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Gramercy leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, barely creasing his suit jacket.

“I want you to know that I asked to be assigned to you. There was a bit of a bet going, actually. Whether anyone could succeed in the position. Dr. Brown had kept you to himself, some thought with good reason, others took issue, but certainly the exclusivity of the relationship was commented on.”

KC adjusted her shoulders, noticing that what Gramercy told her made her uncomfortable. “Any perceived exclusivity to Dr. Brown wasn’t coming from me.”

“I didn’t think it was. I’m telling you it seemed he was keeping you to himself. And, powerful men being what they are, the only reason why one would sequester one of the agency’s best talents was in order to, by association, become one of the agency’s best talents.”

She appreciated the compliment, but there was a KC inside of her who yowled in protest at the idea she’d only meant to Dr. Brown what she could get for him.

It was the same KC inside of her who had immediately protested Yardley and Kris’s speculation that Dr. Brown was either a bad actor or the source of the leak.

She hadn’t lied to Yardley when she said Dr. Brown had never given her a reason to believe he was dishonest. But there were things she hadn’t said.

Dr. Brown hadn’t been her father or her friend.

He hadn’t even been much of a mentor. But he’d been the one person who was clearly on her team, and everything KC had ever learned or known about this work—hacker, MIT student, agency intelligence tech—had always been, to a greater or lesser extent, about fighting.

Fighting to keep her head above water after the agency blackmailed her into going to work for them. Fighting for the bros to recognize her code was good. Fighting to contribute to the conversation. Fighting to make the world a better place.

Her red hair wasn’t the only reason they called her Tabasco.

She got spicy. She’d learned how to do that when she was young, struggling to get what she needed for herself and her grandma.

And it had worked. She’d survived. She’d made it this far.

But there were consequences, not least that fighting kept her separated even from people she wanted a deeper connection with.

People like Yardley. And Gramercy.

The situation KC found herself in wasn’t entirely about Dr. Brown. It was about the choices she’d made. The things she’d done wrong.

So maybe she should stop waiting for Dr. Brown to save her from it.

Maybe she shouldn’t have waited for Yardley to save their relationship by telling KC exactly when it would be okay to be more vulnerable and stop fighting her own life.

Maybe.

“You’re right,” KC said. “He used my talents to make himself and his division look better. I was sequestered, without the opportunities to experience what it means to have colleagues.”

“My god.” Gramercy smiled again.

“That’s all you get, right there,” KC said. “You have to understand that I not only got started on the wrong foot with you, I didn’t have a first step to take with you. I literally don’t know how to work with you. At all.”

Gramercy looked at her for a long moment.

“You are not the only tech,” he said. “You’re not even the only tech at the agency with your level of talent or potential, and I am very sorry, on behalf of the agency, that you’ve carried the weight of believing that you didn’t have colleagues or peers.

I’m sorry you haven’t had more opportunities to see for yourself the positive impacts of your work.

In the protection of our Constitution and the sovereignty of our country, it’s easy for us to forget those that protect values and concepts are people . ”

KC couldn’t help it—she shrugged, just a little. That had been a very sincere and earnest speech, and she was KC. “I mean, colleagues sound nice.”

“Colleagues are nice.” Gramercy tipped his head. “Mostly. Taken on the whole.”

KC laughed. It was the first time Gramercy had ever made her laugh. “I can’t imagine you being anything but coolly magnanimous.”

“I have hollered at you out of an open car window in the middle of the street.”

“Hmm. Hollered is what my grandma did. You gave an oppressed shout.” She leaned back. “But you wouldn’t have done even that if you didn’t care.”

“No.” Gramercy pointed at her. “I would not have. And now I can appreciate that you also care, which is good timing, because succeeding at this mission is going to be harder than jumping out of an airplane in a tuxedo and landing undetected in the courtyard of a Russian palace and stashing the parachute in time to give a toast to the president that distracts him long enough for his chief advisor to parlay with a diplomat and defect.”

“But you did do that, is what you’re saying.”

“It wasn’t easy . That’s my point. And this auction tonight will be many times more complex.”

“All right.” KC rubbed her hands together. “I’m listening.”

“First, I want to talk about some other stakes,” Gramercy said. “There hasn’t been a good opportunity to debrief.”

KC’s brain scrolled through the events Gramercy might know about that required debriefing. “The fight at the safe house?”

“If you survive a fight, the debrief’s built in. I was thinking more about Starbucks. And the conversation you had afterward outside the director’s office.”

KC glanced around the room. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to them, but KC knew it was an illusion.

Their talk was definitely being recorded, for starters.

Probably at least half the techs in the room had known she was dating the Unicorn before she did, and all of them knew now.

She tightened her grip on her elbows. “No one likes to feel ridiculous.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t my decision.”

KC swallowed. “Sure. I could’ve guessed as much.

What I keep thinking about, though? When I was sitting in the van a few blocks from the Starbucks, listening to the Unicorn with Mirabel, and the signal dropped—that ten seconds of silence was the longest ten seconds of my life.

And nobody in the van said a word. Everyone else knew the love of my life had a gun on her. Everyone but me.”

“The reason—” Gramercy cleared his throat.

His words had come out a little hitched.

“The reason you’re going out there tonight is because you listened to the part of you that did know.

Without being told. You acted, overriding protocols, likely saving an officer’s life, and absolutely handing the agency more information.

I will tell you that I believe you will keep listening to that part of you, at work and with Whitmer. ”

KC tried to think of something to say that would sound like agreement, but her stomach felt like she’d swallowed a rock, and she couldn’t tell Gramercy that she didn’t believe it.

There was such a big difference between knowing what she wanted and believing that what she wanted was possible.

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Lucas and I. I told you it helped that he’s a general, and he has the security clearance to know about my work. I didn’t say what I meant to.”

KC searched his eyes. They were blue, like Yardley’s, but lighter, with flecks of green. He’d seen things she couldn’t imagine. He’d lived a whole life before she was born.

“Go on, then,” she said.

Gramercy clasped his hands together. His wedding ring was a thin gold band, dull and nicked. “I don’t imagine you’re going to like it.”

“I mean, on the list of things you’ve done that I don’t like…” But KC smiled. Her stomach buzzed with nerves, uncertain she wanted more insight into a relationship that had taken so many hits at a time when she was still hurt.

“All right. Lucas was deployed seven times in the first fifteen years we knew each other. A lot of that time, I was embedded, undercover, and sometimes didn’t get home for six months at a stretch.

When I became… preoccupied with thinking about how dangerous his work was—or he did the same—we told each other, ‘Someone always has to be the first to leave.’”

“ Jesus , Gramercy.” Her lungs felt tight, her heart hammering in her ears.

“Death is inevitable. It’s the only certainty.

We don’t know when. We don’t know how. It’s possible you won’t make it through this operation.

It’s also possible you’ll be taken out by a rogue Pacific wave on a well-deserved vacation.

Or you’ll outlive every one of your forebears and die holding hands with your beloved on a porch rocker forty years into your retirement. ”

KC didn’t let herself paint that picture with Yardley in it. But god, she wanted to.

“Given the utter inconsequence of our opinions about when and how the end comes for us and the people we love, there’s nothing to do but surrender.

Then, and only then, can we ask ourselves what we want to do in the meantime.

Who we want to be. And, if you have the good fortune to love another person who loves you, you ask yourself what you can do to make space for them to be the person you love, for as long as you have them. ”

KC wiped at her damp cheekbones with both hands. “That’s awful. You’re right. I hate it.”

Gramercy stood up. He unbuttoned his jacket, reached into the interior pocket, and retrieved a crisp white square, which he offered to her.

She took his fancy handkerchief, but only balled it in her hand.

“One more thing,” he said. “Before Lucas and I learned to appreciate the gift we had both been given, we were, as I said, preoccupied with the danger and the complexities of our relationship. There was a long stretch where we might see each other for a few days every three or four months, and when we did see each other, we either fought or we… made up for lost time.” Gramercy shrugged one shoulder.

“In other words, every time we saw each other, we were mostly afraid.”

KC made herself breathe, because what she wanted to do was curl up around the rock in her stomach and go to sleep. Or cry. “I never had a chance to be afraid for Yardley.”

“I didn’t know how not to be afraid for Lucas, but I knew I didn’t want him to be afraid for me.

It was suggested to me by my mother, as it happens, that what we were missing wasn’t love, and wasn’t time together.

It was trust. We didn’t trust the other’s intention to use our talents to stay safe, and we didn’t trust the world that had brought us together.

I was so angry, because she was suggesting I do the hardest possible thing to be with Lucas.

Loving him wasn’t hard. I loved him enough to bear up against the time we lost to our work. But trust?”

KC recalled her mortal fear for Yardley at the Starbucks.

She thought of the two of them arguing outside the director’s office, her throat choked with hurt. Yardley throwing her wig at the bugged portrait when KC told her she didn’t believe they would ever know what part of their relationship had been real and what part a lie.

But she also remembered how it had helped to tell Yardley about the black op. Gramercy wouldn’t be sharing any of this if it didn’t seem to him—this veteran agent, this husband with decades of practice loving another man whose life was dangerous—that KC and Yardley had something worth saving.

Or at least trying to save.

“Trust,” she said. “Like parachuting to a teeny-tiny target.”

“More like a free fall.” Gramercy smiled again, a sad smile of understanding. “But when it’s love, you won’t hit the ground.”

He stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. It’s going to take the time we have left to get through what we need to cover.”

She stood, accepting his hand and holding on to the sensation of his firm, dry palm against hers for a moment. “Thank you.”

“No thanks required, but appreciated.” He started walking toward a set of double doors at the back of the area they had been in, which KC had thus far seen only high-ranking uniforms and somber-faced people in suits exit. No one had entered.

She followed him to the three-phase lock, which involved a fingerprint, a retinal scan, and a code. He completed all three before looking at her. “Are you ready for your first field briefing?”

She was surprised by the whisper of anticipation that suddenly rushed up through her body like Christmas, like hearing Yardley hum in the shower before they went out, or the moment before a heavy lift when she knew she was going to jerk nearly twice her weight over her head and make it look easy. “Gramercy, I’ve been ready forever.”

That was the first time she made him laugh.

Turned out, Gramercy preferred good old-fashioned, earnest joy over a joke.

Maybe she could learn something from that.