Page 9

The van was moving at a good clip, Atlas talking low and furious into a sat phone. The techs had gone wordless, probably because they didn’t know what to say.

Understandable. KC had blown their cover.

KC, more accurately, had stolen Atlas’s hat and sunglasses from the dash to wear as an impromptu disguise, flung the van’s doors open, burst out of the back, and sprinted away at full speed toward the Starbucks to save the Unicorn.

Who was Yardley.

Yardley was the Unicorn.

A bead of sweat rolled down her neck. Her brain felt like a device that wouldn’t boot.

She kept reliving the queasy seconds after the comm dropped out.

Her recognition— Someone’s jamming the signal.

The other two techs had scrambled to deploy countermeasures, but KC hadn’t been able to find a whit of patience for that, not when the woman who’d been witty and brash in her ear, so funny she made KC laugh out loud, was down the block with a gun on her.

She’d only recognized the woman as Yardley Whitmer when they were hauling ass to the van and it hit her with a percussive clang.

The way she held her arms. Her long legs pounding the pavement.

Even in a tight suit and an improbable wig, she’d shoved KC behind her and taken control of their physical encounter with Devon Mirabel with the same habitual elegance that she used to slide a pan of vegetables into the oven to roast, fold a stack of towels, or shimmy out of a dress.

Because she’s the Unicorn.

KC winced.

“Are you hurt?” Yardley was staring at KC with her hands clasped between her knees.

“I’m fine.” Flooded with adrenaline and panic, but fine.

KC hadn’t decided to save the Unicorn. She’d just gone to her, driven by a demand so outsized and urgent as to be a compulsion. Because Yardley was the Unicorn.

And some part of her, hidden from herself, must have known that.

“I’m sorry.” Yardley’s eyes were bright with unshed tears.

“This must be so difficult for you, all of this”—she gestured around the van—“but when we get to headquarters—god, you don’t even know what I’m talking about, headquarters .

” She wiped her hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry, but I’m sure they have someone who can explain—”

“You don’t understand.” KC dropped Atlas’s sunglasses into her lap and rubbed her temples.

“You think I—What, I just wandered into Starbucks? That Starbucks? Versus the one two blocks from our house. Is that what you’re telling yourself right now?

You’re the Unicorn .” She couldn’t look at Yardley, so she studied her own knees, covered in black high-performance fatigues she hardly ever wore except for required training.

Her boots. The hem of the black ribbed sweater that Yardley had given her for Christmas last year.

“Would it help if I had a name tag that said, ‘Hello, my name is Tabasco’?”

KC looked up just in time to watch Yardley go pale as wax. “What did you say?”

This was a nightmare. Her stomach was stuck in a slow, woozy roll. “No wonder you wouldn’t tell me where you were going this morning. You were in fucking Toronto yesterday?”

“KC? You’re Tabasco?” Yardley’s voice rose up at the end.

The color was coming back into her face from the neck up.

“But you’ve been in the middle of that rush job for Rolling Stone ’s website.

” She cocked her head. Blinked a few times.

“Except you haven’t. Right? Am I catching up now?

You’ve been hacking door locks and manufacturing identities and credentials and whatever else tech gets up to where no one else can see them and we don’t know who they are . ”

Yardley’s voice had taken on the clipped annoyance of her mother’s, deep in a pique, each syllable delivered like a precision jab.

KC couldn’t deal with angry Yardley and the Unicorn, not when she couldn’t even deal with Yardley being the Unicorn.

Not when her brain wouldn’t stop rapid-scrolling through a list of the places the Unicorn had traveled in the last six months, an itinerary as wide-ranging as it was hazardous.

A six-month period that had witnessed the slow strangulation of their relationship, and during which KC had believed Yardley’s extra work trips to routine and domestic places like New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Omaha were about taking a look at some bank’s compliance with fee practice and, as a bonus, keeping herself away from another argument with KC.

Which the CIA fucking knew , but they’d purposely kept KC and Yardley in the dark. No wonder Gramercy hadn’t let her attend the briefing. She rubbed her palms down her thighs, knocking Atlas’s sunglasses to the floor in her restless fury.

But as soon as KC’s anger flared, she remembered that Mirabel wouldn’t have pointed a gun at her Yardley if KC hadn’t made something that a lot of shady actors were willing to pay for with a briefcase full of diamonds.

This, right here, right now, just like everything else that had upended KC’s whole fucking life, was her own damn fault.

“Tabasco isn’t even made in Virginia,” Yardley said, her voice remote and hard to pin down. “You’re not from Louisiana. Unless you are from Louisiana? No, we live in your grandma’s house. Or you do. I used to. I’m crashing in your horrible guest bedroom. But you’re a website marketer.”

KC shook her head. Her throat hitched, searching for words. She couldn’t find any that weren’t prayers for a time machine.

“You work for the agency,” Yardley whispered.

“I do. So do you.”

She’d spent three years dating a spy. In love with a spy. Not just any spy, either. The best spy. It was the Unicorn who she’d given a gold watch to, along with the key to her house. The key to her heart.

And then she’d ruined it.

The van pulled into a gated and disguised tunnel that led to a garage at Langley.

When KC had sometimes fantasized about the time there would be a way to tell Yardley everything, she had imagined something like this—driving to this facility and using her key card to admit them to the hidden tunnel.

She would be nervous, but also self-satisfied at the opportunity to finally impress the most beautiful woman in the world with her secret identity and coolness.

She looked at Yardley, gazing into the middle distance with a stupefied expression.

Yardley, who spoke god knew how many languages and knew how to disarm someone in a fight.

Who had rappelled from the Eiffel Tower and parachuted from a helicopter, and who was rumored to be immune to poisoning via having subjected herself to some secret CIA protocol.

KC worked in front of a screen in the basement and was currently embroiled in a black op that could very well lead to her forced transfer to the satellite office in South Dakota.

“Whitmer,” Atlas said as the van pulled to a stop. “Nolan. Follow me. We’ve got bigger problems.”

The lobby outside the director’s office was emptied of everyone but KC and Yardley. Still, KC felt distinctly like she was being observed.

Maybe it was the ring of eleven-by-seventeen portraits of white men hanging in a long, unending line on the dark paneling.

KC wouldn’t be surprised if the portraits were observing them, via concealed monitoring devices.

She wouldn’t be shocked, even, to learn they were being observed by the subjects of a few of these portraits from beyond the grave.

This was the CIA, after all.

Yardley sat with her arms crossed in a leather armchair with Ashley Sterling-Chenoweth Thompson’s wig like a small dog beside her.

She was determinedly studying the line of portraits.

A tech had taken her bra for analysis, and she’d buttoned her jacket to the collar for modesty.

She wore her black hair pinned in a crown of braids against her head, a style that KC thought of as very Yardley and had never—not one time—put in the category of useful hairstyle to wear under a wig .

KC still couldn’t reconcile everything she’d heard about the Unicorn—everything she’d observed firsthand about the Unicorn this afternoon—with Yardley .

Yardley and her soft palette of soft clothes, and how she squealed when she found a spider in the shower.

The way she shoved her cold feet under KC’s ass on the sofa when they watched a movie together and loved rom-coms, the more rom the better.

The way she took care of KC, bringing her something to drink when she was working.

The way her eyes used to flutter shut as she sighed and pushed up her hips when KC gently held her wrists above her head, just pressing them against the pillow, and kissed her neck with a little bit of teeth.

“How bugged do you think this lobby is?” Yardley’s voice sounded thick, like it did when she was upset.

“The usual amount.”

“So they’ll know I sneezed before I do.”

“And why.”

KC wanted to smile, but the mutual acknowledgment of spying , making a joke about it, had swamped her with a new wave of disbelief and… yes. Betrayal.

Hers. Yardley’s.

She’d imagined this day would come, the day she confronted the enormity of the lies she’d told Yardley once and for all.

If I just told her , she’d thought, like a mantra .

If I told her, she’d have to believe me.

She’d have to forgive me. She’d have to still love me.

But KC had never once imagined the enormity of the lies Yardley had told her .

It was not fair to hold Yardley to account for those lies. KC could acknowledge that. But her heart was a fickle bitch, and it was holding Yardley to account regardless. Her heart was reliving their entire relationship, sifting through it for what was actually true.

The venom of hurt inside her made her knees unsteady. She wondered if Yardley had ever respected or loved her for real. If any of it, any of what they’d shared in three years, had been real .