The two men were gone, as if they had never been there in the first place. Again.

What. The. Fuck.

As the creep-o-meter on the back of Isaac’s neck went wild, Grier walked over. “Was there someone here?”

“Ah . . .” He looked all around. “I don’t . . . know. Come on, let’s get inside.”

Ushering her back into the house, he thought it was entirely possible he’d lost his damn mind.

After locking the door and watching Grier reengage the alarm, he sat down on a stool at the island and took out the Life Alert. No response yet and he hoped Grier’s father got here before Matthias hit him back.

Best to have a plan.

In the silence of the kitchen, he stared at the cooktop as Grier took up res across the way, leaning back against the counter by the sink. It felt like a hundred years had come and gone since she’d made him that omelet the night before. And yet if he followed through on what he was contemplating, the next few days were going to make that seem like the blink of an eye in comparison.

Running through his brain, he tried to think of what he could say about Matthias. He knew a lot when it came to his old boss . . . and yet the man had purposely created black holes in every operative’s mental Milky Way: You were told only what you absolutely, positively had to know and not one syllable more. Some shit you could deduce, but there were vast patches of huh-what? that—

“Are you okay?” she said.

Isaac looked up in surprise, and thought he was the one who should be asking that of her. And what do you know, she had her arms around herself—a self-protective pose she seemed to fall into a lot when she was with him.

“I really hope you can patch it up with your father,” he replied, hating himself.

“Are you okay?” she repeated.

Ah, yes, so both of them were playing dodge ’em.

“You know, you can answer me,” she said. “With the truth.”

It was funny. For some reason, maybe because he wanted to practice . . . he considered doing that. And then he actually did.

“The first guy I killed . . .” Isaac stared down at the granite, turning the slick expanse of stone into a TV screen and watching his own actions play out across the speckled surface. “He was a political extremist who had bombed an embassy overseas. It took me three and a half weeks to find him. I tracked him across two continents. Caught up with him in Paris, of all places. The city of love, right? I took him out in an alleyway. Sneaked behind him. Slit his throat. Which was a messy mistake—I should have snapped his—”

He stopped with a curse, well aware that his version of talking shop was hardly like some tax attorney yammering on about the IRS code.