The car finally rolled to a stop behind a detached garage with an ancient Toyota pickup parked beside it. The wheels were gone, its axles sagging onto cinder blocks.
“I kissed a girl for the first time behind this garage,” KC said. “Back then, it was as pink as my grandma’s denture glue, but I like the way it’s faded to more of a coral.”
Gramercy did not smile. “There’s a situation.”
“You don’t say.” She crossed her arms with false bravado, wishing he’d caught up with her five miles into her run instead of when she’d just started to hit her stride. KC desperately needed to unwind the tension in her shoulders and neck. She’d spent too many long days and sleepless nights in front of a keyboard the past few months, trying to save the world while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or, failing that, waiting for Dr. Brown to emerge from whatever safe house he’d been stashed in and explain everything.
All while weathering the worst breakup in the history of the D.C. metro area.
The one way KC knew to get the grit out of her eyes and come down from what was becoming a habitual state of cranked-up hyperfocus was to run and keep running. It was only when her quads burned and her lungs hurt that her body and mind finally snapped back together and let her feel like herself again. Like shehada self.
The agency didn’t care if she had a self, but KC did. The descent of her life into a calamitous hellscape of loss and lies had made her perversely protective of what little belonged to her. Her opinions. Her unique abilities, such as they were. Her relief that she hadn’t yet received a burn notice.
The last time she spoke to Dr. Brown, he’d made a point to remind her of what he’d told her when he was first given the black op to develop the device. He’d chosen KC to make this piece of technology because she kept her eyes on the higher truth, evenwhile her mouth had to lie. He’d told her not to let one bad day expose a mission.
The strain in his voice was audible even over the crackling comm connection. He’d been injured, and it was entirely her fault. The controlled test of KC’s weapon in Toronto had gone as bad as worms in cheese, and now her mentor and friend was recuperating somewhere, unable to reach out to her for risk of exposing the mission.
Without orders to follow, KC had taken the weapon apart into hacked-up pieces of code, which she’d stashed on the dark web. Safe as houses, she’d thought.
She’d thought wrong. Days later, the agency began picking up whispers that the device was being reassembled. Those whispers told KC that somehow, despite her precautions, her hidden pieces had been located by someone who knew where to look.
The only thing she’d been able to do was dedicate herself to helping the agency track down whoever had it. She needed to keep the technology safe, and to keep people safefromit, without revealing that she’d been the one who made it—at least until Dr. Brown returned and told KC who in the agency they could trust.
“You’re in a mood,” Gramercy observed. He turned toward her, his blue eyes assessing through the lenses of his glasses. “Trouble in paradise?”
No, no, and nope. KC never asked Gramercy questions about how things were going at home with his husband. She and Gramercy were not on a personal-questions-asking footing. In fact, KC wouldn’t say, strictly speaking, they liked each other.
“That’s not a work-appropriate question,” she bit out. “Also? You already know the answer because we work in intelligence. I had to file a report when Yardley moved in last year. I’m sure youknow I put a moving POD on my credit card, and you probably also know my girlfriend bought a stack of retaliatory moving boxes the very next day, because you clowns see fit to monitor her every move, even though the CIA promises the American public it doesn’t spy on its own citizens. But I’m going to be understanding and pretend you’re not prying out of a purely ghoulish impulse to pick over the bones of my love life.”
“Kind of you.” Gramercy stared through the windshield at the alley. “I forget how much more difficult it is when your partner doesn’t have security clearance.”
Anger fired in KC’s gut. Gramercy’s husband, Lucas, was a three-star general. “Sure.Sure.Naturally, privilege is the answer, privilege I don’t have and never will. She’s a mere civilian, so I can’t tell her anything when she’sjustmy girlfriend. Maybe someday if we got married, if I got permission, if she got clearance, but you know what? It turns out that when half of what you tell your person isn’t true and the other half skates the surface lest you inadvertently put her in mortal danger, she starts to think you’re shifty as fuck.”
Gramercy made a noise in his throat that KC couldn’t interpret.
That was fair. KC didn’t know how to interpret that outburst herself, except as an expression of the unburned adrenaline flooding her system, pressing in on her chest, trapping all the things she couldn’t say in her throat.
She’d been like this ever since Atlas told her over the Toronto comm yesterday to start pulling background on Kris Flynn—the name of the one person who coulddefinitelyhave found where KC concealed the code for the weapon. The person who could reassemble it, because once upon a time KC and Kris Flynn had come up with the idea together, and they’d known each other before either one of them had anything to hide.
And now Kris could expose her.
She wondered if Yardley, an old-fashioned rule follower who made sure finance bros followed Uncle Sam’s regulations and didn’t hoard outsized pieces of the pie, would have any sympathy for a woman who wasn’t a good enough spy to keep weapons out of the hands of the enemy.
Probably not.
Gramercy adjusted his tie. “Speaking of what was on that thumb drive.”
“We weren’t.” KC glared at him, but his face revealed nothing, and he didn’t respond to her aggression. Fatigue crept in as her anger drained away. “What, then? What.”
“The analysts have been working with the data that you, as you said, stayed up all night to provide a decryption key for. It seems the target, Kris Flynn, who we now assume was the maker of the device, was collecting intel about her employer.”
KC sat up straighter. “Who?”
“One Devon Mirabel. A nationless criminal whose accomplices are known to acquire and sell gray-market tech to the highest bidder.”
“Never heard of him.”
“The agency’s had a file on him for years. Here’s the critical piece. Mirabel’s shopping the weapon to buyers.”
