Page 34

Lidingo, Stockholm Archipelago

Now, as she traveled through the city of Stockholm and over the New Lidingo Bridge to Devon Mirabel’s private compound, her mind’s eye kept pulling back and away, zooming out to consider the shape of Northern Europe hunched over the Baltic Sea like a protective parent.

Water breaking against coastline had left behind a low landscape riddled with lakes, canals, and islands.

Mirabel’s compound sat on just over four acres of pristinely kept woodland and rolling green lawns.

KC had been briefed on the locations of public land and parks, access points on the electric grid, propane reserves, power lines, and cell towers.

She knew where the agency had land, air, and water support stationed for the mission and the locations from which more support could be called in.

All of this, KC imagined on her mental map as pinpoints and outlines superimposed over access roads and highways, canals and bridges, sea lanes and air traffic routes.

Mostly, though, she thought about how, from the air, Stockholm looked like northern Minnesota, where the fertile farmland fragmented into small lakes, breaking apart until, at the Canadian border, there was nothing but blue.

She’d gone with Yardley on vacation to those boundary waters the first year they were together.

They’d flown to Minneapolis and driven a rental car north until they ran out of land.

An outfitter supplied them with canoes and bags of equipment and food, and they’d spent five days paddling, reading maps, learning what loon calls sounded like.

They’d laughed and slept in late and eaten fried trout.

She’d discovered that Yardley had a beautiful singing voice but only knew the lyrics to maudlin English ballads.

That she had no compunctions about putting a minnow on a hook.

That her head was full of random and delightful facts, and she could sit on a rock without moving, watching the sunset until it had completely disappeared below the horizon.

That trip was when KC had known that the first thought she’d had upon seeing Yardley— I’m going to marry that woman —wasn’t something she could pretend was anything but the voice of fate.

The kind of fate she’d never really believed in.

When Yardley moved in, she set up an area in the basement to make her dioramas.

She had magnifying lights and a Dremel. She kept her supplies stacked in Sterilite organizers full of moss, dirt, and bitty rocks in various sizes and colors.

KC had asked for a tour, and Yardley—pink-cheeked, talking too fast—showed her a diorama of the Boundary Waters.

It had a little canoe, with two tiny figures.

The figure at the back of the canoe had red hair.

KC couldn’t look at Stockholm from the air and not think of Yardley.

She couldn’t look out the window of the agency’s black car, purring slowly over the winding island road, and not think of the layers and layers of maps in her head.

Sea lanes. Air support. Escape routes. Yardley’s enthusiasm, making the world glow.

How she was quiet and unguarded in sleep. What had gone wrong.

Every map had a red dot hovering above Mirabel’s teal-roofed compound, which KC had committed to memory. The main house, three outbuildings, the pool, the stables. Thirty bedrooms. Thirty bathrooms. Four levels, a wraparound driveway, a firepit, a boat launch, walking path, garage.

The guests. Their dossiers. Their security. Their motives, objectives, weaknesses, pet peeves, histories. Who would have weapons, what kind, how to disarm them.

A hundred things that could go wrong. A thousand errors KC could make that meant she failed to achieve the mission’s single objective.

Get the drive.

But when she closed her eyes, what she heard was the faint, whooshing white noise of her comm and what she liked to pretend was the sound of Yardley breathing, even though it probably wasn’t.

She slowed her own breath down to match it, the same as she used to do when she wrapped her arm around Yardley’s middle and closed her eyes in their bedroom, letting the warm, breathing aliveness of the woman she loved lull her to sleep.

That kiss. That kiss in the closet that smelled like towels fresh out of the dryer, like the sheets at an expensive hotel in the District where she’d splurged on a date with Yardley last year.

The way, when KC found her mouth, Yardley had made a noise like it hurt in the best, brightest way, and her skin was so hot, everywhere, against KC’s palms, and she couldn’t get enough even as she couldn’t quite convince herself it was happening.

But it had happened, and it had done something to KC like it did to see her mother’s gold watch on Yardley’s wrist after she’d implied she left it in Virginia.

It meant she’d never taken it off except when she had to.

It meant she hadn’t taken it off yet , and so there was more than just that encounter in the dark to work with.

There was the conversation they’d had, halting and difficult, but real.

Trust.

Tonight, KC had decided to let the heavy fabric and loose neck of the sequined, oversized black satin T-shirt she wore tell her body how to move.

The woman she was pretending to be was young and insouciant.

Spoiled. Sharp. The dress was so short, KC wore black briefs and fishnets essentially as pants, but she liked the knee-high, patent leather Docs.

Their platform soles changed her gait, changed her attitude, and cloaked an arsenal of tech.

No one will look too close , Yardley had said, tapping through a tablet, double-checking mission details. They’ll be insulted you’re not packing a gun .

I hate guns , KC had said, which made Yardley laugh.

So do I.

It was funny. When KC had imagined Yardley Whitmer in her role as a financial consultant, she’d pictured her gliding through airports in a silk blouse with her roller bag, distant but polite with the tedious finance bros.

She’d told herself that her Snow White princess saved her fullest, most secret, weirdest self for KC and KC alone.

But the Yardley who built dioramas in the basement, who snorted at KC’s most juvenile Monty Python references and made herself caches of salty, slightly revolting snack foods in case she suddenly needed them for fuel because she burned even more calories being alive, being a little too much , than KC did running forty miles a week—

That Yardley did not belong only to KC. That Yardley was the Unicorn.

In the ballroom, coordinating the mission, she talked fast, and she was always two steps ahead.

She moved constantly, pacing, gesticulating, throwing off beams of energy.

She absorbed dossiers and details, briefing documents and updates from the analysts, from tech, from Atlas and Gramercy, like they were KC telling her a story—her round chin balanced in her hand, her long legs crossed, nodding her head, taking it in.

The first time KC had kissed her, it was because Yardley asked her to, after hours at that party talking, flirting, eating, finding ways to touch KC’s hair, hand, arm, and shoulder.

KC had slowly wrapped her hand around the bodice ties of Yardley’s white sundress.

She’d pulled her mouth close, and through the silky cotton of those ties, like they were wicks pulling melted wax, she felt Yardley go entirely still.

She’d asked Yardley against her mouth, holding her to a wall hidden from the partygoers—the smoothest KC had probably ever been—if she still wanted the kiss, and Yardley had closed her eyes and begged please in such a broken voice, KC knew that the kiss was going to lead to their first everything.

It was a lot, how it was between them. In the beginning, KC had been where Yardley could put it all.

They’d hurt each other the most by holding back, because KC was who the Unicorn came home to.

KC was Yardley’s person, her respite, her soft sheets and hot mugs of coffee and long, lazy mornings in bed.

Just KC. Even when she hid the truth and didn’t give Yardley everything she deserved, she’d still been the person the Unicorn chose, the person Yardley Whitmer took to meet her family, and that meant their relationship had always been real.

Real, and messed up, and imperfect, and falling apart.

But things that failed could be put back together. How many times had KC taken her own lines of painstakingly assembled code and cut them into pieces, rearranged them, rewrote them, so she could fix them and make them work?

She’d made Yardley a promise in that linen closet, and she intended to keep it.

“Confirmation from Atlas, the device is onsite.” Yardley’s voice in the comm was buttery and tart at the same time. It was the same voice she used on the phone with her mama. That made KC smile.

“Does it include confirmation the product is for auction?” Out the car’s window, she could just see the lights from Mirabel’s compound, curving along the long driveway.

There were two cars in front of them and few more trailing behind.

Some of the guests would be arriving by water, others landing at a private helipad a mile away on the far side of a forest preserve to be shuttled to the property by Mirabel’s staff.

“Affirmative.” Atlas’s voice came in. “This is a one-stop shop.”

“Tech is reporting at least one more RSVP.” Yardley exhaled. “No intel.”

“Copy.” KC had a sinking feeling about that RSVP, but there wasn’t any point articulating it. They’d prepared for every contingency that could be prepared for. “Sidebar. Has Absolute Tosser finished interrogating the asset’s unexpected visitor?”