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“You don’t have to go,” Flynn hurls at me, back in the suite. He’s planted by my empty suitcase tower, one hand on his hip, the other running through his hair. “In fact, you shouldn’t go. The CIA doesn’t always…they don’t always get things right. Under these conditions, Roderick Flaa shouldn’t have even been let through security.”

“A little too late for that now,” I say, frantically searching for a tennis outfit. I definitely unpacked one: breathable top and a white skirt that hits just above the knee. For this vacation, security’s ditched the staff that normally helps with the PM’s wardrobe; I’m on my own. “Would it be uncharacteristic of Sofia to back out of a match?”

Flynn rubs his eyebrows. “Probably. But we can easily make up an excuse.”

“What’s on the schedule for the rest of the afternoon?”

“Late lunch, tour of the grounds, piano bar, dinner, meeting the real PM tonight.”

“Okay, so I’m touring the grounds, with an emphasis on the tennis courts.” My eyes sweep around the suite. “Did you see a pair of tennis shoes anywhere?”

“Closet to the left,” he says, those blue swim trunks clinging to his thighs. His shirt’s half-unbuttoned, like he hastily did it up, racing back upstairs to conference with me, and I have a flash of him in the water, telling me about his last mission. What the hell happened, Flynn? “Max, hold up a second. This is a step above sitting on the beach. Most of the guests here have never met the prime minister face-to-face, and you’ve managed to stumble on the one that has. It’s low risk. He doesn’t know her extremely well; they’re just acquaintances, political allies, but…Are you positive you’re up for this?”

“No,” I tell him honestly, grabbing the sneakers and tying them tight. The laces do not shake in my hands as I bunny-loop. “But I don’t want to feel like I’m failing at the first hurdle. How hard can it be, if they’re not that close? I have laryngitis; we won’t talk. I can play half an hour of tennis, if it keeps my cover.”

I’m acting more confident than I feel.

Maybe Flynn sees through it. After the tunnel, though, after my demand for a pep talk, he has no choice but to build me up. “Fine. All right, fine. It’ll be a good practice run for the back half of the holiday, if you happen to bump into any diplomats in Rome. The prime minister has a wicked backhand, and I remember that you do, too, so…” He blows out a breath. “Give ’em hell, kid.”

In that blown-out breath, I hear everything Flynn isn’t saying: that it’s a smidge suspicious for Roderick to show up, unannounced, in the middle of a potential assassination plot. Definitely thought about that myself. “Do we trust him?” I pry.

Flynn runs his tongue over his teeth. “He’s been vetted by Sofia’s offices.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I trust him enough to be on the opposite side of a tennis court with you, in broad daylight, thirty feet from my face,” Flynn finishes, and that’s closer to an answer. “If anything happens, which I highly doubt it will, I’ll be right there. It’s a bigger worry that you’ll out yourself as the double.”

“Which I won’t,” I add, again. If I underline my confidence enough, maybe it’ll carry me through the rest of the trip. “I’ve been thinking…Should I at least practice her accent, just in case I really need to speak, in an emergency? That way, I can protect myself, but not out myself.”

“Have you ever tried to do a Summerlandian accent?” Flynn asks.

I think back to the first evening after my recruitment, where I stayed up late watching the prime minister on YouTube, my lips curling over the vowels in the dark. “Not in any serious way. But it’s basically Norwegian, isn’t it?”

Flynn’s eyes light up, golden flecks around his pupils. “And you can do a Norwegian accent?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that.”

“Then just…just give it a try. Hit me with it. Tell me, in Sofia’s voice, that you…are very pleased to meet me.”

I clear my throat, feeling like I’m about to give a speech in class. “ I am …” I say, trying to wrap my tongue around the accent: melodic and pitchy, just like Sofia’s. “ I am very pleased to meet you. ”

Flynn’s face drops. Which is understandable. I’ve heard it, too.

“Oh my god,” I breathe out.

“It wasn’t—it wasn’t terrible.”

“Flynn! I sound like a bad impression of the guy from Frozen ! The one who owns that ski lodge slash sauna. I should be riding on the back of a reindeer.”

He pats my shoulder in a way that’s meant to be reassuring. “We can practice, if you want.”

“Good, because if I use that accent, I won’t have to be assassinated. They’ll throw me out of the hotel and onto the next plane back to America.”

Flynn tells me to brush it off. And mostly, I do.

“You caught the sun a little,” he says, pointing to the pink on the back of my shoulders. “Do you want me to aloe that?”

Do I want Flynn rubbing gel onto my bare skin with his bare hands?

Best not.

“I’m good,” I say.

“I know, I know, the rules,” he says, grabbing a bottle of aloe from the bathroom countertop and tossing it, underhand, my way. Luckily, my reflexes don’t fail me; I catch the bottle midair. “No touching. You can’t look like a lobster, though. Ruins the ministerial image.”

Annoyed but taking his point, I squirt some of the green gel into my palm, lathering my shoulders and a stretch of my back.

“You missed a spot.”

“Where?”

“Midback,” he says.

“I got there.”

“No, you didn’t.”

I try again, contorting my arms.

“Still missed it,” Flynn says. I throw him a pointed glare before he holds up his hands, the picture of innocence. “Hey, I’m just trying to keep you from peeling like an iguana.”

I actually do believe him. “Lobster, iguana, I’m a carousel of animals today, aren’t I?” Half under my breath, I mutter, “Okay, fine, we’re wasting time. Just do it.”

Taking the bottle, he spills a dollop of aloe into his own palm, positioning himself behind me. With one long, delicate finger, he strokes away a piece of hair from the back of my neck. A shiver—not necessarily the bad kind—zips down my spine.

“Sorry, must be cold,” he comments, noticing my goose bumps, as if the aloe has already touched my skin. I suppress a gasp when his palm meets my midback, working a light circle beneath my shoulder blades. It isn’t overtly sexual; I can tell that’s not his intention. But the slick feel of his hand, grazing gently over me; the cold sting of the aloe under the heat of him; the way I could back up a few inches and nestle myself between his hips—it’s enough to make my nipples pinch. A part of me wants to linger here for a second longer.

And I wonder if he feels the same, if that little hitch in his throat is because of me.

“There,” he says. “You’re good.”

“Good,” I say, forcing out the word.

“Good,” he says, like this has become a game of ours, our own private tennis match, except neither of us can quite look each other in the eye.

Moving on!

I drag myself into the bathroom. Shoes on, skirt on, Nike shirt and matching tennis hat on, I spring into the entryway, waiting for my handler to change into tennis gear as well. (In the bathroom, too, obviously. Not in front of me.) Maintaining his I’m-merely-a-guest facade, he throws on a lightweight shirt that waterfalls over his torso, and follows me from forty to fifty feet behind, all the way down to the courts. I’ll admit, having Flynn at my back—all muscle and suaveness and speed—makes me feel a bit invincible. As he laced up his shoes, he also gave me the lowdown on Roderick—the PM’s known him tangentially for five years, they run in the same Summerlandian circles, and he has a Chihuahua named Boudicca, after the British warrior queen.

The last bit of intelligence proves to be especially useful.

Boudicca—or “Boudie,” as she’s called—is present at the tennis courts, scuttling around Roderick’s feet. Her ears perk when she sees me, and I wonder if the one who’s most apt to clock me as the double is actually an eight-pound ball of buttercream fur. That tiny, twitching nose knows something’s different. When she prances up to me, yapping across the court, my throat clenches. Luckily, after the first sniff, she melts against my shoes, practically cooing.

Another test, passed.

Once again, Roderick swaggers up to me, Flynn pretending to stretch his hamstrings next to the opposing court. We’re around the backside of Hotel Giorgio, a stone’s throw from the infinity pool, where two clay courts cut into the cliff. “I’m ready for a rematch,” Roderick says, pausing at the net. I’m on one side; he’s on the other. Covertly—or what feels like covertly—I reposition my necklace so Flynn can hear, just in time for Roderick to add, in a dipped-down voice: “Otherwise, I can think of other activities.”

Come again, buddy?

“Remember when we played that match in London?” he adds, not just bordering on flirtatious. He’s full-out scaled the wall. One of his dark eyebrows is sky-high, and he’s dragging his thumb across his bottom lip in a way that looks, quite frankly, like he wants to rip off my tennis outfit and lick my naked body. “And…afterward?”

I most certainly do not remember that.

The corners of Roderick’s eyes crinkle, approaching a double wink. In his courtside-green tennis outfit, disturbingly snug across his pectoral muscles, he is halfway between a catalog model and an advertisement for lawn restoration services. “You’re conserving your voice, but we’ve never needed words, have we, Sofia?”

I blink at him, from his tight-tight shirt to his sparkling white sneakers, holding in an almost-guttural reaction. Schooling my face into a neutral expression takes work . Flynn was wrong. This isn’t a low-risk, one-on-one interaction. Sofia doesn’t just know this man tangentially. She knows this man, in a biblical sense. That’s suddenly painfully obvious as Roderick gazes at her—gazes at me —with virtually unrestrained lust in his eyes.

“Oh…kay,” Flynn says slowly and quietly into the earpiece. By the second court, he’s recalculating, pretending to focus on toe-touch stretches as light reflects off his tennis whites. “We can either get you out of here on urgent business—cough for option one—or you can back away from the net with a noncommittal smile and play the game.”

He’s leaving it up to me? Why would he leave it up to me? That confidence I was feeling earlier doesn’t have nearly as much float as a tennis ball.

Roderick’s waiting for my response. So is Flynn.

Sunshine beats down on my bangs as I wonder—darkly, in the back of my mind—if Roderick is the one Sofia was trying to warn me about in her note. The reason this mission is more dangerous than I presumed. Is her secret lover a secret assassin?

I back away, more out of fear than commitment to the game. Fear of Roderick, but also fear that—if I leave—I’ll break my cover. On the first day. In the first couple of hours. Five million dollars and my chance at a better life, down the drain, in one abandoned tennis match.

Across the net, Roderick whispers something to me in what sounds like Norwegian. Or Swedish. Or possibly Danish. Hard to tell when you speak literally none of those languages.

“Try to remember what he’s saying,” Flynn prompts, hovering close by. He doesn’t sound that worried, so…I shouldn’t be worried? “We’ll debrief later.”

The dog wants to debrief now .

She’s weaving between my ankles like there’s a treat stuffed in my socks, and Roderick chuckles, jogging around the net with his hair flip-flopping, scooping up the Chihuahua—who immediately starts biting him. I’m talking full-out munching on his palms, nibbling with loud gremlin noises. Grrr-aarr-aaaa! Graaaa-rraaaaaa! I’m flinching, from the visual, the sound, and the closeness of a maybe-assassin.

Roderick isn’t flinching. Boudie must be a bit gummy, no teeth.

“She’s always like this!” Roderick says to me, thankfully in English this time. “Still! When she came up to you so calmly, I’ll be honest, I was surprised. Maybe this holiday has changed something about you already, Sofia. You must be more relaxed.”

At this, I nod and press my lips together, picking up a racket and a ball from one of my security team members. For this time, and this time only, I’m grateful I can’t say anything. Let’s not question the Chihuahua’s observations (although, Roderick really should. Who doesn’t notice that the woman they’re lusting after is a completely different person?).

I wonder how much Sofia actually likes him—if she ever did.

Understandably, she’s verbally evasive when it comes to relationships. People are always asking her—and she manages to spin their questions into conversations about feminism in the twenty-first century, or how the press unfairly targets women. In all her years in politics, she’s given only one quote about her romantic history, in that British Vogue article I read before Gail dropped by with bagels: “Dating in politics is a minefield. I always feel like a spy. Never going anywhere a camera could reach, every meeting behind locked doors. It may seem like a good way to get to know someone, but I could never…walk with them in Sommerang park. Get a coffee, browse a bookstore. Normal Sundays. Normal couple things. That sort of isolation, it distorts your impressions. You think you love someone—when actually, they’re the only one there.”

Anyway, it’s my serve.

It occurs to me, as I toss the ball up into the air—half-blinded by the Italian sun—that I might’ve exaggerated my readiness to Flynn. I might’ve considered, a touch more deeply, the last time I played tennis. Which was approximately a decade ago, in a recreational league near my grandmother’s retirement home. Hazily, in the background, I hear the metal gate to the court squeak open—all the way on Roderick’s side of the net—and I take in a deep breath as I swing. My racket cuts through the heat, a quick swipe. The movement feels good . Natural. Muscle memory. Flynn and I, sometimes that summer, would play after our shifts, squeezing out that last bit of post-dinner-rush energy before bed.

The ball rockets forward, a yellow missile.

I think I’ve crushed it.

But really, Giorgio’s entered at the side of the court. To watch us play? To cheer us on? To receive a tennis ball in the jugular?

That’s what happens.

My serve is more than a little off.

I watch with unrestrained horror as the ball crashes into his throat, knocking him back, and he staggers around the court like he’s had twelve limoncellos too many, pawing at the water table, gasping. Flynn hisses into my earpiece.

Shit! Shit, shit, shit.

Rushing up to Giorgio, the world’s biggest apology on the tip of my tongue, I help stabilize him as he insists—absolutely insists , in a raspy voice—that he’s fine. Perfectly fine. Completely fine! It’s no worse than the bee! He has braved extreme throat pain before! Go back to your game, Signora Prime Minister, go back to your game. I have just come to tell you your brother called again. I take a message. Don’t worry about Giorgio.

It’s all going very well.

After checking on Giorgio as well, Flynn decides (apparently) that the best way to keep me calm is to crack a joke. “At least we know how you might take down any assassins now,” he says, speaking into cupped hands on the other court. “Tennis ball, straight to the jugular.”

I sniff out a laugh, able to breathe again.

I couldn’t repeat that shot if I tried.

The rest of the match unfolds much less violently. We volley back and forth as I find my swing. Boudie rushes the court like a streaker, yapping at Roderick’s heels, and we pause the play until she’s safely on the sidelines again. “Your serve!” Roderick yells, right before he dives after the ball—and misses dramatically, racket swinging into empty air. “It’s getting better! Bravo, Sofia! Bravo.”

This , I can do. Move confidently on the court, like Sofia. Glide and swing and sweat. Be the active decoy. Unless Roderick is the greatest actor this side of Kenneth Branagh (doubtful), he’s fooled by my performance. What I’m less sure about—much, much less sure—is the chitchat afterward. Roderick wipes his brow with the back of his hand, pausing play after half an hour (we aren’t actually keeping score), and asks if I’d like to grab lunch with him. It’s a suggestive invitation. “Get lunch,” from Roderick’s mouth, sounds an awful lot like “get laid.”

Mmmm, Roderick, no.

I gesture vaguely toward my security team, hoping this says, I have other plans , my schedule is full of…things. Prime minister things. Important, vacation things. Roderick doesn’t quite grasp the message; his eyebrows quirk in a lost-puppy way, his head tilting to the side. Fortunately, his cell phone rings—I wonder, somehow, if Flynn orchestrated that—and he’s called away to another lunch, promising that he’ll be back at the hotel late in the afternoon.

Goody. I’ll be looking forward to that!

Boudicca trails by his heels, doggy paws padding up the stairs. I hear her, around the corner, trying to tussle with the bomb-sniffing German shepherds.

I’m left on the courts, cocooned in Sofia’s security team, chugging water from a glass bottle. It’s sweating just as much as I am. Condensation dribbles down my neck, the sun even higher in the sky than it was a few minutes ago. We’re “isolated,” up a hill and behind a gate, but the sounds of distant Vespas sweep on the streets. Layered on top of that is the slap of the sea, and the shuffle of Flynn’s footsteps in my direction. He jerks his head toward the small, covered cabana by the courts—the one that houses fresh towels and extra tennis balls.

Catching his drift, excusing myself, I meet him briefly inside, away from any prying eyes. “Sofia really knows that guy,” I say immediately, taking another quick swig of water. It’s hotter in here than on the courts, and I want ice cubes, a cold bath, a dip in the sea. “He doesn’t seem like her type. At all. Not that I’m an expert on her personal life.”

Flynn fans the neckline of his shirt, skin glistening, and the already-cramped vestibule starts to feel…tighter. Warmer. He glances at my water, and without even thinking, I offer him some; he grabs the bottle, taking his own swig, and it’s so unexpectedly intimate. His mouth on the same glass. Casually sharing a drink. “This’ll look suspicious, fast,” Flynn tells me between gulps, “so before you forget, what did Roderick say to you, exactly, when he was whispering? The Norwegian? Can you remember?”

“Uh…” I scrounge for the words, doing my absolute best to replicate his verbiage. “It was something like… Du sah-ret meg…some…en vakker vannmelon ?”

Flynn pinches his lips together. “I don’t think that’s right.”

“Why, what’s it mean?”

“?‘You hurt me like a beautiful watermelon.’?”

“Okay, fair enough.” Pushing my bangs back from my eyes, I catch Flynn’s forearm before he turns to leave—and then immediately drop my hand, remembering the rules I set out. “Hey, how was I?”

“As the double?” Flynn asks, his eyes flicking down—just for a second—to where I touched him. “Believable. There was only that slight mishap with Giorgio.”

“Oh god.” My stomach gutters. “We owe him a gift basket. Get him that…macaroni and cheese one. Maybe with socks.” We should swing on by the lobby, right now, to check on him. See if he needs some ice, or some goat soap added to his apology basket.

“Giorgio asked me for your full schedule, by the way. Earlier.” Flynn grinds his molars for a second. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“He’s just being accommodating.”

“Probably. But there’s always a chance he could be coordinating with the enemy. Narrowing down your whereabouts. Times, activities, locations.”

“No,” I say, unwilling to believe it. “Not Giorgio. He’s too…”

“Giorgio?”

“Exactly.”

Flynn says, “Just keep your guard up. Anyway, we should go.”

I puff out a breath. Is anything else going to get thrown at me today? An impromptu tennis match with Sofia’s maybe–secret lover was already more than enough. Statistically speaking, the afternoon has to run smoothly, right?

Back inside, Flynn’s walking a respectable distance behind me, and I’m enveloped inside my security team, strolling toward the elevator, tennis shoes pounding the tile. From outside the dining room, white-wine glasses and sparkling dinner plates already set for the next meal, I have a clear shot of the lobby. Hotel staff push glimmering gold suitcase trolleys. The fountain’s spurting out a steady stream of water. Giorgio looks okay! He’s puttering around like a peacock, welcoming several new guests in a non-raspy voice—a woman in elegant, wide-legged trousers, an elderly couple with more luggage than the prime minister, and…someone on the fringes. Someone who, even at this distance, looks familiar.

“Max!”

My neck stiffens, ears ringing, like I’ve just heard an explosion.

“ Max! ” the voice calls again from the lobby.

No . That’s all I can think as my pulse skyrockets. Absolutely no way. Nothing else can possibly go wrong today. There must be another Max in this hotel. A French tourist called “Maxime,” or a member of the PM’s security team, or someone in the dining room. A waiter! The piano guy. The Italian greyhound in the miniature hat, sniffing his owner’s shoes by the bar.

“Margaux Adams !” the voice shouts for a third time, and that’s…my name. That is my first name and my last name, assembled in the correct order, and I should keep in character, keep striding toward my suite with brisk efficiency—but it’s instinct. Hear full name, freeze . When I stop on the fancy white tile, right as the elevator doors ding open, I see him bobbing toward me. A crown of black curls, flashing through the hotel lobby.

My throat constricts, as if I’m being strangled.

As if he’s strangling me.

Calvin . Against all odds, against all reason, the man hurtling in my direction is none other than my roommate.