He nodded and pulled himself together before glancing back at Isaac. “How far are you willing to go?”

“I won’t comment on other operatives,” Isaac said, “but when it comes to my assignments, I’ll go all the way. The things I did for Matthias. What I know about him and his second in command. Where the two of them sent me. The trouble is, it’s a patchwork—there’s a lot that I only know part of.”

“Let me show you something.”

Her father got up from the table, and before she could see what he did, a section of shelving came forward and wheeled left, exposing a safe set into the stone walls. The sturdy door was opened by his handprint on a panel and the inside was not very big—little more than the dimensions of a legal pad horizontally and no greater than six inches high.

He came back to the table with a thick folder. “This is everything I’ve been able to piece together. Names. Dates. People. Places. Pehaps this will help jog your memory.” He tapped the front cover. “And I’ll figure out who to go to. There’s no way of knowing for sure who’s involved in Matthias’s inner circle—government conspiracies have thick roots, but also tendrils you can’t see. The White House is not an option, and it’s a federal issue, so state contacts won’t help us. But here’s what I think. . . .”

Her father’s voice grew more powerful with each word, the gathering strength of purpose turning him into the pillar she had always believed him to be. And as he spelled out plans, she felt a shift in the center of her heart.

Although that was just as much because of something Isaac had said. None of us know what we’re getting into until it’s too late. . . .

Her brother had been a beloved junkie, an addict of the first order who likely would have died by his own hand at some point—although that was not a justification for what had been done to him, simply the reality of what the situation had been. And she had been surprised, at the time, with how upset her father had been at the loss. He and Daniel had had no contact for at least a year before that horrid night: after the latest stint at yet another high-priced rehab facility had fallen by the wayside, her father had hit the wall as a lot of parents and family members did. He’d given all he could to his son, limped through a decade of patches of recovery that gave treacherous hope, but were inevitably followed by long, dark months in which no one knew where Daniel was, or even whether he was alive.