Only I couldn’t. I had to stay away. And I wasn’t ready for how much that hurt.

Some hours later, I was in the driver’s seat of a parked van, trying to keep warm. It was three in the morning and a bitter wind was whistling straight through the open sides of the concrete parking garage, turning it as cold as a meat locker. We couldn’t run the heater or it would kill the van’s battery and we couldn’t start the engine because we wanted people to think the van was empty.

The parking bay where the meet was supposed to happen was directly behind us. Colton, Bradan and Gabriel were in the back of the van, watching through spy holes, Gabriel ready with a camera. We had Cal on top of a building across the street, keeping watch. JD was in the passenger seat watching his side and my job was to watch my side.

But my mind kept wandering back to Erin. Why her? I’d gone my entire life without feeling that connection. Why did the one woman I had it with have to be JD’s little sister?

“Got a car coming in,” said Cal over the radio.

We waited silently while the car crept slowly through the garage…and then pulled into the bay we’d been watching. Everyone inhaled: this was it.

A moment later, another car arrived, a big black Mercedes. It pulled into the bay next to the first car. As a guy climbed out of the first car, Gabriel started snapping pictures. The man was stocky, short and carried a cardboard file. “There’s our seller,” whispered JD.

A guy climbed out of the Mercedes. He was older, fifties, maybe, with a silver beard and wearing a suit and black leather gloves. There was a….hardness about him. He was all muscle, but it went beyond that. His scowl was so deep set, it looked like he’d never smiled. And his eyes were weapons: he didn’t look at things with curiosity and joy, like Erin did. He stared at them as if he was extracting every useful scrap of information from them before discarding them. It felt like he’d been cast from iron, cold and utterly unyielding.

The man with the beard held out a thick brown envelope. “He must be the buyer,” I muttered. I was supposed to be watching my side but my eyes were glued to the mirror, watching it play out.

“That can’t be right,” muttered Gabriel to himself.

I twisted around in my seat to look. Gabriel had moved the camera away from his eye and was looking at the last photo he’d taken on the screen. “That writing on the front of that file’s in Cyrillic,” he said, confused. “And it’s got the Hammer and Sickle in the corner. He’s not selling US secrets, he’s selling old Soviet ones.”