She picked up the mug and took a sip. Perfect—with just the right amount of sugar she liked in it. He’d watched her, she thought. Saw how much she’d added at some point, even though she hadn’t been aware of it. And he’d remembered.

“You lookin’ at me?” When she glanced up, he nodded down at the dossiers. “My picture?”

“Ah . . . yes.” Grier tapped the phrase. “What exactly does this mean?”

He walked over and leaned in. As he stared at the details under his face, the tension in him was palpable, his big body tight all over. “They had to give me a reason.”

“Before you’d kill someone.”

He nodded and began to walk around, going over to the wine bottles. He took one out, looked at the label, returned it . . . moved on to another one.

“What kinds of reasons did they give you?” she asked, well aware that his answers about this meant way too much to her.

He paused with a Bordeaux cradled in his hands. “The kind that made it seem right.”

“Like what.”

His eyes flipped toward her and she had a moment of pause. They were so grim and hollow.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

He put the bottle back. Went a couple of feet farther down the wooden racks. “I only did men. No women. There were some who could do the females, but not me. And I’m not going to give you specific examples, but the political-affiliation nonsense just wasn’t enough for me. You kill a bunch of people or rape some women or blow some shi—er, stuff . . . up? Very different story. And I needed to see some proof with my own eyes—video, photograph . . . bodies that were marked.”

“Did you ever refuse an assignment?”

“Yes.”

“So you wouldn’t have killed my brother.”

“Never,” he said without hesitation. “And they wouldn’t have even asked me. The way Matthias saw it, I was a weapon that worked under prescribed circumstances, and he took me out of his holster at appropriate times. And you know . . . I realized I had to leave XOps when it dawned on me that I was no different from the people I was killing. They’d all felt as if whatever atrocities they were committing were justifiable. Well, so did I and that made us mirror images of each other really. Sure, an objective viewpoint would have agreed with me over them, but that wasn’t enough.”

Grier let out a long exhale. He was what she’d always believed in, she thought.

“How so?” he said.