“Right now? Oh . . . let’s see, that you should not be fighting in there, for starters. After all, I’m assuming you’re not here as part of the popcorn-and-Raisinets set. Instead, I want you to come with me and let me help you get out of the country safely.”

Isaac’s voice was ancient as he shook his head. “You know I can’t trust you. I’m sorry, man. But I can’t.”

Fucking hell.

Bottom line, though, was you couldn’t fault the reasoning: In XOps, even when you were on assignments with your compadres, it was each man for himself. Decide to leave the fold? If you were smart, you wouldn’t put your life or your faith in your own mother’s hands.

Jim took a drag and focused on the other man’s face, feeling that burning drive in his chest get hotter. Hard to explain the “why” of it . . . but he couldn’t pull out now that he’d found Isaac. Even if that compromised his battle with Devina. Even if Isaac didn’t want his help. Even if it put himself in danger.

Isaac Rothe had to be saved.

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “But I need to help you. And you’re going to let me.”

The other man’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Excuse me?”

Jim glanced over to the door. Adrian and Eddie had reappeared and . . . the two of them were looking like this was all supposed to happen. As if they had known all along that Isaac would show up here. And Jim would talk to the guy. And . . .

On a quick tilt of the head, Jim regarded the dark heavens, and thought about the way his first assignment had gone: no coincidences in any of the chain of events. Everyone and everything he’d met up with had woven into his task. And golly gee-fuckin’-whiz, it was so not hard to imagine that Matthias was playing on Devina’s team. The guy had done evil wherever he went, perpetrating acts of violence and deceit that had both shaped the world on a global scale as well as altered private lives forever.

Jim refocused on Isaac. Maybe being so damned committed to this AWOL soldier wasn’t just a page out of his past . . . Hell, Nigel, his new boss, hadn’t seemed easygoing in the slightest—and yet the archangel had rolled over the instant Jim had announced he was going after Isaac: Not the kind of thing that you did if you were team captain and your quarterback started running for your own goal line.

Exactly the kind of thing you did if your boy was right where you wanted him.

Holy shit . . . Isaac was his next assignment.

Man, that shit he’d pulled over his own corpse at the funeral home was going to prove to be a stroke of genius.

“You’re going to need me,” he pronounced.