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“Was Cold Intent really only about revenge against my father?” he asked curiously. “Did you love him so much, then?”

“Love—“ she burst out laughing. “I hated his guts.”

He shrugged. “In my experience, love and hate are the two sides of the same coin. The opposite of love is apathy, mother, not hate. If you actively hate Roman, you still have powerful feelings for him.”

He felt everyone in the room gaping at him. Of all the stares, the one he chose to meet was Katie’s. She was the only person here who would truly understand what he was saying. After all, she’d both loved and hated him.

Sure enough, she smiled wistfully at him just a little. Then she mouthed the words, “I love you.”

“And I, you,” he murmured back aloud. His gaze swung to his mother. “Thank you for that, Claudia. You may have been a complete failure as a parent, and I may have been raised in hate, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I was conceived in love.”

“Love?” she screeched. “I despised Roman Koronov!”

“He never got over you, either,” Alex said calmly in response to her enraged outburst.

His simple words deflated her like a balloon. She collapsed into the same chair she’d been sitting in earlier. All of a sudden, she looked every year of her age and more.

She stared at a spot on the carpet for a minute, or maybe even a little longer. And then looked up and said, simply, “Kill them both.”

Katie let out a cry of distress.

Alex laughed.

Claudia looked up at him sharply. “You think this is a joke? That I won’t do it?”

“I think you’re a fool for underestimating your own son, mother.”

Claudia raised a hand to forestall the thugs from dragging him and Katie from the room.

“You asked me if I thought you wouldn’t see my approach to you coming. Let me ask you a question. Did you seriously think I would barge in here without a back-up plan of my own?”

“You’re bluffing,” she scoffed. “I have access to every operational deployment order in the CIA. No team was sent out here to save you.”

He threw back his head and laughed richly at that.

“What?” she demanded.

“You thought I would call the CIA for help, knowing that you have the agency in your back pocket? That was a stupid miscalculation on your part. I guess we know which side of the family my brains come from, now, don’t we?”

Behind him, Katie gasped.

Smart girl. She’d figured out what he’d done.

Claudia half-rose from the chair. “What have you done?” she demanded.

“What else, mother dearest? I called father dearest.”

The phrase ‘father dearest’ was the pre-arranged signal. Alex had just enough time to dive for Katie and knock her flat on the floor beneath him before every window in the house burst inward in an explosion of shattered glass, as a Spetznatz team poured in, their AK-47s spitting death.

CIA men leaped every which way for cover, firing back as all hell broke loose. Dozens of tiny razor-sharp cuts from flying glass sliced his arms, back, and face as he covered Katie as best he could.

The lights went out, and the chaos was complete as muzzle flashes exploded from every direction.

Something hot slammed into his left leg, and he grunted involuntarily in pain.

It took a little maneuvering to roll on his side and tend to the wound, but he managed to tear off a length of his shirt and tie off the gunshot wound without getting hit again.

“Can you move?” he yelled in Katie’s ear.

“Yes!” she shouted back.

He paused long enough to peel off one of the two cloth patches taped to the shoulders of his sweater and to slap it on Katie’s shoulder.

The infrared marker cloth would identify her to his father’s men as a friend in the firefight and not a foe.

His remaining shoulder patch would do the same for him.

“Follow me, a stay low,” he told her as the worst of the gunfire moved outside the house.

“Ya think?” she retorted.

Grinning, he belly crawled toward the front door.

Claudia’s men had made for the exits and were scattering to the woods as he looked on.

Good call. The Spetznatz team had superior numbers and the element of surprise on their side.

Not to mention, his father had personally trained this team, and they were fully as good as the CIA team at fighting in close quarters.

The last thing the CIA team needed was to be pinned down in the confines of a house with wooden walls, entirely permeable to high-caliber gunfire. He’d have bugged out, too, if he were caught in the same situation.

Black figures chased other black figures into the woods, and sporadic muzzle flashes were accompanied by increasingly distant sounds of gunshots.

He sat up cautiously on the porch, leaning back against the wall of the house.

Katie did the same beside him. He didn’t know if she was even aware of huddling tightly against his side.

“Umm, what was all of that?” she asked in a small voice.

“The cavalry, Russian style.”

“Holy cow. That was impressive.”

“My old man comes through in a pinch.”

“He really loves you, you know.”

“Yeah. He’s got a funny way of showing it, though.”

“Those are some parents you’ve got,” she commented dryly. “They’re going to make the world’s worst in-laws.”

He chuckled, and then it grew into a laugh, and then into uproarious hilarity. She joined him, laughing until tears ran down her face. They’d done it. They’d survived his first meeting with his mother.

A black Hummer rolled up the driveway as their humor subsided.

“Now what?” Katie muttered in disgust. “Do we have to run again?”

“My leg’s shot. I couldn’t run if I wanted to,” he commented.

“ What? ” She jumped away from him in panic. “Where? How bad is it?”

“Bullet passed through my calf. It’s not life-threatening.” He jerked his chin at the man climbing out of the Hummer. “Besides, we’ve got company.”

He recognized the bulldog silhouette of André Fortinay. Alex sighed. Time to face the music for this little stunt of his. “Help me to my feet,” he murmured to Katie.

She leaped up and bent down to help hoist him upright. His leg hurt like hell, but that was a good sign. The nerves were operational. He tested the limb, and it held his weight without any new pain or numbness. Bone wasn’t broken, then.

Fortinay strode right up the porch steps, not stopping until he was face-to-face with Alex and Katie, who’d wrapped her arm tightly around his waist. Protective little thing, she was.

“What in the hell have you done, Alex?” André demanded.

He shrugged. “I took what measures I deemed necessary to protect myself when I approached an armed and hostile target.”

“That target was your mother. A high-level intelligence asset in the U.S. government in charge of an extremely important and classified mission that you have blown to hell and back.”

“That asset tried to kill me and Katie.”

“Speaking of which, where is she? I have orders to bring her in for debriefing.”

Katie piped up fervently, “Please tell me she’s in huge trouble for trying to kill her son.”

André shrugged. “I’m just following orders. I have no idea what will happen to her.”

Alex looked around the front yard and pasture. “She didn’t come out this door. She must have gone out the back.”

“Or she’s still inside,” Katie added. “Did she get caught in that initial burst of gunfire?”

Alex hobbled inside quickly, alarmed. He didn’t pause long to examine his feelings.

For operational purposes, he hoped she’d been immobilized if not taken down, outright.

But in his heart, his feelings weren’t so simple.

He’d loved the idea of her for so long it was hard to separate the reality of the woman from the fantasy of her.

Katie wrapped her arm around his waist again, restraining him when he would have hopped over to the stairs to clear the upper floor of the house. “Let André’s men do it,” she murmured.

“Clear!” someone shouted from upstairs. “There’s no sign of Ms. Kane, Dr. Fortinay.”

André swore under his breath. Alex shared the sentiment. And yet…a frisson of relief whispered down his spine.

They waited almost another hour while André’s men did clean up duty in the woods around the house. The Spetznatz team disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. If any of the Russians had been injured or killed in the firefight, they’d carried out their casualties when they left.

As for Claudia’s team, a number sported gunshot wounds around the high-tech body armor they’d all worn. One man had been killed by a head shot between the eyes. His body was loaded in the second Hummer that had arrived not long after André’s, and the vehicle drove away.

Finally, the cleanup team reassembled at the house. A big, gruff man reported in to André. “There’s no sign of Ms. Kane, sir. She’s gone.”

Alex snorted. Now there was an understatement.

He had no doubt the Claudia Kane identity was dead.

His mother would disappear to who-knew-where and not emerge again until she’d built a new legend, a new face, a new life.

Just like he would have done in the same situation.

His mother was back to being a nameless, faceless ghost who might or might not ever reappear in his life.

And maybe that was as it should be. She’d been a ghost in his mind for so long he almost couldn’t conceive of a flesh-and-blood woman taking its place.

In the meantime, Katie was warm and vibrant against his side. Real and alive. Here and now. She was no ghost at all. She had substance and form. He could wrap his arms around her, hang on to her, tell her his fears and dreams, pour his love into her, and she would return all of it and more.

Finally, at long last, the ghost of his mother had released its hold on his heart. He was tired of her cold comfort. Cold Intent had been well-named, after all. It had been all about Claudia’s rage and desire for revenge.