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I refrained from rubbing my palms together, anxious to dig. “Doing what?”

“Bodyguard, muscle, hired gun, whatever you want to call it.”

Michio folded his arms over his chest. “What does Beckett do exactly?”

Cliff shrugged. Tallis said, “Some kind of underground international humanitarian, perhaps? That’s my guess given the secret nature of his activities and the types of services he requires.”

“Humanitarian,” Roark prompted Tallis, avoiding my stare.

“His methods may be questionable, but he seems to always be on the right side.”

Whatever his job was, he wasn’t doing it anymore considering he spent the prior eighteen months at my heels. “What types of services are we talking about?”

Tallis grinned. “Let’s see, a week before the outbreak, I helped him shovel through innards on a blown-up Afghani sidewalk looking for…” He rubbed his nape. “This and that. That same night—”

“I escorted him to Tibet,” Cliff said, “to have tea with the Dalai Lama.”

Michio’s brows shot to his hairline. “Bull.”

Cliff shared a smile with Tallis and lifted a shoulder. “The man has more connections than anyone I know.”

“Had,” Tallis said. “Most of them suck blood now.”

“Who does he work for?” Roark asked.

“No one knows.” Tallis plopped onto the couch. “Beckett carries himself like a military attaché, yet he lives like a spy. Every assignment is flawlessly planned, heavily clouded, and approached with zero emotion.” He darted his eyes at me. “Until this one.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“When he sought me out a month ago, he wasn’t his usual cryptic self. He was fidgety, short-tempered, running around like some obsessed person. He kept going on about this beautiful kidnapped woman.” He paused, held my eyes. “He’d even traded in his rifle for arrows and a tomahawk. His behavior made me nervous and the shit about saving a woman when I knew none had survived…I turned down the assignment.” He exhaled. “In the end, he was very persuasive. And I get it now. In the matters of humanity, this billet makes all the others negligible.”

“It’s not just that,” Cliff said. “He’s made this one personal.”

Personal. I decided to analyze that later. “So what was your assignment from Beckett?”

“Get a yacht, pick you up from Manoel Island and meet him in Genoa—if he wasn’t with you in Malta.”

“And above all,” Cliff said, “guard you with our lives.”

Michio watched them with the same scrutiny he watched me. “What happens in Genoa?”

Tallis leaned into his knees. “Doesn’t work that way, mate. Beckett never shows all his cards.”

Lines formed on Roark’s brow. “When the wanker dragged me from the fortress, he had a pilot with him. A French bloke.” He looked at me for the first time. “He said he’d fly ye to Iceland.”

To see the Shard. Michio knew them, trusted them. Still, my stomach churned. Did I want to know if I carried the cure? And if we did find it, what would keep us from repeating our failures, pandering our human-centric gods and destroying ourselves all over again?

If the Drone hadn’t killed the last of the nymphs, what would they endure to test the cure? Even if we found and cured twenty nymphs, I knew all too well the hardships each would suffer as rare human women.

Bile simmered in my throat. I braced my hands on my knees. Roark took a step toward me then seemed to think better of it.

“And if Jesse failed to kill the Drone?” I asked to no one particular.

Cliff’s voice whipped with the ocean breeze. “Beckett never fails.”

I wasn’t convinced.

Several hours after retiring to bed, I lay curled around Michio’s back, seeking comfort in his steady breaths.

Sleep hadn’t taken me, and I knew why. I was waiting, hoping.

Wooden boards creaked. The room lolled with the rock of the tide. My eyelids drooped. Just as I was about to give in, the reason for my wait slipped into bed behind me.

I shut my eyes as his hands sought a place to settle, a place against my bare skin but far enough away from Michio’s. The back of my thigh. The dip of my waist.

I fell asleep loathing my guilt of wanting more from Roark, but content with having him there. It would have to be enough.

We left the steep mountains of Corsica and sailed around Capraia. I stood opposite Michio on the yacht’s port quarter and narrowed my eyes at him. The combination of the open sea and the perspiration beading on his hulking frame made me dizzy and restless.

Two days on the boat, rife with sexual tension. All three of us felt it. I didn’t have a clue how to approach it. So, I did what I always did and escaped to the bathroom. The loss of my bullet only fueled my frustration.

“Evie. It’s important that you press your free hand into your opponent’s throat when you’re locking the arm. Try again.”

I’d asked Michio to teach me the arm bar he used against my flower technique. The one that put my hand so temptingly close to his groin and my submission to the head. After forty-five minutes, however, I regretted the request. I couldn’t drag my thoughts away from the ache between my legs or the brooding priest polishing his sword a few feet away.