Ziggy had saved them, really, and RJ had never felt so far from the spy she wanted to be in the moment she’d realized she’d been betrayed.

By the one person she’d tried to save, of course, as all great stories went.

She came to the massive square, with the Gothic and Romanesque Church of the Holy Spirit rising from the center like a medieval specter. During the day, the square was a postcard—the mansard-roofed church with the cupola-topped steeple surrounded by storybook buildings. Red-roofed, with apartments over the ground-level shops, flowers spilling from sidewalk planters, and during the day, umbrella-topped cafe tables set up on the dark cobblestones near a number of quaint restaurants.

A place to linger, to ponder why she had this incessant ability to blow up all the good things in her life with an unquenchable need to fix, to help, to…rescue.

Movement from across the square had her stopping in the puddle of darkness beside the church. A couple, his arm around her shoulders, tucking her in tight.

RJ’s chest tightened.

Please, York, still be alive.

She’d picked up a burner phone in Frankfurt when she’d landed, but her call to the Sigonella Air Base had been routed to the hospital switchboard, and the call to York’s room went unanswered.

He was probably still unconscious after losing so much blood, and his traumatic surgery…yes, that had to be right because anything else had her shutting down, her thoughts careening together into a tight, inescapable knot.

But strange that Roy hadn’t picked up—especially since this op was of his making. She wasn’t exactly sure what Roy did for the Caleb Group, the clandestine private ops team that worked exclusively for American President Isaac White, but she had a guess.

One that gave him connections and resources around the globe.

The couple disappeared down a street and RJ took a breath, then braved herself out into the open, where the moonlight bathed the dark plaza, where anyone with a little heads-up knowledge and a little luck might center her in their sights and…

Well, and finish the job they’d started at KiTZ, the Hope Children’s Cancer Center just down the road. Again, if it hadn’t been for Ziggy—

She spotted the safe house just up the block, and three stories up, hidden in plain sight above an Indian restaurant called Raja’s. Turning in under the hanging sign, she walked past the restaurant, now closed for the night, the smells of cardamom, cloves, ginger, and coriander saturated the red brick floor, the ancient waddle and daub walls.

The stairs creaked as she ascended. The second story opened to a terrace on the backside of the building with a view to the river, a door to their apartment to the right. She knocked, twice, waited, then knocked again, twice.

A lock clicked and the door opened.