She tugged on his hand halfway down the hallway, turned to him, and stopped in one move.
He frowned. “What is it?”
“There isn’t really an easy way to tell you this, so I should probably say it. Maybe I should’ve said it days ago before things got to this point.” She ducked her head, not entirely sure how to explain. “I don’t like it when people hurt others just to get what they want.”
“It’s not okay to jump to conclusions rather than trusting someone you already know you can trust.” Luca touched his warm palm to the side of her neck, his thumb on her cheek. “But it is okay to apologize for getting the wrong idea, and it’s also okay to be a human being with faults and things that trigger you into acting without thinking.”
It sounded like he knew what he was talking about, which gave her the courage to explain. “There was a CIA agent who showed up at the refugee camp I was working at. Just after January. It must be nearly four years ago now.”
“Just before you quit and came here?”
She nodded, continuing to speak quietly, hoping no one was listening to them. “He said a shipment of medicines was coming in and he needed to look inside the crate in order to intercept it. One of the vials was apparently not the medicine but the prototype for a deadly disease that someone was going to use to destroy a lot of people. I think he was stopping it from being sold to dangerous people.”
“Was he legit?”
She nodded. “Yes, but he was also the kind of person who was willing to condemn an entire camp of people with polio to die just so that he could stop one vial from getting through to the bad guys who were buying it.”
“In exchange, he might have saved millions of lives.”
“We don’t know that.” She lifted her chin. “What we know is that I was facing a massive outbreak and thousands of people were going to die within a few days. But his mission was more important than their lives, and he was going to delay the shipment until he had orders as to where his vial was going next.”
Luca’s expression hardened. “What happened?”
“I refused to let him look in the containers before I took the medicine out so that I could begin distributing it. He didn’t like that, and we fought about it. In the end, I was on my back and he was strangling me.” She closed her eyes, still able to see his face above hers. Those eyes so set on killing her. “I managed to reach a knife, and I stabbed him before he could kill me.”
“He died?”
“I murdered a foreign agent and then completed his mission for him—but it was too late for a lot of the people. Some were saved, but far too many didn’t make it.”
“So you quit and came here?”
She nodded, swallowing against the lump in her throat. “I can’t work with people who are willing to trade others’ lives like that.”
“He would have killed you to complete his mission.”
“And I had to kill him to complete mine.” To do the job she was there to do—as a doctor.
“But in the end, you did both of your jobs.”
Kira nodded.
“He knew what he was getting into. He went there prepared to die and also prepared to kill to get it done. I’m glad it was him and not you.” Luca winced. “Maybe that makes me a terrible person, but you saved more lives with your actions than he would have. I’m guessing he wasn’t going to listen to an agreement where you both got what you wanted.”
“I tried.” She shook her head, tears gathering in her eyes. “He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t care about those people at all.”
“So you gave up covert work and started over.”
She said, “I don’t want to start doing it again. But I know it’s what you do.”
“Seems to me like if you work with me for a little while, you’ll realize my tactics are a whole lot different than that guy’s. Not just because this is local investigations and if I break the law, I’ll go to jail. But I’m not going to ask you to do it if you don’t want to.”
She wanted to trust this. To get to know him better so that she had evidence for her belief in him. Not just blind faith. “Maybe I should take a couple of weeks off from the emergency department and do that.”
“If you’re going to take a vacation, we should go somewhere more exciting than wherever I’m working.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “But thank you for telling me.”
She nodded, exhausted from having to relive the memories again. Even if it was only a quick conversation, the whole thing seemed to weigh down her heart all over again. Making her feel heavy in ways she didn’t like. But God had asked her to carry these things.
It wasn’t as if she could just forget them all or watch them get washed away.