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KC pulled up to all fours, her blood gone cold in an instant.

Yardley rolled silently across the floor and leapt up to press herself flat against the wall to the side of the entryway.

She signaled to KC to move out of the path of the door, and KC crab-stepped over, fear and confusion so crowded in her body that she could taste blood at the back of her throat.

Yardley caught KC’s eye and signaled confidently with a hand. Stay back, say nothing, but be ready to fight.

“Vem ?r det?” Yardley sounded like a harassed Swedish mother of three trying to change a diaper while soothing a toddler, but not remotely suspicious. Not afraid or even concerned. “Om du har mitt paket, l?mna det vid dorren tack!”

Everything went quiet.

Yardley reached up and pulled a few locks of hair from her ponytail, scrubbed her hands across her face, and, to KC’s dismay, undid the bolt and chain on the door and opened it a crack. “Jag forsoker f? bebisen att somna, kan du komma tillbaka senare?”

“Sorry, I thought—” KC heard a woman’s voice, a little husky, neither old nor young. British?

She tried to very silently breathe so she wouldn’t pass out.

“You’ve got the wrong flat?” Yardley replied in accented English.

Then silence again. KC straightened to her full height as everything she’d ever been trained to do in hand-to-hand without a weapon dropped like a warm blanket over her body.

Yardley would not get hurt. She would not.

There had been times she might have, times she’d been within a hair of losing her life for her country that KC hadn’t known about, but this time KC had a say in it, and it was not fucking happening.

She did not run forty goddamned miles a week and work on gains in her stupid gym to let some morally bankrupt bottom feeder so much as leave a bruise on Yardley’s body.

KC eyed a sturdy table opposite Yardley. She could be on it and sting from above in seconds.

“Look, I’m here to talk to, um, KC Nolan?”

Oh, god. Not a British accent. Irish.

Unless KC was very much mistaken, Kris Flynn was at the door of their top-secret safe-house apartment.

“I believe I’ve got the right place?” the woman said. “I doubt someone else has been following me halfway across the world and breaking into my hotel rooms.”

Yardley opened the door a little wider and leaned against the frame, crossing her arms. “Flynn, I presume?” She’d dropped the accent.

“Yeah.” The woman sounded relieved.

Yardley turned her head to look back to KC. “Your friend’s here.” She pulled open the door wider, and KC scanned to the woman’s right and left first, unconvinced she’d come alone. But there was no one but her.

Kris Flynn was a heart-faced woman about her age with short, thick blond braids under a stocking cap. She wore a man’s coat. The arms were too long, but the coat wasn’t big enough for her to fasten around an obvious baby bump.

Kris clocked her standing behind Yardley and grinned. “KC, at long last.” She pulled off her hat while Yardley shut and bolted the door behind her. “Us keyboard jockeys are usually bringing up the rear, aren’t we?”

When she wiggled out of her coat, it was easy to see that Kris hadn’t come here from a good meal, warm bed, and stroll through a rose garden. The circles under her eyes were deep, her sweater had a rip at the shoulder, and there was mud on the hems of her jeans.

KC forced herself to push what Kris had interrupted into her darkest periphery.

This was the last moment in her life she needed to be flooded with hormones and reactionary behavior.

She’d hoped to get to Kris first. There had been an undefined plan to beat Yardley at her own game and find out what Kris knew before anyone else did.

In the best-case scenario, generated while she pretended to nap on the Darkhorse, KC had imagined swearing Kris to secrecy and convincing her to cooperate with the project of decommissioning the weapon.

Then, later, she could report to Dr. Brown that all was well. Problem solved.

But Kris had found them first. KC had not prepared for that possibility, and so she was utterly fucked.

Given that she had no idea what she was doing on this mission, it didn’t surprise her. What did surprise her was that, beneath her fear and apprehension, KC was glad to see Kris.

She’d always wanted to meet her.

“Sit down.” Yardley pulled out one of the chairs. “And you won’t mind if I—” She held up a tiny scanner that checked for digital devices and signals.

Kris held out her arms. “Go for it. Don’t have so much as a mobile.”

When she’d completed the scan, Yardley put the device back in her pocket and nodded at KC. “She’s clean.”

“But how are you here?” KC shook her head. “Our driver took evasive maneuvers and triple-checked for a tail. This apartment doesn’t exist. You disappeared off the street an ocean away from here two days ago.”

“I’ve got a few friends yet.” Kris shrugged. “Long story short? I recognized your work in Toronto, and I knew you were with the CIA.”

KC’s heart stilled. What work had Kris recognized?

“It’s a right mess, I’ll admit.” Kris yawned. “I tried to be a good girl, but enough didn’t add up, and I missed Declan.”

“Declan?” KC’s spinning brain couldn’t place the name.

“Baby daddy. Dublin,” Yardley supplied.

“Cor! Jesus. We’ve been together for six years.

I’m not doing this with any dickhead!” Kris pointed at her belly.

Then her eyes filled with tears. “And god, don’t I miss him.

He likely thinks I took off on him. I’d been such an absolute bloody knob lately.

Hormones. He was taking good care of me, making me feel beautiful.

Fixing up the nursery. And here I am talking to you lot, and it’s cold as fuck here, and I don’t have my good coat.

I got this out of a charity box.” She touched the sleeve of the coat she’d taken off and put in her lap.

“I don’t have anything, actually, thanks to that puffed-up wanker, Devon, and this ridiculous mess.

I’ve missed two appointments, you know that?

What if this baby’s growing a second head?

I won’t know. I’ll be in some international prison with a two-headed baby in my lap. ”

KC laughed. She couldn’t help it. The real-in-person Kris sounded so altogether like Kris.

“Let me get you something to eat,” Yardley offered. “This flat is terrible, but there’s nice food.”

“And a cuppa?” Kris asked. “Sweet and light, please.”

“Sure thing.” Yardley went to the mini fridge in the corner that had a basket and a kettle perched on a board on top. She raised her eyebrows at KC, pointing the spoon she held at Kris.

There was something way, way too attentive about Yardley’s whole demeanor. It was terrifying. How many bad guys had picked up on this vibe before the Unicorn crushed them under her heel?

Yardley lifted her eyebrows higher and double pointed at Kris with the spoon.

Right. Time to interrogate their potential asset. In front of Officer Whitmer, superspy.

“Could you start from the beginning?” Yardley continued to make tea with her hands while, with everything else, she watched KC.

Maybe she should’ve been watching Flynn, but if an obviously pregnant woman without identification, money, or even a good coat had found a CIA safe house with two spies in it, then Flynn—no matter what she’d done or what side she was on—would be working for the agency shortly, at least for the duration of this mission.

Nothing to be concerned about there. Yardley was a lot more keen to find out what information Flynn’s presence would extract from KC.

“Did I interrupt something?” Flynn twisted around to look at Yardley. “I’m feeling like there’s an undercurrent.”

Yardley turned her attention to pouring hot water over the tea bag and let herself smile, even as the question made her throat tighten with navy-blue sadness.

She could still see a mark on KC’s neck where she must have bitten her.

She was going to have to put her unabated horniness for her ex-girlfriend to work in the service of sharpening her ability to observe her.

All’s fair.

“Why?” KC asked. “What makes you think you interrupted anything?”

Yardley was impressed with KC’s tone. It was almost uninterested in Kris’s answer. If Yardley hadn’t spent the last months scrutinizing every shift in her expression and all of her spare energy trying to figure out how to save them, she might have believed KC wasn’t freaked out.

Flynn showing up here was obviously what had her freaked out the most. Freaked out on a personal level, if Yardley was reading her right—and not because Kris shouldn’t have been able to find them.

It gave Yardley more evidence there was something about KC’s involvement with Project Maple Leaf that she didn’t know.

She would know it, but she didn’t know it yet.

It was a good problem to keep at the center so that the yawning pit of denial and grief currently squatting in the spot where her heart used to be didn’t swamp her focus.

“I thought I heard you arguing as I came up the stairs,” Flynn said. “It sounded personal. And there’s something in the air.” She waved her hand around. “I’ve been a lot more sensitive lately because of the baby.”

“We’re colleagues,” KC said, like she was holding ice in her mouth.

Ha! No. Not the best way to win the trust of a critical asset. “We broke up,” Yardley said. She plucked a bright red packet of Ballerina biscuits from a basket near the kettle, selected a banana, and carried them to Kris Flynn.

Flynn accepted the snack, meeting Yardley’s eyes. The steady intelligence in her gaze confirmed she was not a woman to underestimate.

Yardley enjoyed meeting people like this on a mission. Regardless of what side they were on, they became part of a network of wildly unusual and smart people who were all very useful to each other when it came to balancing the humors of the world.