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But Iyara knocked her hand away. “Why should I tell you anything? Because you speak my grandmother’s dialect? It’s just another trick. At least they”—and she jerked her head at the men lying in various degrees of pain on the floor, moaning—“never disguised their real intentions.”

“Here’s the difference. I know what kind of scientist your brother is. I know what he’s made.” Bethan kept her gaze as steady as her voice. “I also know what’s likely to happen to the world, and to him, if this invention falls into the wrong hands. I think you do, too, or you wouldn’t have tried to hide in a place like this.”

Iyara let out a bitter laugh. “You can’t possibly think American hands are less dirty?”

“I can’t tell you who has clean hands,” Bethan said. “I like to think it’s a sliding scale, but none of us come out fresh on the other end of it. I will tell you this. Our client is an individual whose concern here is not building himself a weapon but studying the effects of the science involved in controlled, nonmilitary environments.”

“Why should I trust anything you say? Because you’re a woman?” She shook her head. “I know better than that.”

Bethan held her gaze. “I’m not asking you to be my friend, Iyara. I’m asking you to think about what future you want. A brutal death at the hands of men like these?Because you must know that’s what’s on offer if we leave you here. Or a chance at a real life?”

She saw something like hope move across Iyara’s face, quickly blinked away, but Bethan knew she had her.

“How can I trust that?” Iyara asked, but Bethan heard the ache in her voice for the first time.

Bethan handed her the pack she carried, with the medical supplies. This time, Iyara took it.

“The world is a grim place. We both know that,” she told her softly. “Don’t trust it. Trust me. You can, Iyara. I promise.”

Two

Jonas called in the cleanup crew on their way out of the decrepit old mining town, despite his serious doubts that anything would be there when they arrived. Not when this particular sector of the Atacama Desert was home to far too many desperate and dangerous individuals—not to mention whoever was behind the group that had met Alaska Force there with so much unexpected force.

Then it was a long four days to get back out of the high desert, made more precarious this time because they were transporting the scientist’s sister. Iyara Sowande might have held her own against the men who’d held her in that run-down building, but that didn’t mean a civilian recovering from a traumatic event was prepared to travel at the same pace as the team. But she did her best without complaint, and once they made it to their waiting jet in the port city of Antofagasta on the Chilean coast, it was a comparatively smooth and quick flight to Lisbon.

And once there, Iyara took them directly to a nondescriptflat outside of Lisbon proper, in an unremarkable suburb that wasn’t notable in any way.

Jonas called into command back in Alaska. Oz, resident computer genius, listened to the mission rundown in silence, though Jonas could hear Oz tapping away on his keyboard.

“Should I let the client know the package is incoming?” Oz asked when Jonas was done with his report. “Or do you think there will be more roadblocks?”

Jonas took a quick scan of his team, the scientist and his sister, all crowded into the small apartment in a Portuguese city half a world away from the desert where they’d found Iyara. “We’ll be wheels up inside an hour and on our way to Montreal. Make sure the client is ready.”

“Roger that,” Oz replied.

When the line was terminated and his duty done for the moment, Jonas stayed where he was in the farthest corner of the flat, not quite ready to rejoin his team.

Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his team that he needed to keep his distance from. It was Bethan. Jonas had been working with Griffin for a while now. He’d always liked Rory. And August, one of the new crop of Alaska Force members, could more than handle himself. Jonas had spent his entire adult life in militaristic scenarios like this one, in and out of the service, and had always been good at teamwork.

Better than good.

He just wished that Bethan Wilcox wasn’t quite so good at what she did.

If he’d had his way, she never would have been accepted into Alaska Force in the first place, but no one had asked him. And he hadn’t had it in him to veto her selection, which he could have done. Not for her sake, but because he had no intention of telling anyone why it was she got to him.

Not even the only men alive he considered brothers andfriends, Isaac Gentry and Templeton Cross. Together they’d been in and out of too many fires to count. The three of them had started Alaska Force after the last mission they’d all been on had gone so spectacularly wrong.

But Bethan was his very own ghost. She’d been haunting him for years.

Jonas hadn’t been prepared for the kind of damage she could do to him by actually being there, in the flesh.

He still wasn’t.

As usual, Bethan was aware of it when he stared at her too long. She looked up from her position next to Iyara on the small couch, and he saw that deliberately blank look take over her face.

The same expression she always threw his way, and more power to her.

But he remembered too well. That was the problem.