“How do I know that you really spoke to Vox?” I said in a quiet growl.

Rasouli offered a thin smile. “He said that you might ask that, so he gave me something to say. I suppose it is a code phrase that will mean something to you. It means nothing to me.”

“What is it?”

“Vox told me to say, ‘I vetted Grace and she was clean. She wasn’t one of mine.’”

I had to work really hard to keep what I was feeling off my face. It cost a lot.

Grace.

Damn.

When I’d first joined the DMS a year ago, Church’s senior field officer and my direct superior was Major Grace Courtland. She was as beautiful as she was smart and tough. She had been the first woman to enter Britain’s elite SAS team as a field operative, and she helped build Barrier—Britain’s elite and highly secret counterterrorism rapid response force—and was later seconded to Church when Congress gave him approval to build the DMS. Grace and I went into combat together, we worked together, and we fell in love together. We never should have done that, it was against common sense and every rule in the book. Then, last summer, a professional killer’s bullet took Grace away from me. She died saving the world. The whole damn world. I still hear her voice; still catch glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye. Still feel the absolute yawning, cavernous absence of her in my heart.

She had also been vetted by Vox before coming to work for Church. Some people on both sides of the pond tried to use that to smear Grace’s good name. Church had words with a few of them. I had words with a few others. Word got around and people shut the hell up.

Hearing her name on the lips of this monster filled me with a rage so intense that black poppies seemed to bloom before my eyes. Rasouli watched my face and I could see the delight he took in what he saw. He was like a vampire, feeding off of my pain.

The voices in my head all screamed at me to drag Rasouli to the floor and …

… I closed my eyes for a moment.

Grace.

Thinking of her tricked me into a memory of her speaking my name.

Joe.

The black flowers of hate withered and blew away, leaving a strange, cold control. I smiled at Rasouli and after a moment his smile faded.

“Vox,” I said quietly.

“He spoke quite highly of you. I think he likes you … and he certainly admires you. He called you ‘tenacious.’”