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“What I heard is Mirabel headed to his mansion in Lidingo—incredibly gauche, by the way—and he was in a hurry. He was supposed to be staying in the District for a while, but not anymore. So there must be business.”

Lidingo. Stockholm. “Bounce,” Yardley said.

“Gotta find the ladies,” KC purred.

In the alley on the way to the comms van, KC picked up speed. “That was embarrassingly easy,” she said over the comm as she walked. “You sent me on a baby mission. For babies. Itty-bitty spy babies.”

“Wally’s is tedious, but it tends to deliver.”

“Do you have to play solitaire in your head to keep yourself entertained? Because I’ve seen men offer you free appetizers in exchange for a single dimple—the good kind of appetizers, with things like truffle oil and individual table smokers.

I have to imagine the men in there have handed you a great deal of useful information for our country. ”

Yardley watched an agent help KC into the comms van, her dress shining madly, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright.

Mission high. It looked good on her.

“Kyle Bornakov is one of my favorite mean girls,” Yardley said as the van pulled away from the curb. “He’ll talk behind anybody’s back, which means he hardly has to watch his own, because no one knows who they’d piss off if they stabbed him in it.”

KC pulled a face. “His breath is one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Like the breath of a leathery old tortoise.”

The laughter burst out of Yardley before she could stop it, loud enough in the small van that everyone turned to look at her.

“And that place stinks,” KC added. “Same as your hair after you’ve come back from your book club night.”

Then, KC went still, staring at the ceiling of the van. When she looked at Yardley again, her mouth was grim. “There’s no book club, huh? That’s a shame. You loved the idea of that book club when you brought the flier home from the library.”

“I do think I would love it, if I were ever able to go.” Yardley slid off her bench and reseated herself next to KC as the van moved through the dark streets.

She was dimly aware of the background chatter that had taken over her headset, arranging transportation and a route to Sweden. “Look. Doesn’t it make you wonder…”

“What?” KC’s profile was half in shadow, the pink bob covering too much of her face for Yardley to tell what her expression was.

“If it might do us good.” She cleared her throat. “Give us closure, maybe. I mean, if we tried looking more at what was true instead of everything that was a lie.”

When KC turned to her, her brown eyes were fathomless with a sadness that made Yardley’s heart pinch. “The truth is a lot.” She turned away. “And we’re spies. Not a good idea to stop searching for the lies.”

That stung. Yardley could feel her mission high draining into the rubber mats on the metal floor of the van.

“What’s next?” KC asked.

The way she said it—her eyes darting away to look around the van, her shoulders tight—Yardley knew for sure she didn’t mean for them.

“They’re readying the Darkhorse at Andrews.”

After that, KC started talking to one of the techs while they pulled everything from KC’s cameras and audio, and Yardley watched the streetlights go by for the rest of the half-hour ride to the airbase.

Ninety minutes later, they were doing Mach 5 over European airspace, and Yardley was reviewing an updated briefing document on her secure tablet when she noticed the time.

Just past midnight in Virginia.

When she’d woken up this morning in the guest room, she never would’ve imagined the day would end with her strapped into a leather jump seat across from a sleeping KC in the metal-and-black cabin of a military aircraft so new and fantastically expensive that Yardley assumed its use must have been authorized by the president.

Everything she knew about KC—and Tabasco—kept shuffling around and coming back into focus like patterns in a kaleidoscope.

KC’s strength and cleverness and technical brilliance were the same color for this KC and the woman Yardley thought she knew, but the KC in the Situation Room was a different color. So was the KC at Wally’s.

The KC who knew where all the zips were on a flight suit and how to do a preflight check was six new colors Yardley had never seen before.

What about the KC who used to bring Yardley coffee in bed, who still had a stuffed purple cat from childhood that she kept on her reading chair? The one who told Yardley gossip about the bros in her sweaty gym, giggling, and liked to use a brand of teen deodorant that smelled like cotton candy?

What about the one whose thighs trembled and toes curled and throat flushed when Yardley touched her?

The critical work that intelligence agents did, 99 percent of the time, boiled down to reading people.

It bothered Yardley that she couldn’t get the KC she knew so well to integrate completely with the colleague she’d known by reputation but met in person for the first time less than twelve hours ago.

Then again, when it came to KC, Yardley had never figured out how to get her personal and professional impulses to balance.

KC was supposed to be… not a fling. An affair , Yardley had told herself at first, knowing a night or two wouldn’t be enough to get this glorious woman out of her system. An affair was something glittering and wonderful, but with a short season. Yardley had thought she could have that, at least.

She’d probably started to catch feelings as soon as KC talked to her at that party and Yardley found herself memorizing the freckles dusted over her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose.

The black halter top she wore showed off the smooth, curvy muscles of her upper arms. The sun lit up the intense red of her messy cropped hair, and the corners of her big eyes squinted a little, her intelligence washing over Yardley like a midnight breeze off the ocean.

They didn’t leave the bed for a week. Each other’s sight for two. Then Yardley had gone on a mission, telling herself as she boarded the plane that she was letting KC fade into a gorgeous memory.

But the moment her traitorous feet met the tarmac in Virginia again, they were walking themselves to KC’s front door.

Three years. And then, today—no, yesterday—after they’d broken up all over again in the hallway outside the director’s office, they’d had that incident.

The almost-kiss-and-definite-bite at Langley.

KC was probably right to say it had only happened because there had been so many long and august moments between them without tension or crying or cold silence.

Just that, all by itself, had been enough for Yardley to move her body close to KC’s like they both had rare earth magnets embedded in their breastbones.

“Where’s your watch?”

Yardley startled and checked the seat opposite her.

KC still had her eyes closed and her head tipped back, but her voice was crisp over the comm—and, if Yardley wasn’t mistaken, faintly accusing.

The Darkhorse flew higher and faster than any aircraft Yardley had ever been transported in.

The headphones were the same noise-canceling kind Yardley had used in military helicopters.

They gave KC’s speech a crystalline quality.

“It’s safe. I don’t usually wear it in the field.” This was not untrue, but definitely evasive, given that the watch was currently zipped into the pocket of her flight suit. Yardley hadn’t wanted KC to remember she had it and take it back.

She forced herself to take a deep breath.

She didn’t want to argue, and she didn’t want to talk about the mission.

She could accept that her impulse to carry the vision of KC in her flight suit to her bunk was only a delusional response to the fatigue of an emotional day, but she wasn’t going to waste a chance to talk about something .

Yardley needed them to have a conversation. More than anything, she needed to get to know this woman across from her in a new way—a way that would let her smash together all the KCs and Tabascos in her head into a single person whose behavior she could understand and predict.

“You know,” she said, “when my granddaddy finally got declassified and told my nan he’d been a federal intelligence agent for the whole of their marriage, she kicked him out of her house.

Wouldn’t return his calls. She’d always thought he cheated.

” It was the second time in as many days Yardley had brought up this story, and the second time she wasn’t sure what she hoped to gain by telling it.

“And yet you made up your mind you wanted to have his career,” KC said. “Fully aware of the consequences that came along with it.”

“I wasn’t going to let myself fall in love.” It tightened Yardley’s stomach to consider how shortsighted and naive she’d been. She’d really believed that her foolish romantic constitution would be made immune by the power of a resolution.

Who had she been protecting with that noble resolution, exactly?

Not the eligible women of the Southeast. It seemed like she had been trying to avoid the exact spot she now found herself in, broken up with someone she’d break the world for, with nothing left but a gold watch zipped up next to her bewildered heart.

“On the other hand.” KC opened her eyes. Her steady gaze on Yardley’s was full of wry humor. “You told me never to accept the first plan.”

“I did say that.” Yardley gave KC just enough of a smile to keep her attention. “So here we are. Tell me what I don’t know. What you could never say.”

KC looked down and rubbed her fingertip over her thumbnail.

She wouldn’t. That was what her body language meant.

There was nothing new about KC refusing to share, but the disappointment that Yardley would never truly know this woman rolled through her in a bigger, blacker wave than she’d anticipated.

She had already turned her face away to master herself when KC spoke.