my mom.

"We could fly home," I said. "I bet they already boarded a plane and went back to Virginia. We should get on a plane and—"

"We've been over this," Scout interrupted, stopping that idea before it could grow. "It's just like what you told me yesterday—we've got to stay put until someone finds us. Plus, we don't have any more cash and we can't use a card and on top of that, if you don't think that the Gathering isn't monitoring every flight from Europe to DC, you've got another think coming."