"Halifax," she replied. "Nova Scotia."
I blinked up at her. "Why the fuck am I in Canada?" I rasped. "Why stop a hundred miles from the US border? I could've jogged there!"
She squeezed my wrist, offered me a grim smile. "You didn't have another hundred miles. You barely made it here. You lost half your blood volume. Your heart stopped twice. Trust me, this is as far as you could go."
"Me?" I barked. "Please. I had another—" I glanced at my arm, the one on the receiving end of the lead pipe treatment, and found a long, ugly scar from my elbow to wrist. "Fuuuuuck."
Now I was really pissed about that lead pipe.
"Like I said," she continued, "you didn't have another hundred miles." She released my hand, stepped back. "There were diplomatic reasons as well."
"Say again, Tomb Raider?" I asked, an eyebrow arching up as I peered at her. Who the fuck was this chick?
The door opened and in limped Jordan Kaisall. "You're awake. Good. We gotta move."
Once again—fuuuuuck.
If Kaisall was standing in my hospital room—in Nova Scotia of all the damned places—a couple of bad dreams were the least of my worries. Kaisall was a black ops contractor. He took on jobs too risky, too dark, too plausibly deniable for anyone else. His teams went in after the SEALs, the Green Berets, the Rangers, the CIA operatives. Got them—us—out when shit turned sour.
And he was my brother's business partner.
If Kaisall was here, Will knew everything. Perhaps not everything but he knew my mission was fucked and he knew more about the past couple of days than I did. And if Will knew, my father did too. Not only that, but the CIA hadn't come for me. Either they wouldn't or couldn't.
One more time—fuuuuuck.
He dropped his hand on the woman's shoulder, a touch too familiar to be collegial, and she smiled.Yes.Then it clicked. Yeah, I knew her. "Mossad," I whispered. Israeli intelligence. "You're Mossad. I saw you a few years ago in—hmm. In Tangier. Right?"
She gave me a quick shake of the head, a fleeting smile. "I'm sure you're mistaken," she replied. "I'm just a cake decorator."
"And I'm just a cultural anthropologist," I drawled.
She shrugged. "I'm told Morocco is lovely in October."
"Especially when taking down terrorist cells." I bobbed my head when she didn't respond. "And Budapest in May? How do you like it there?"
"It's hard to say. I haven't been in ages." She sounded a bit wistful, as if her memories were of the variety kept in scrapbooks and Instagram photos. But they weren't. Nothing we'd seen existed in the light of day. Hell,wedidn't exist. That singular truth made our work possible.
It also meant my brother's business partner had to fetch me from the North Atlantic because no one else dared come for me.
"Yeah and I hear Russia's delightful in December but thank fuck none of us are there right now," Kaisall added. He beckoned toward me. "I hope you weren't especially fond of your spleen."
I forced a shoulder up in spite of the pain twisting through my body. "No more than any other vital organ."
"Good answer. Couldn't be saved." He tapped his fingers on the footboard. "Do you think you can walk? I've got a jet waiting at a small airstrip outside the city and we'd attract a lot less interest if you could board on your own."
My tank was half full of borrowed blood and I wasn't sure I could feel my feet but I said, "Of fucking course I can walk on my own."
I hadn't survived SEAL training and one deployment after another andthenCIA trainingandyears-long missionsandalsoescaping Russia with a bullet in my side and a janky broken arm to give up now. No, son. No. I was walking out of here if it cost me everything. I'd get the fuck through it.
That was how I lived—getting the fuck through it.
"All right," Kaisall replied, skepticism heavy in those two words. "Wheels up in two hours." He wrapped his arm around the woman's waist, kissed her temple. "That's just enough time to get you a clean passport."
I snickered. "How is Nova Scotia's black market? I've always wondered."
Ignoring me, Kaisall said to the cake-decorating killer, "Anything you need before we go, April?"
April.Yeah, that hadn't been her name in Tangier. Or Budapest.
