There was a silence and then Alistair Childe’s patrician voice came over the connection. “Are you all right? Shall I come over?”

Cradling the phone in the crook of her shoulder, she picked up the Life Alert by the chain and watched it dangle. Clearly, she was under surveillance—so it wasn’t like there was any hiding who she saw or where she went. And besides, having her father show was probably a good idea. She’d always sensed that he had serious power in high elevations, because politicians and military men alike treated him with something more than just respect: They were vaguely afraid of him, in spite the fact that he was an Ivy League-educated gentleman.

Might not hurt to throw him in the mix, and besides, there was no one else she would have gone to with this situation.

“Yes,” she said. “Come now.”

In the house on Pinckney Street, Isaac stared out from behind his sheet of particleboard with an urge to kill. And that burning drive wasn’t in the civilian sense that he was frustrated and wanted to let that shit out in the hypothetical.

He wanted to slit Matthias open from throat to scrotum and gut him like a pig.

Motherfucker was not going after his woman.

It didn’t matter what Isaac had to do or sacrifice: Grier Childe, with her good heart and her smart eyes, was not going to become a notch on Matthias’s belt.

Clearly, however, she was in the guy’s crosshairs. She’d taken off well over two hours ago, and she’d had the cash with her. Which should have been Isaac’s cue to leave as well . . . except the black sedan that had driven by at dawn had rematerialized from an alley off Willow Street and gotten right on her bumper.

With no wheels of his own, he’d had to let them both drive away, his goddamn heart pounding with impotent rage. His first instinct was to call Jim Heron—but he still wasn’t sure he could trust the guy.

The only thing he’d been able to do was replace the signal he’d tied to her lantern. Picking up a painter’s hat that had been left behind, he’d put it on to cover his face and slipped out briefly to tie another piece of that muscle shirt around the iron fixture—just in case whoever was in that car hadn’t seen the first one before she’d taken it away. Although that was unlikely. The question was whether the XOps method of marking a situation as clear would matter: In the field, when an assignment was finished and the team member had taken off, he always left a white mark somewhere on the premises or the vehicle or the scene.