"I've had a lot of time to think." Her voice slipped, just for a second. The confidence flickered. Underneath the bravado, the girl who'd spent years locked in her father's house was still there, still waiting for someone to tell her the door wasn't real.
I pushed off the counter and walked over. Put a hand on her shoulder. "Marli Jacobson."
She looked up at me.
"That's your name now?"
"That's my name now." She tested it like a coat she wasn't sure fit yet.
"It's a good name."
"It's a fake name."
"All names are fake. We just get used to them."
She snorted. "That's either very deep or very stupid."
"Both, probably. It's a family tradition."
She closed the laptop. The kitchen settled into the hum of the refrigerator and the soft tick of the clock above the Aga. Outside, the security lights threw pale rectangles across the lawn.
"Will Maeve be angry?"
The question was too careful. Not will she miss me. Not will she be sad. Angry. That was what Callum McCarthy had taught his daughters to expect. That wanting something for yourself was a betrayal, and betrayals were punished.
I set the water bottle down.
"She'll be terrified," I said. "Then proud. Then terrified again. Possibly all at once. She has quite the range."
Mary's mouth twitched.
"She won't be angry because you want a life. She fought too hard for hers to deny you yours."
Mary stared at the closed laptop. The screen was dark now, a black rectangle where an acceptance letter had been.
"What if I get there and I'm nobody?"
I'd asked myself the same question once. Different context. Same shape. I'd been eighteen, standing in a Moscow courtyard, looking at the body of the first man I'd ever killed and wondering if that was all I was now. A weapon, and nothing else.
"Then you become somebody," I said.
"Is that your motivational speech?"
"I kill people for a living. You should be grateful your choice doesn't have casualties."
She laughed. Small but real, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Go to sleep," I said. "I have to figure out how to tell my Pakhan he's paying your American tuition."
Three days later, her bags were in the foyer.
Four suitcases. Three were Mary's. One was a care package Maeve had assembled at three in the morning with the intensity of a woman preparing a polar expedition. It contained, among other things: a travel blanket, two packs of British tea bags, a printed list of emergency contacts laminated by Gregor, a spare phone charger, and a small stuffed dog that looked suspiciously like Fergus.
Artem had arranged a jet out of Farnborough to Logan International. Blade was loading the luggage into the SUV withthe sour look of a man who had not signed up for bellhop duties but was too professional to complain.
Mary—Marli—stood in the grand foyer in a trench coat that was trying very hard to make her look like a sophisticated adult and mostly succeeding.
Maeve was holding onto her like she planned to physically prevent the jet from taking off.
