“No. But that does not mean I can trust them. They could say something careless in the hearing of someone with soviet ties. They could mention me in a report that makes its way back to Russia. They could . . .” They could ruin his every plan. His whole purpose.

“Zivon.” She breathed his name so softly he barely heard it. Yet it zapped him like a live wire, pulling his gaze to hers from where it had drifted to the pattern in the tree bark.

No one had said his first name in weeks, other than when it was attached to his surname in an introduction. No one had called him by it. The closest anyone had gotten was Camden using “Ziv.” But that had never been his nickname. That wasn’t him.

She offered no apology for the liberty either. No, eyes steady in that way she usually reserved for whatever she saw through her camera’s lens, she reached up and touched her fingertips lightly to his coat. Over his heart.

Over the encrypted message, ready to send, and the photograph of two German officers, where the papers were hidden away in his pocket.

She shook her head. “You cannot trust your enemies. And if you do not trust your friends, then who do you trust?”

Perhaps she meant it to be a rhetorical question. But the answer resounded like a gong. “No one.”

She didn’t shake her head or pull away or do any other logical thing. No, she sighed. And she rested her whole hand there, over all his worst secrets that she didn’t even know existed. “Not even God?”

“Of course I . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence. It would be a lie, much as he wished it weren’t. He let his eyes fall shut, to close out the image of her earnest face. “I want to. I try to. But He has taken everything, Lily. Everything. My parents. My brother. My career, my home, my future.”

She didn’t react to his liberty-taking with her name. Except that when she spoke, her voice seemed a few degrees warmer. “No. Not that. As long as you have breath, you have a future. One only He can see.”

Zivon could catch glimpses of it too. Logical conclusions to the patterns in play. Cause and effect. Actions and reactions. He just couldn’t foresee the surprises. Evgeni vanishing, likely dead. The introduction to a friend like Clarke, who shared so many interests.

Lily Blackwell, who could see beauty in a world he swore had been emptied of it.

The footsteps of the Russians had faded away, the ambassador and his cousin clearly not wanting to be overheard either. But new ones approached from the opposite direction—familiar ones. Ivy and Clarke would double back to join them soon.