“Tatyana. You don’t have to do this. We can call it in. It will take some time, but we’ve got more than enough proof to persuade the president.”

“No,” Tatyana said. “We can’t wait for that.”

She hung up and caught a cab outside the station. She told the driver to let her out a block from the hotel. As she walked toward the entrance, she felt an overwhelming rage at what had happened to her.

She’d had no time to really process it, but now that she was back, the depravity of what they’d done to her made her skin crawl.

They’d ordered her to seduce her own assassin, to let him have his way with her, to let him do whatever he wanted, knowing that later that night he would kill her.

She knew Spector had already killed the man, or more accurately, that his elderly mother had killed him, but she still had rage for the GRU men who’d set it up.

She’d always known her job was dangerous. She’d accepted that fact a long time ago. And she knew she’d put herself in extra danger by leaking that vial to the Americans. She’d betrayed her country.

There was a price that had to be paid for that.

But the way Igor and Timokhin had played her, getting her to fuck her own killer, that went beyond the bounds of what she was willing to accept. That added insult to injury.

No man would ever have to die that way.

She had the Glock in her coat and ran her fingers over its cold steel.

As she entered the hotel, everything she’d done in her years as a GRU agent came flooding back to her. She’d slept with targets, she’d slit their throats, she’d furthered the interests of power-hungry, evil men.

But worst of all, she’d broken her own code.

She’d let them fuck her.

“Men will do many things to you in your life,” her grandmother had told her. “They’ll do things you’ll think will destroy you. They’ll have their way with you. They’ll hurt you. They’ll violate you. But only you can ever truly let them fuck you, Tatiusha.”

It was true advice.

And in all her years in the GRU, Tatyana had thought she was living by it. She’d thought she was in control. Even when she let them sleep with her, she thought she was holding them back, protecting herself, preserving the part of her soul that mattered.

But she was wrong.

She was wrong, and she’d been fucked.