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Yardley removed the large bandanna from around David Miller’s eyes. They’d handcuffed him to a heavy, good English-oak chair, and Julia had turned the lights low to give him a chance to adjust to his circumstances.

Or to the existence of consequences for his behavior.

He squinted. His large, pale blue eyes focused on her where she sat in the Windsor-backed chair across from him. She’d buttoned up her tuxedo shirt and discarded the salt-and-pepper wig.

“Fuck,” he said.

“You don’t call, you don’t write,” she replied.

“I don’t answer to you.”

“You’d think that an agent of the United States of America would be eager to answer to their countryman and colleague in the wake of an arms auction of interest to the very organization they are undercover in. But definitely don’t answer to me .”

KC took the cue and walked into David Miller’s line of sight.

Julia had requisitioned a tutor’s office on the campus of the old naval college.

The tutor must have an association with the theater department, as bits and pieces of stagecraft in the corners and leaning against the wall provided an appropriately dramatic setting.

KC’s entrance was framed by a plague doctor’s costume hanging on a peg and a teetering pile of prop books that looked like they belonged to a wizard.

“Hiya, Mr. Miller. Remember me?” She sat down with her legs crossed on a small chintz-covered chair.

“KC?” He said this under his breath, his head darting back and forth between the three women. He didn’t seem to know whether to look at KC, whose appearance had slumped his shoulders, or at Julia, who made him sit up straighter and jangle the handcuffs.

“Have you seen the pictures of Emma’s new baby?” KC asked. “She named her Amybeth, after your wife. Probably because Mrs. Miller has had such a fucking difficult year, what with her husband and the father of her children abandoning her with the liquid half of her life savings.”

“I’m undercover,” he said, a small fissure of anger in his tone.

“Are you, though?” KC asked. “Because there’s a difference between being undercover and isolating yourself to keep from having to face the truth. I know a lot about that, actually.”

KC’s comment hit Yardley like an arrow whining through the air from above and then sunk heart-deep into her chest. They could have lost so much.

Secrets aren’t the only way to keep a person safe , Atlas had told her.

There are ways to share this work with a family or a partner.

They aren’t easy. There are no guarantees. Life isn’t safe.

Yardley had been doing the wrong hard things. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“You can’t possibly understand the delicacy of espionage at this level.” David’s voice had gone more than a little bit patriarchal.

“I mean, of the two of us, you’re the one who’s handcuffed to a chair. But please, tell me more about what I don’t understand.”

“Oh, I do like her,” Julia said. “She’s like a tiny jalapeno, Yards.”

KC leaned back against the puffy cushion of her chair, pulling her sock-clad feet into a tighter crisscross.

She was obviously more than okay. Fully in her powers and where she belonged.

If anyone at the agency had ever thought to ask this woman what she wanted, they could’ve had all this talent in their global network years earlier.

Her and KC’s crash course had taught them a lot about the power of a simple question. Yardley felt as though she’d plugged her heart into an electrical socket. Her love was neon-laced, electric pink, illuminating the world.

“My handler…” Miller said.

“Dr. Brown,” KC supplied. “The worst traitor the agency’s seen in a very long time. Maybe you missed the burn notice? Easy to do when you stop checking your work messages.”

Miller went quiet. Yardley couldn’t tell if KC had guessed right and Miller didn’t know, or if this was what he looked like when he had an original thought.

KC tapped her finger against her knee. “Here’s the bad news.

With help from our friends at MI6, we have plenty of intel to indict you as a traitor.

An extremely lazy traitor, granted, but if you’re not spying, you’re lying, so this is not the kind of situation where we answer your questions.

This is the kind where it would be a good idea if you took this opportunity to unburden yourself of what you know about Dr. Brown, any new digital weapons, Swedish blackouts—really, whatever comes to mind.

Doesn’t even have to be linear. Pretty sure we can follow along. ”

Miller’s long, aggrieved sigh reminded Yardley of her daddy when he picked up the stack of bills from the end of his desk and got his good pen out to start writing checks.

“Okay, boomer,” KC said. “Give us a story.”

“I haven’t seen him for months,” he said. “I haven’t done anything but what I was asked to do.” He clenched his teeth together and didn’t elaborate.

“Cade, your son”—the hard edge to KC’s tone made each word into a hammer blow—“had a garage sale where the only things he sold were what either belonged to you or reminded him of you. It was really something to see him put a fifty-cent sticker on a T-ball shirt because you coached the team when he was four.”

Yardley was impressed. Psychological torture was tough to introduce into an interrogation, but KC was getting right in there. “If you don’t like democracy,” she said, “maybe you have a stock portfolio? Those really take a beating when an empire falls.”

“My god,” Agent Miller breathed.

“I want dates,” KC prompted, frowning at him over her crossed arms. “Times. Conversations.”

After a long moment punctuated by the ticking of the clock on the mantel, Miller lifted his chin. “He’s better off,” he told KC defiantly.

She went a little pale. Yardley might not have noticed if it weren’t for the fact that it made her freckles stand out in stark relief against her skin. She looked ten years younger.

This man had known her then. Not ten years ago, but nearly twenty, when KC was a hot-tempered gifted kid and a friend to his daughter, curled up on his furniture or sitting with her arms around her knees on the carpeted floor, memorizing the moves of an MMA fighter.

A girl whose own father was never home.

“You mean Cade,” KC said.

Miller nodded.

KC shook her head. She sounded more sad than angry when she said, “No. He’s not.

I promise you he is not. You know something about my situation growing up, so I’m going to offer you an insight.

When my dad decided I was better off with my grandma while he was gone for work for weeks at a time, he might have thought it was my grandma who was parenting.

She was, best she could. That’s true. But what he didn’t realize is that he was parenting me, too.

He didn’t explain why he had to be gone.

He didn’t reassure me that he loved me. His parenting taught me that I was on my own, and always would be, and even deserved to be.

That is a lonely lesson for a kid to learn. ”

Miller cleared his throat. “Not everyone is equipped for it. I’m the type, right or wrong, better suited to this kind of work.”

“Hardly working, though, are you?” Julia said mildly.

Staring at Miller, KC scraped her fingernail over the tender spot beneath her thumb.

Abruptly, she stood and crossed to the chair where Miller was restrained.

“I’ve heard that before,” she said to Miller.

“‘Not everyone is equipped for every role.’ ‘You’re well-suited to this type of work.’” The voice she used when she repeated Miller’s phrases was, unmistakably, Dr. Brown’s.

She squatted down in front of Miller, her dress sparkling, her mouth grim.

“You can make excuses,” KC said solemnly.

“But I promise you, your kids are not better off, regardless of how you feel, because the thing you need to consider is that the beginning and end of how they feel is not your feelings about them . ”

KC didn’t look away. Miller, to his credit, didn’t, either.

“It hurts,” KC said. Her hand was on the arm of Miller’s chair.

“It hurts to be abandoned. You hurt them. That is a fact. It’s devastating when someone who’s supposed to love you by default, who’s supposed to be yours to guide you and teach you and cheer you on, can’t be bothered.

Because who are you then? What are you worth? ”

Yardley had to close her eyes. She had to. Just for a moment, just until the surge of her breath-stealing revelation settled down.

She’d wanted to be a backstop against any harm coming to KC.

From the moment they met, Yardley had tried to make her body, her life, into a bulwark against the hurt that was doled out so recklessly by the people in power—mostly, in all honesty, by the men, the Dr. Browns and David Millers of the world—telling herself the whole time that her decision to risk herself was what kept good people safe.

But seeing her incandescent, combustible KC confront one of those men with all the steely resolve and insight she’d earned for herself by walking through fire, Yardley knew she couldn’t put herself between this woman and the world.

It wasn’t her job to make her body a shield against the world’s danger.

She couldn’t love KC Nolan holding her breath, hoping nothing bad ever happened.

Her job was to honor what KC had made out of a lifetime of hurt.

Even if KC never found a way to fix the pain her daddy, her mama, and her grandparents had visited on her by simply not showing up, Yardley could learn and do better, because a good part of loving this woman would be about showing up.

Trying. Finding a hundred, a thousand different ways to remind KC that she wasn’t going anywhere.

When Yardley opened her eyes, KC was watching her.

Yardley put her fingertip on her own sternum. She looked into KC’s eyes and mouthed, I love you .

KC smiled. I know , she mouthed back.