He frowned. “No. I’m not, actually, Tae. I’m— I’ve done a lot of things that a good man shouldn’t do. But I’ve done them for a good reason, and that’s what keeps me sleeping at night. But let’s not get me confused with the actual good people in the world like your dad, and . . . well, you.”

She just blinked at him. What?

He offered her a smile. “But around you, I do feel like I’m a halfway decent guy.” He winked.

The pilot came over the loudspeaker and told them that they were starting their descent, and he turned away.

No. No, that wasn’t right.

Except it made sense, didn’t it? “From the beginning, I knew that I was different. Made for trouble, I guess.”

Oh, Colt.

But maybe it was the kind of trouble that she needed. The kind that would keep her alive.

And without a doubt, he was exactly the man she needed right now, when her life felt like it was skidding off the rails.

She just wouldn’t think about the end of the story.

The sprawling city of Orlando came into view as she stared out the window, Roy’s words in her ears. “We think we figured out where the Petrovs are going to hit.”

It couldn’t be Disney World—not only because of the unthinkable chaos and destruction wrought by unleashing a bioweapon on hundreds of thousands of children and families, but even, technically, the fact that Disney World was under a no-fly zone, with some of the most advanced security in the world.

It seemed impossible, all ways around.

“Why a vaccine and not an antiviral?” Colt said as the landing gear went down.

His question came out of the blue, but not so far from her thoughts either. Uncanny how he could almost read her mind.

“Because, for smallpox, the vaccine acts as an antiviral. The body produces antibodies that allow it to fight the virus.”

“Won’t that make the person sicker?”

Across the aisle, Zoey was leaning over Roy, looking out the window.

“We don’t actually inject smallpox into the body. We use another virus that is similar to the smallpox virus called vaccinia, which is also a poxvirus but less harmful. In the past, we used cowpox. We’d draw fluid from the pustules of an infected cow, separate the virus from the fluids, then use the cowpox virus as our base vaccination. The cowpox is similar enough that when it invades the body, the body attacks it and creates memory cells that will attack any substance similar to it, like smallpox.”

“So why doesn’t the current vaccine work?”