My thumb hovers over the keyboard. Two weeks of silence, and now this. She’s done what I asked—what McIntyre demanded—and then some. Delivered enough intel on Dragonov’s consolidation to keep Langley happy for months. Proved every bet I placed on her was worth it.
And now she’s going deeper. Into the belly of it. Where I can’t follow.
CHRIS: You have your emergency line?
TATIANA: Always.
CHRIS: Backup extraction plan?
TATIANA: Three of them. Stop mothering me.
I almost smile. Almost.
There’s more I want to say. But Tatiana’s done this before—gone under, stayed under, came back out with intel and scars in equal measure. She knows what this work eats. Knows it better than most.
I’m the one who’s not sure he could do it again.
CHRIS: Be careful.
TATIANA: Careful is boring.
The typing indicator appears, disappears. Appears again.
TATIANA: I’ll surface when I surface. Don’t come looking.
I wait, but nothing else comes.
The phone goes dark in my hand. I sit with it for a moment, the weight of what she’s walking into pressing against my chest. Tatiana’s good. Best asset I’ve ever worked with, not that the list is long. But Dragonov’s organization has swallowed people with more training and better backup than she has. The Serbs don’t play by rules that leave room for mistakes.
I pocket the phone. Start the car.
File it. That’s what the training says. Compartmentalize. Put it in a box and access it later, when it’s useful, when you have bandwidth to actually do something about it.
But I’m tired of boxes. Tired of the endless sorting and storing and pretending the things I’ve locked away don’t have weight.
Tatiana’s going to be fine. She has to be.
I pull out of the parking structure and head toward Dr. Reiner’s office, the worry folded into a corner of my mind where I can find it later. After.
Right now, I have a different kind of work to do.
Dr. Reiner’s office is nothing like I expected.
No leather couches. No Rorschach prints. No degrees arranged in a self-important grid on the wall. Instead, there’s a small room with two comfortable chairs angled toward each other, a window overlooking a courtyard garden, and a side table with a box of tissues and a carafe of water. The walls are painted a warm gray that somehow manages not to feel institutional. Photos on a bookshelf: a group shot of teenagers in graduation robes, a wedding photo with two women in white, a candid of what looks like a Thanksgiving dinner with at least a dozen people crammed around a table.
No CIA insignia anywhere. No indication that the woman sitting across from me has security clearance high enough to know about operations I’m not even read into. Wyatt said she’s contracted through them, but you’d never know it from looking around.
Dr. Reiner herself is not what I pictured. Late fifties, maybe early sixties. Black, with a cascade of natural curls falling past her shoulders—dark at the roots, honey-brown at the tips. She’s wearing a blazer over a simple blouse, small gold hoops in her ears, and an expression that reminds me uncomfortably of Nina when she’s decided to stop letting me deflect.
She looks like someone who’s raised a houseful of kids. Not just her own, but every stray who needed a place to land. The kind of woman who’d make you feel welcome and seen and then calmly refuse to let you bullshit her about anything that mattered.
That quality makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
I settle into the chair she’s indicated, cataloging the exits out of habit. One door, one window. Standard office building layout. No surveillance equipment I can detect, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
“Water?” she offers, gesturing to the carafe.
“No. Thank you.”
