“I’d like to hear more about what your dynamic with Dr. Brown is like now.” Yardley forced herself to inject indifference into her voice. “I don’t know him well. When it comes to counterterrorism, he exclusively works with tech. I would have thought he’d be on Maple Leaf.”
Something minute and extremely terrible happened behindKC’s face—a suppressed emotion that, if Yardley hadn’t known KC, hadn’t loved her, she would have missed.
But a question like that shouldn’t have made CIA officer KC Nolan uncomfortable.
When KC shrugged, her arm lifted with her shoulder, indicating the gesture was false. “He’s on medical leave.”
Yardley’s throat squeezed.That was a lie.
Before she could take a breath, a hard wall of pressure pushed her into her seat. The impossibly young pilot’s voice came over the comm to let them know they were descending and would be wheels to ground in five.
KC pulled out her tablet and tapped it awake, as though their conversation had reached its natural conclusion.
Yardley spent the five minutes to landing deep inside her head, racing through everything she knew and didn’t know about KC Nolan, Tabasco, Dr. Brown, Kris Flynn, and Project Maple Leaf. She pictured the way KC’s back had stiffened in the Situation Room when the president made it clear she’d come into possession of game-changing information. She considered how much bravado KC had shown in that meeting, which seemed to disguise significant fear.
But fear of what?
When they landed, she unbuckled her harness and stood up at the same time KC did. A soldier opened the cabin door. On the tarmac, two men wearing black fatigues with no visible insignia maneuvered the stairs into position. A black BMW sedan sat twenty feet away, the engine idling.
Freezing-cold air rushed through the opening in the plane, blowing through KC’s fiery hair. Yardley thought again of thesnapshot she’d seen of her on the steps of her grandmother’s house.
What KC had been through were the kinds of experiences that made a person hypervigilant, careful, observant. The kinds of experiences that made spies.
And traitors.
The cold air was blissfully numbing. Where they’d landed, on an isolated runway at the Air Target Sweden AB, could be anywhere with scrubby trees and a few armored military vehicles parked in tidy rows in a covered lot. As KC climbed into the car beside the driver, Yardley tried to remember the last time they’d really kissed.
She couldn’t.
That was a tragedy. She’dlovedKC Nolan. She hadn’t known everything, but she’d known enough to love the girl who KC had been, with skinny legs and knobby knees, big teeth and huge sunglasses, sitting on the concrete steps of her grandma’s house and smiling big over the loneliness in her heart.
She’dlovedthat pint-sized twelve-year-old sitting on a cushion, steering a Lincoln slowly through the streets of Reston, Virginia, and she’d loved the teenager who’d taken up service to her country when what she’d really needed was support, mentorship, and a chance to relax and actually be her age.
They’d kept too many secrets—that was obvious—and the agency had put KC in the basement, maybe for too long. Maybe for long enough that bad actors had reached her or she’d reached out to them in order to solve a different problem. Yardley didn’t know why KC was afraid and concealing information, but her instinct told her KC was in more trouble than the mission was.
The CIA would do anything to its officers it suited them to do. Her granddaddy had been more than clear about that.
So it was a good thing Yardley was the Unicorn. KC needed someone willing to get to the bottom of things before anyone caught on—either the bad guysorthe good guys—and fix it.
Keeping KC safe and out of the line of scrutiny so that she could thrive would be the kind of parting gift that might make it possible for Yardley to put her broken heart back together.
She just needed to come up with a plan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ulrikagatan Street, Östermalm, Stockholm
KC took a seat at the small table in the galley kitchen of the flat. It was downright tatty for this address in the posh Östermalm neighborhood. How did the agency find these places? Was there a top-secret registry of properties all over the world with one working tap and painted-over light switches?
Although she couldn’t pretend there wasn’t still a small part of her that was actively being bowled over by these surroundings. She’d never been to Europe. Never taken a transcontinental flight, much less on a top-secret military jet that traveled at near-hypersonic speed. She’d been to Stockholm in surveillance footage and on body cameras, had familiarized herself with significant traffic patterns and landmarks, but seeing it with her own eyes hit different.
Travel was one of many promises Dr. Brown had dangled in front of her that had not materialized.
“Hmm.” Yardley was walking in a small circle, her hand over her mouth, her eyes focused on something that was definitely not in the room. She sat down on the foot of an iron-frame bed in the corner of the studio and whipped her dark hair into a ponytail with an elastic on her wrist.
She’d been like this since they landed. As soon as they arrivedat the flat, KC had collapsed on top of the bed’s lumpy mattress and dropped into a dreamless sleep. She woke up four hours later to the sight of Yardley still pacing.
On the Darkhorse, when KC had been caught off guard by Yardley’s question about Dr. Brown’s absence from Project Maple Leaf, Yardley had noticed. And KC had noticed her noticing.
