“Well.” He looked ruefully out of the window. “After our last meeting it was like you’d thrown a hornet’s nest through his window. Everybody got to walk around downtown Cambridge in the snow, looking for a missing old lady in a powered wheelchair, you know? I ended up spending a week spying on a private security firm we’d hired. Didn’t find much except a few padded expenses claims. Then Angbard quietly started shuffling people around—again, nothing turned up except a couple of guards on the take. So then he put me back on regular courier duty in the post room, with a guard assignment or two on the side, moved himself to a high-rise in New York—real estate above the thirtieth floor is going cheap these days—left Matthias running Fort Lofstrom and Angus in Karlshaven, and declared that the search for your foster-mother couldn’t go on any longer. Uh, he figured we weren’t going to find anything new after that much time. Well.” He shrugged. “I can’t tell you any specifics about my current assignments, but his lordship told me that if you got in touch, I was to—” He paused.

“I think I can guess,” she said dryly.

“No, I promise! Angbard doesn’t know about us,” he said firmly. “He thinks we’re just friends.”

The appetizers arrived. Miriam took a sip of her chowder. The news about the hunt for Iris depressed her, but came as no real surprise. “Angbard. Does not know. That we, uh, you know.” Somehow the thought made her feel free and sinful, harboring personal secrets—as well as strategic information about the third universe—that the all-powerful intelligence head didn’t. She paused for a moment and studied the top of his head, trying to memorize every hair.

“I never told him,” Roland said, putting down his soup spoon. “Did you think I would?”

“You can keep secrets when it suits you,” Miriam noted.

He looked up. “I am an obedient servant to your best interests,” he said quietly. “If Angbard finds out he’ll kill us. If you want me to apologize for not giving him grounds to kill us, I apologize.”

She met his eyes. “Apology noted.” Then she went back to her soup. It was deliciously fresh and lightly seasoned, and Miriam luxuriated in it. She stretched out her legs, and nearly spilled soup everywhere as she found his ankle rubbing against hers. Or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter. Nearly two months of lonely nights was coming to the boil. “What would you do for me?” she whispered to him over the remains of the appetizer.

“Anything.” He met her eyes. “Almost anything.”

“Well, I’d like that. Tonight. On one condition.” The waiter removed their bowls, discreetly avoiding the line of sight between them—obviously couples behaving this way were a well-understood phenomenon in his line of work.

“What?”