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And still, all they did was stand there on a windswept beach, waiting for the morning fog to lift.

“The briefing’s at nine,” he reminded her after a lifetime or two. And then he broke her heart by dropping his hand and stepping back. Breaking whatever it was that hummed there between them, like their own personal electric charge. “I’ll race you back.”

***

When she walked into the briefing in the lodge at precisely 0900 hours, Bethan had erased any possible trace of the night before and, while she was at it, everything personal that had happened in California.

Everyvisibletrace, anyway.

Once inside the big, cheerfully masculine room, she nodded and smiled faintly at her colleagues before taking her preferred place over against one wall, next to Kate Holiday.

She and the trooper were the only women in the room, which would have made them friendly by default. Good thing Bethan also happened to like her enough to count her as a real friend. That wasn’t always the way it went in primarily male spaces.

“One of these mornings you need to come to the workout,” Bethan said as she settled into her usual stance.

Kate smirked. “I keep meaning to. Then I remember that I hate group activities.”

“Everyone works out alone, Kate. Nobody lifts the weight for you. You have to do it yourself.”

“And still a hard pass from me on that one,” she replied, the way she always did.

When Isaac and Oz walked into the room, the whole group fell quiet. They all pulled out their own tablets and paid close attention as Isaac laid out the active missions, the potential missions and clients, the new candidates who’d impressed him—including, Bethan was delighted to see, another woman—and any other orders of business.

“Let’s circle back to the scientist,” Isaac said then.

And when he flashed a picture of the Sowandes on the screen, Bethan forgot Jonas, her family, kidding around with Kate, and all the rest of it.

Because looking at Iyara Sowande made her feel nothing but guilty. She’d made her a promise, and so far, that promise was broken.

“To bring everyone up to speed,” Isaac was saying, “we all feel pretty sure the person responsible for the disappearance of the Sowandes is this guy. Currently masquerading as a squeaky-clean CEO—”

“Isthere such a thing?” Blue asked.

“Not in this lifetime,” Templeton replied.

“—without a single red flag on his record.” Isaac nodded at Blue and Templeton. “This seemed unlikely from the get-go, because nobody collects that many defense contracts without a little mess in there somewhere.”

“In this case, it’s a very well hidden mess,” Oz added from his spot near the front, his laptop making his face look blue. “I had to do some seriously deep diving to figure out who this guy used to be.”

“Way back when he was blowing up convoys in a land far, far away,” Bethan added, not doing a great job of keeping the tension out of her voice.

“About that,” Jonas said from his place across the room, and the way his dark eyes moved to hers made her belly tighten. “Bethan shot that guy once already. And he came back, created a new identity for himself, then acted like he didn’t know who we were at Bethan’s sister’s wedding.”

“While putting cameras in your room,” Jack added.

“And going to great lengths to make himself look like some pencil pusher,” Lucas agreed.

“I don’t like resurrections,” Jonas told the room. “Particularly not secret ones. No one does that for a good reason.”

“Amen,” Isaac muttered, and he probably wasn’t the only one thinking about the situation Caradine had been inlast year. Though Bethan figured he was probably still angrier about it than anyone else in the room. He cleared his throat, a sign of emotion that Bethan absolutely was not comparing to Jonas’s complete lack thereof, because why torture herself when she needed to concentrate?

Oz kept going. “Pre-resurrection, our friend was better known as Judson Kerrigone. Born in Delaware and raised mostly in New Jersey, with a couple of years in Philadelphia as a kid. Tried to enlist in the army, the navy, and the marines in three consecutive years but was rejected every time. Debt, drugs, and a criminal record. Tried to make a lateral move to the police but failed the psych eval.”

“He sounds like a real winner,” Templeton drawled.

“Obviously, the next step was to embrace that mercenary life,” August agreed.

“One thing I’ll never understand,” Jonas said in that dark way of his that resonated inside Bethan, even from across the room, “is why anyone would think it’s easier to kill for money when it’s hard enough to do it for the right reasons.”