“Only one Russian, John, same as I said before.”

He eyed her with the suspicion of someone for whom disbelief was a baseline response, but she’d told the truth, if not the whole truth.

She said, “Don’t make me fight you for it.”

And that was the thing.

She could take the SIM if she wanted. He knew it, she knew it.

She’d never be able to compete with him brain to brain or make Clare love her the way Clare loved him, but she didn’t need to when she could take him down in two quick seconds. That’d always been the reason for training hard, fighting harder, and getting beat by bigger assholes. But using force here guaranteed he’d vanish to seek Dmitry on his own, and letting him walk into the jaws of death alone meant that good-bye now possibly meant good-bye for forever, and she wasn’t ready for that.

He said, “Look, you want the card, you can have it. But I need a promise from you—not manipulation—a one-hundred-percent, honest-to-God real promise.”

The irony almost made her laugh.

“Coming from the guy who claims I’ve never kept a promise in my life.”

“Do you want it or not?”

“Fine,” she said. “What’s the promise?”

“That you stop sabotaging me.”

“I’m not sabotaging you.”

“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

She held up her pinkie.

He hooked his with hers, then dropped the SIM on the table and nudged it in her direction. She picked it up before he’d have a chance to change his mind, pulled a small square pill case from her pocket, and dropped the SIM in together with the others.

He said, “No matter what happens with Dmitry, there’s still the kill team, and that’s not going to stop until we put an end to it.”

“How close are they?”

“Close.”

“Bonus for Prague,” she said. “Might buy us some breathing room.”

“Or an opportunity.”

“You see an intersection between the two.”

“If you’re willing to provide cover at the rendezvous and let me take point with a body double, then yeah.”

The suggestion made her bristle.

A plan like that would put him down on the ground again, same as it had here, and if Dmitry was real and this thing in Prague turned out to be legit, it meant he’d be meeting their father first, alone, without her, and that raised the same damn issue that had pushed her back from the rooftop edge to join this conversation and made her want the SIM. But if one of them had to be down in the gorge, she’d rather it be her covering Jack than the other way around.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “But I can work with it.”

His finger traced the edge of the coffee cup.

He said, “Have you heard from Clare?”