Reston, Virginia

Newly fallen leaves crunched under her running shoes as KC Nolan flew over the narrow streets of her neighborhood.

No matter how fast she ran, the beat of her soles on the pavement wasn’t loud enough to drive out the only two words in her head.

Kris Flynn. Kris Flynn. Kris fucking Flynn.

As she came up on a set of stone pillars marking the entrance to the parking lot of Glade Valley trailheads, her way was unexpectedly blocked by a dark sedan rolling slowly through the entrance onto the street in front of her.

The headlights flashed once, but the car didn’t move. She couldn’t see who was inside it.

Jesus, fuck.

KC stopped in the middle of the road, heart in her throat, scanning for an exit.

The headlights flashed again, and she wondered if the element of surprise would be on her side if she parkoured off the sedan’s trunk onto the closest stone pillar and then dropped into the brush by the creek that ran alongside the park.

From there, she could run through the middle of the creek for a few hundred feet—it was shallow this time of year—then scramble up the bank to meet up with the trail.

She bent her knees and made her shoulders go loose, calculating the distance between where she stood and the back end of the car.

The driver’s door opened. “For heaven’s sake, get in. I want a breakfast sandwich before I have to report to headquarters. I don’t have time for your shenanigans.”

The car door shut.

KC looked up at the moon, already fading, and let out a sigh. She wished she didn’t have a reason to be so cagey and hypervigilant. She wished it wasn’t her own fault she was jumping out of her shoes at every noise, shadow, and communication.

She wished she hadn’t felt like she had so much to prove to Dr. Brown that she’d agreed to develop the demo of a digital weapon that was suddenly very neatly turned in her direction—thanks, apparently, to Kris Flynn , a hacker she hadn’t run into since they were both teenagers breaking into government databases for the LOLs.

She glanced at the time. Last night, she’d barely had a chance to regroup from handling tech for the Ritz-Carlton mission before she heard Yardley sneak in and shut the guest-room door behind her, coming home late from her last-minute work trip to a brokerage house in New York.

Those trips meant hours of meetings with tedious corporate men.

Tedious men loved Yardley. They couldn’t resist her cultured North Carolina accent, Snow White gorgeousness, and easy charm.

KC, on the other hand, had not won any pageants.

First of all, the talent portion never involved tech expertise, deadlifting, or arguing.

Secondly, she said what she thought, often betraying the remnants of one of those not -cultured Virginia accents.

As a child, she’d been saddled with nicknames like “Half-Pint,” “Firecracker,” and “Red.” The word “trash” had also been bandied about, mostly by tedious men of the type who adored Yardley.

She jogged around the front of the sedan, opened the passenger door, and dropped into the seat.

“It took me all night to crack the encryption on the data from that thumb drive you got out of Flynn’s safe.

I turned in my homework. Can’t a girl have an hour to clear her head before dealing with you bird-watchers? ”

Gramercy pointed the car down the road, keeping the headlights off. KC had never seen her new handler wear anything but a crisp suit, and this was true now, at five forty-five in the morning.

Sometimes she tried to imagine what Gramercy must have been like in the field twenty years ago—a literal ghost, deep undercover in the Russian president’s cabinet—but she couldn’t imagine him without his slim-cut suits, wildly patterned pocket squares, and stylish glasses.

Although the deep grooves bracketing his mouth hinted he might be capable of using it to express something other than exasperation.

“There’s a bottle of water in the glove compartment,” he said.

KC took a look. “And a Glock with a silencer. You know I hate guns.” She grabbed the Fiji and closed the compartment.

“I removed it from my holster in deference to your sensibilities.” Gramercy turned down a dark alley that he probably thought was clandestine but was actually just the access road behind a row of houses where three sets of parents of her elementary school friends still lived.

She’d carved her name into the brick half-wall in this alley when she was eleven.

The car finally rolled to a stop behind a detached garage with an ancient Toyota pickup parked beside it. The wheels were gone, its axles sagging onto cinder blocks.

“I kissed a girl for the first time behind this garage,” KC said. “Back then, it was as pink as my grandma’s denture glue, but I like the way it’s faded to more of a coral.”

Gramercy did not smile. “There’s a situation.”

“You don’t say.” She crossed her arms with false bravado, wishing he’d caught up with her five miles into her run instead of when she’d just started to hit her stride.

KC desperately needed to unwind the tension in her shoulders and neck.

She’d spent too many long days and sleepless nights in front of a keyboard the past few months, trying to save the world while waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or, failing that, waiting for Dr. Brown to emerge from whatever safe house he’d been stashed in and explain everything.

All while weathering the worst breakup in the history of the D.C. metro area.

The one way KC knew to get the grit out of her eyes and come down from what was becoming a habitual state of cranked-up hyperfocus was to run and keep running.

It was only when her quads burned and her lungs hurt that her body and mind finally snapped back together and let her feel like herself again. Like she had a self.

The agency didn’t care if she had a self, but KC did. The descent of her life into a calamitous hellscape of loss and lies had made her perversely protective of what little belonged to her. Her opinions. Her unique abilities, such as they were. Her relief that she hadn’t yet received a burn notice.

The last time she spoke to Dr. Brown, he’d made a point to remind her of what he’d told her when he was first given the black op to develop the device.

He’d chosen KC to make this piece of technology because she kept her eyes on the higher truth, even while her mouth had to lie.

He’d told her not to let one bad day expose a mission.

The strain in his voice was audible even over the crackling comm connection.

He’d been injured, and it was entirely her fault.

The controlled test of KC’s weapon in Toronto had gone as bad as worms in cheese, and now her mentor and friend was recuperating somewhere, unable to reach out to her for risk of exposing the mission.

Without orders to follow, KC had taken the weapon apart into hacked-up pieces of code, which she’d stashed on the dark web. Safe as houses, she’d thought.

She’d thought wrong. Days later, the agency began picking up whispers that the device was being reassembled. Those whispers told KC that somehow, despite her precautions, her hidden pieces had been located by someone who knew where to look.

The only thing she’d been able to do was dedicate herself to helping the agency track down whoever had it.

She needed to keep the technology safe, and to keep people safe from it, without revealing that she’d been the one who made it—at least until Dr. Brown returned and told KC who in the agency they could trust.

“You’re in a mood,” Gramercy observed. He turned toward her, his blue eyes assessing through the lenses of his glasses. “Trouble in paradise?”

No, no, and nope. KC never asked Gramercy questions about how things were going at home with his husband. She and Gramercy were not on a personal-questions-asking footing. In fact, KC wouldn’t say, strictly speaking, they liked each other.

“That’s not a work-appropriate question,” she bit out.

“Also? You already know the answer because we work in intelligence. I had to file a report when Yardley moved in last year. I’m sure you know I put a moving POD on my credit card, and you probably also know my girlfriend bought a stack of retaliatory moving boxes the very next day, because you clowns see fit to monitor her every move, even though the CIA promises the American public it doesn’t spy on its own citizens.

But I’m going to be understanding and pretend you’re not prying out of a purely ghoulish impulse to pick over the bones of my love life. ”

“Kind of you.” Gramercy stared through the windshield at the alley. “I forget how much more difficult it is when your partner doesn’t have security clearance.”

Anger fired in KC’s gut. Gramercy’s husband, Lucas, was a three-star general.

“Sure. Sure. Naturally, privilege is the answer, privilege I don’t have and never will.

She’s a mere civilian, so I can’t tell her anything when she’s just my girlfriend.

Maybe someday if we got married, if I got permission, if she got clearance, but you know what?

It turns out that when half of what you tell your person isn’t true and the other half skates the surface lest you inadvertently put her in mortal danger, she starts to think you’re shifty as fuck. ”

Gramercy made a noise in his throat that KC couldn’t interpret.

That was fair. KC didn’t know how to interpret that outburst herself, except as an expression of the unburned adrenaline flooding her system, pressing in on her chest, trapping all the things she couldn’t say in her throat.