A small military passenger plane, the Skyvan was the equivalent of riding in an airport parking lot shuttle, except thirty thousand feet in the air. Not exactly comfortable.
But it wasn’t comfort, really, that got Yardley out of bed in the morning, or put her on planes, trains, and buses and sent her all over the world, risking her blessed hide for information. It was faith that she’d been born with a particular combination of talents and grit, and she had an obligation to use them to make the world better. Working for the agency was how she transformed her purpose into action.
Also, call her old-fashioned, but she truly did believe that putting her own self in peril kept other folks, civilians—good people—safe. People who were loved. People who loved others.
People like KC.
That was what Yardley thought about on the Skyvan between dozing on and off, wiped out from what had been a thirty-six-hour sprint.
KC.
How every single time KC Nolan had smiled in the eleven hundred ninety-seven days since they met, Yardley felt the same way she did the first time.
Like she was coming home.
CHAPTER TWO
Reston, Virginia
Newly fallen leaves crunched under her running shoes as KC Nolan flew over the narrow streets of her neighborhood.
No matter how fast she ran, the beat of her soles on the pavement wasn’t loud enough to drive out the only two words in her head.
Kris Flynn. Kris Flynn. KrisfuckingFlynn.
As she came up on a set of stone pillars marking the entrance to the parking lot of Glade Valley trailheads, her way was unexpectedly blocked by a dark sedan rolling slowly through the entrance onto the street in front of her.
The headlights flashed once, but the car didn’t move. She couldn’t see who was inside it.
Jesus, fuck.
KC stopped in the middle of the road, heart in her throat, scanning for an exit. The headlights flashed again, and she wondered if the element of surprise would be on her side if she parkoured off the sedan’s trunk onto the closest stone pillar and then dropped into the brush by the creek that ran alongside the park. From there, she could run through the middle of the creek for a few hundred feet—it was shallow this time of year—then scramble up the bank to meet up with the trail.
She bent her knees and made her shoulders go loose, calculating the distance between where she stood and the back end of the car.
The driver’s door opened. “For heaven’s sake, get in. I want a breakfast sandwich before I have to report to headquarters. I don’t have time for your shenanigans.”
The car door shut.
KC looked up at the moon, already fading, and let out a sigh. She wished she didn’t have a reason to be so cagey and hypervigilant. She wished it wasn’t her own fault she was jumping out of her shoes at every noise, shadow, and communication.
She wished she hadn’t felt like she had so much to prove to Dr. Brown that she’d agreed to develop the demo of a digital weapon that was suddenly very neatly turned in her direction—thanks, apparently, toKris Flynn, a hacker she hadn’t run into since they were both teenagers breaking into government databases for the LOLs.
She glanced at the time. Last night, she’d barely had a chance to regroup from handling tech for the Ritz-Carlton mission before she heard Yardley sneak in and shut the guest-room door behind her, coming home late from her last-minute work trip to a brokerage house in New York. Those trips meant hours of meetings with tedious corporate men.
Tedious men loved Yardley. They couldn’t resist her cultured North Carolina accent, Snow White gorgeousness, and easy charm.
KC, on the other hand, had not won any pageants. First of all, the talent portion never involved tech expertise, deadlifting, or arguing. Secondly, she said what she thought, often betraying the remnants of one of thosenot-cultured Virginia accents. As a child,she’d been saddled with nicknames like “Half-Pint,” “Firecracker,” and “Red.” The word “trash” had also been bandied about, mostly by tedious men of the type who adored Yardley.
She jogged around the front of the sedan, opened the passenger door, and dropped into the seat. “It took me all night to crack the encryption on the data from that thumb drive you got out of Flynn’s safe. I turned in my homework. Can’t a girl have an hour to clear her head before dealing with you bird-watchers?”
Gramercy pointed the car down the road, keeping the headlights off. KC had never seen her new handler wear anything but a crisp suit, and this was true now, at five forty-five in the morning.
Sometimes she tried to imagine what Gramercy must have been like in the field twenty years ago—a literal ghost, deep undercover in the Russian president’s cabinet—but she couldn’t imagine him without his slim-cut suits, wildly patterned pocket squares, and stylish glasses. Although the deep grooves bracketing his mouth hinted he might becapableof using it to express something other than exasperation. “There’s a bottle of water in the glove compartment,” he said.
KC took a look. “And a Glock with a silencer. You know I hate guns.” She grabbed the Fiji and closed the compartment.
“I removed it from my holster in deference to your sensibilities.” Gramercy turned down a dark alley that he probably thought was clandestine but was actually just the access road behind a row of houses where three sets of parents of her elementary school friends still lived. She’d carved her name into the brick half-wall in this alley when she was eleven.
