Good.
She changed the trajectory of her walk, speeding up when she noticed Cigarette murmuring into her comm. Yardley brushed past her, blocking out the rest of the street noise by pure will, nearly tripping and calling attention to herself when she caught the word Cigarette had spoken as Yardley passed.
Tabasco.
Her higher cognition dropped out, and she turned around and ran toward the alley alongside the safe house. When she got there, she reached up to yank down the ladder to the fire escape. No doubt they’d seen her, and certainly they’d heard the screech and clang of the ladder, so she didn’t worry about the rubber-on-metal noise of her boot soles. She just climbed to the third floor as fast as she could.
They were after KC, and they knew her code name. A spy with a laser-assisted sniper aiming at them and their code name in the wind was a dead spy, so Yardley didn’t care to think through why any of this would be the case until after she had protected KC’s precious body.
She wrenched open a window and threw herself into a random apartment. A young woman immediately started screaming.
“Get out! There’s a fire!” Yardley yelled in Swedish.
She ran out of the apartment with the woman, and as she reached the door to the apartment where KC and Flynn were supposed to be safe, she heard the voices of an American man yelling in the stairwell and a British woman yelling back.
Cigarette and Headphones, on their way up. They knew where to go.
Flynn hadn’t, but they did.
Before she opened the door, she yanked down the fire alarm in the hall.
She slammed the door behind her and found Flynn already standing up in distress at the sudden noise.
“Get down! Curl up in the bottom of the wardrobe.”
Flynn moved fast and shut herself in, but Yardley was already shrugging off the laptop strap and disentangling the mangled box of pastries from her wrist, focused on locating KC.
There she was—crouched in a fighting stance in the space behind the door, eyes alert.
“Man and a woman in the hall in less than ten seconds,” Yardley shouted over the wail of the fire alarm. “Probably armed. Looking for you, so put that hood up and keep your head down while we fight.”
“You laughed and fell down all the way through that trial kickboxing class we took, and we’re going hand-to-hand with two armed hostiles?” KC yelled.
Yardley put her palm on the doorknob and looked over her shoulder at KC. “Don’t worry about me. I fight dirty.”
With that, she smashed the door open into Cigarette’s shoulderon the other side, pulled the door back and smashed it again, and then leaped out and tripped her as she reared back in pain.
“Got it,” KC said, and as Yardley stomped on the small of Cigarette’s back, she watched KC crouch and swing her legs across Headphone’s ankles, bringing him to his knees for just long enough for KC to stand up and wrench back his arm, grab his gun, and drop out the cartridge, which she stuffed in her pocket.
Yardley wished this was a date.
It would’ve been one of the best they’d ever had.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KC lay on her back and panted, trying to find her breath. The grit in the grotty hallway carpet pressed into her shoulders. Her thigh was screaming with a giant, throbbing bruise, and the ear-piercing bell of the fire alarm rattled her teeth.
They’d gotten away.
KC had been running after the man and woman she and Yardley disarmed and nearly subdued when Yardley caught her by the hips before she could stop their descent down the stairwell, knocking her backward.
Now, Yardley was breathing hard, on her knees but getting ready to stand up. The alarm cut out with one last sharp trill.
“Why the fuck did you stop me?” KC peeled herself up off the floor. She could hear shouting residents at the bottom of the staircase and the sound of a siren nearby.
“Because they were running away.” Yardley reached her hand down. “I don’t chase anyone or anything unless it’s absolutely dire. Which is almost never. What would we do if we caught them, torture them with snacks until they told us what we wanted to know? The CIA is not law enforcement. Let the FBI chase people. They have to pass physicals.”
KC accepted Yardley’s outstretched hand and got to her feet.“Shouldn’t we jet before the fire crew comes? They’ll sweep the building.”
