With her complete and utter submission her fear faded, and with the banishment of her fear, the pain was transformed into—what? In perceptible increments into pleasure, which rose and rose like a shining tower before her until it blotted out the sky, the sun, the moon, everything. She groaned from deep in her belly and, for the first time in her life, she came. Wave after wave of pleasure washed over her, until she was inundated, until she dropped below the surface, immersing herself without any fear of drowning. In fact, the opposite was true. As her orgasm raged on, she sensed the power in it—a power beyond her imagining.

And then it subsided, slowly, languorously, leaving her on a shoreline, without breath and with a pounding heart. She wanted nothing more than to look back at the eternal waves, to crawl back into that tide of pleasure.

But there was a distant sound, as of a bell tolling. From behind and above her, she felt the cool draft of Sydny moving away from her, her footsteps exiting the bedroom, heels clicking down the hallway and across the parquet floor of the living room—how clearly these small sounds came to her in her new private world, as if they were whispered intimately into her ear!

She heard Sydny’s voice call out “Who is it?” as if it were a shout.

And then the roar of gunshots ripped through the apartment, shattering every perfect note that had come before. The fragile shell of her brave new unvarnished world cracked open.

*   *   *

So I’ve kicked Whit out twice, Charlie thought as she exited the toilet. Our history has a way of repeating itself, as if both of us are bound to a wheel that raises us up and then almost drowns us. Maybe, she thought, as she rose to her feet, drowning would be a blessing compared to the wreckage we’re left with.

She looked through the rooms of the villa. The blood, the sheer human waste. Her mind had had time now to count the pileup of the dead, the modern process of death so clinical the mind couldn’t properly register it as it was happening. I am part of this, she said to herself. A willing participant in the death of Americans, no matter how misguided their motives.

Dimly, she became aware of a rhythmic beeping. Turning, she sidestepped the body at her feet on the hallway floor, went into the room where Seiran el-Habib was still a prisoner, tied again to his chair. He cringed visibly as she strode toward him, but she went past him, picked up the sat phone that Flix must have dropped or left behind. Where was he, anyway? And where was Whit. She shouldn’t have cared, but she did. Very much so.

Toggling on the phone, she said, “Hello?”

“Who’s this?” said a male voice that sounded both staticky and very far away.