But maybe their kiss in the dark was like a seed they’d planted together. Safely tucked in, ready to grow up into the world where they could say everything they had ever wanted to.
The door opened. The light clicked on like a slap, making Yardley squint her swollen eyes. Amanda was in the doorway, an apology written all over her face.
“I am genuinely sorry. This is absolutely the worst timing, but you’re being looked for.” She must have seen something in KC’s expression, because she shook her head. “They have no idea where you are, I only made a good guess. But I’m obligated to tell you they’ve detained someone outside the residence who’s asking for Kris Flynn. A Declan Byrne?”
“Dang it.”
But KC started laughing, and she turned around, directing her laughing face at Yardley—her full smile, her big brown eyes with their illegal copper lashes and her kissed lips and her extra-super-messy hair—and Yardley started laughing, too.
“He’s the love of her life,” KC said. “We should’ve seen this coming.”
“We should have.” Yardley felt a sudden burn of tears in her eyes despite the laughter. “But we didn’t this time.”
“We’ll figure it out,” KC said, reaching her hand out for Yardley’s. “Come on, before Declan’s thrown into Swedish prison.”
Yardley took KC’s hand, pressing their damp palms together, and it felt like maybe they had gotten somewhere new after all.
“It’s nice, actually,” Yardley said as they left the room and went to another hallway Amanda pointed out to them.
“What’s that?” KC let go of her hand, but slowly, with another smile.
“Swedish prison. I’d have to take off a star or two on account of it beingprison, but the food was excellent, and at the time I was hungry and incredibly tired.”
“Put a pin in that,” KC said. “Later.”
Later.
Yardley let herself believe it like it was their first truth.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lidingö, Stockholm Archipelago
The last thing KC had reviewed in the ballroom before she ducked into the back seat of the BMW X5 was drone footage.
Now, as she traveled through the city of Stockholm and over the New Lidingö Bridge to Devon Mirabel’s private compound, her mind’s eye kept pulling back and away, zooming out to consider the shape of Northern Europe hunched over the Baltic Sea like a protective parent. Water breaking against coastline had left behind a low landscape riddled with lakes, canals, and islands.
Mirabel’s compound sat on just over four acres of pristinely kept woodland and rolling green lawns. KC had been briefed on the locations of public land and parks, access points on the electric grid, propane reserves, power lines, and cell towers. She knew where the agency had land, air, and water support stationed for the mission and the locations from which more support could be called in.
All of this, KC imagined on her mental map as pinpoints and outlines superimposed over access roads and highways, canals and bridges, sea lanes and air traffic routes.
Mostly, though, she thought about how, from the air, Stockholm looked like northern Minnesota, where the fertile farmlandfragmented into small lakes, breaking apart until, at the Canadian border, there was nothing but blue.
She’d gone with Yardley on vacation to those boundary waters the first year they were together. They’d flown to Minneapolis and driven a rental car north until they ran out of land. An outfitter supplied them with canoes and bags of equipment and food, and they’d spent five days paddling, reading maps, learning what loon calls sounded like. They’d laughed and slept in late and eaten fried trout. She’d discovered that Yardley had a beautiful singing voice but only knew the lyrics to maudlin English ballads. That she had no compunctions about putting a minnow on a hook. That her head was full of random and delightful facts, and she could sit on a rock without moving, watching the sunset until it had completely disappeared below the horizon.
That trip was when KC had known that the first thought she’d had upon seeing Yardley—I’m going to marry that woman—wasn’t something she could pretend was anything but the voice of fate.
The kind of fate she’d never really believed in.
When Yardley moved in, she set up an area in the basement to make her dioramas. She had magnifying lights and a Dremel. She kept her supplies stacked in Sterilite organizers full of moss, dirt, and bitty rocks in various sizes and colors. KC had asked for a tour, and Yardley—pink-cheeked, talking too fast—showed her a diorama of the Boundary Waters. It had a little canoe, with two tiny figures. The figure at the back of the canoe had red hair.
KC couldn’t look at Stockholm from the air and not think of Yardley. She couldn’t look out the window of the agency’s black car, purring slowly over the winding island road, and not think ofthe layers and layers of maps in her head. Sea lanes. Air support. Escape routes. Yardley’s enthusiasm, making the world glow. How she was quiet and unguarded in sleep. What had gone wrong.
Every map had a red dot hovering above Mirabel’s teal-roofed compound, which KC had committed to memory. The main house, three outbuildings, the pool, the stables. Thirty bedrooms. Thirty bathrooms. Four levels, a wraparound driveway, a firepit, a boat launch, walking path, garage.
The guests. Their dossiers. Their security. Their motives, objectives, weaknesses, pet peeves, histories. Who would have weapons, what kind, how to disarm them.
A hundred things that could go wrong. A thousand errors KC could make that meant she failed to achieve the mission’s single objective.
