Jimmy was sitting in the panic room with the actor and the sleeping baby, listening to Robin’s theories as to why Sam and Alyssa had named the kid Ash instead of after Sam’s Uncle Walt—a member of the illustrious Tuskeegee Airmen and a WWII hero—who’d been the father figure and positive role model in Sam’s life.

Apparently there was some spooky little boy named Walt on the TV show Lost, and neither Sam nor Alyssa wanted people thinking they’d named their kid after him.

So they’d gone for their second choice, which was a nod not to the punk who’d married Demi Moore, but rather to the Bruce Campbell character in the classic Evil Dead movies.

At least that was Robin’s current theory.

“How are you doing?” Robin interrupted himself to ask.

“The helicopter should’ve gotten them there by now,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I know, I’m watching the clock, too.” Robin nodded. “But they’re not going to walk in and say, Excuse me, Elite Task Force, I must go call my significant other.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Jimmy said tersely. “It’s just hard.” Especially knowing that the bastards—whoever they were—had Dave.

“I wish I could tell you that you get used to it.” Robin sighed. “But you don’t.”

Their phones both rang, almost simultaneously. And yes, it was Tess calling him. Jimmy opened his phone.

“Look, I’ve been thinking,” he said, going point-blank as Robin, who was more mobile, took his call from Jules out in the hall. “We’ve gotta get Dave back and—”

“We’re going to.” Tess’s voice was filled with conviction. “You’re going to have to do your job there, while we do ours here.”

He closed his eyes, because he didn’t want to be a helicopter flight away from her. And it was driving him crazy to think about where Dave surely was, right now. “Yeah, I’m working hard.”

“Well, it’s good I came back here.” She ignored his sarcasm. “The security cameras’ signals have been pirated.”

Pirated meant the signal was going out to another receiver. And yes, dealing with that kind of problem was right up Tess’s extremely talented alley.

“One of the SEALs—Lopez—noticed a glitch in the system, and when we checked it out, sure enough,” she continued, with that note of thrill in her voice that happened when she was in techno-nerd mode. It was another reason to curse the fact that he wasn’t there, because he loved watching her when her eyes lit up and she glowed with the excitement of a challenge. “It’s creepy, I have no idea how long they’ve been watching us, because it wasn’t something that would’ve been noticed on a standard system check. But there’s been some kind of short, which makes the digital signal from the camera freeze—which is what brought it to Lopez’s attention. After I get off this call, I’m going to pirate the pirate and give ourselves the ability to send our watching friends only those images we want them to see. It’s tricky: I can’t just create a simple loop, because the sun’s going to come up. I have to get creative.”

“Damn that pesky dawn,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah.” She laughed. Paused. “You sound almost okay.”

“I’m not,” he admitted. “I know what they’re doing to Dave, and it’s making me—”

“We’re one step closer to finding him,” Tess said. “Remember Russ Stafford? On the flight over, I figured out why that name sounded so familiar.”

Jimmy sat up. “You think Russ is our man?”

“I do,” Tess said. “His name sounded familiar because it was. It came up during an assignment in 2003.”

Which was back when she’d worked, like him, for the Agency. Only she’d worked a desk down in Support.

“But there’s something I need to ask you first,” she said. “Have you ever skimmed funds from money that you seized while working an Agency op?”

“Define skimmed,” Jimmy said. “Because when you’re out in the field, and you need to make a quick escape, you take what you need to survive.” Which sometimes included the contents of someone else’s wallet. “A trip to the ATM isn’t always prudent, so—”

“No,” she said. “I’m talking about significant amounts of money. Like, enough to slow you down while you figure out a way to transfer it into some offshore account.”

“Slow me down?” he said. “Not a chance. Most of my assignments were in places where if I was found—by anyone—I’d be killed. Arranging to transfer money takes time and contacts who don’t want to kill you. Although if I saw a situation where large sums of money were going to fall into, say, al Qaeda’s hands? I’d intervene. Maybe push it in another direction. An anonymous donation to the local orphanage.”

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe that’s what happened, which is too bad because it means I’m probably wrong about Stafford.”

“How much money went missing?” he asked, knowing that this was where this conversation was going.

“Fifteen million dollars,” Tess told him.

“Shit,” he exhaled on a laugh. “No. That would require a truck to move. That’s not a slip-an-envelope-through-an-orphanage-mail-slot deal. Can you give me details?”

“Abida Talpur,” she said. “September 1999. His deletion was on your list.” She managed to say it without the pause that most people added before the word deletion, but then she added, “For his terrorist activities—”

“I know what he did,” Jimmy interrupted her. Abida Talpur was responsible, in 1998, for taking out an Air Kazbekistan jet carrying the K-stani minister of defense—and two hundred and twenty other men, women, and children, all of whom had died. Talpur had planned it, paid for it, and celebrated it. And so, in 1999, Jimmy was assigned to erase him from the surface of the earth. Which he’d done, gladly and, as it turned out, rather easily.

He’d gone in, done the job, and gotten out.

“I didn’t get close to Talpur,” he told Tess now. “I took a sniper shot from a mountainside. I didn’t even go into the city. I hiked out, across the border.”

“Okay,” she said. “Good. Then Russ Stafford’s back on our list. Because when Talpur died, he had assets of close to forty million dollars. I don’t know if you paid attention to the political and financial ramifications of Talpur’s death—”

“I did,” Jimmy said. “But it’s been a while.”

“Talpur didn’t have a son, didn’t have any surviving male relatives,” Tess told him, “except for this one brother who’d been exiled. So Hersek Khosa, the friendly warlord next door, moved in and absorbed Talpur’s property and holdings. His empire, so to speak. But in the spring of 2003, Talpur’s brother manages to get back into the country, and he cries foul—claiming that Abida was killed by a squadron of U.S. soldiers, who were in league with Khosa.”

“Not a soldier in sight,” Jimmy confirmed.

“By 2003, we’d pulled our embassy and all troops out of the region, and the borders were locked down, pretty tightly. We were looking for a reason to get operatives in, so we sent an ‘official’ team to investigate. I was on support for that assignment. And here’s where it gets really interesting.

“I was digging through intel,” Tess continued, “just doing my job, collecting all the information I could find for the agents in the field, and I come upon a discrepancy in Talpur’s bank records. We’d been watching his assets pretty closely before his removal, because of his terrorist ties, and we had what seemed to be a very accurate accounting of his funds—which, like I said, totaled about forty million, give or take a few hundred thousand.

“But we’re also watching the assets of Hersek Khosa, because we’re keeping track of everyone in the region who has money, and I notice, huh. Khosa absorbed Talpur’s assets, but the numbers are off by fifteen million dollars. It’s just gone. And I check and I recheck and I pull all sorts of files and it’s just not there. And I’m getting worried, because a terrorist can do a lot of damage with that much money. So I write up a complete report, including all kinds of information like the name of Khosa’s Agency handler—and okay, the fact that Khosa even had an Agency handler alone is something of a surprise—”

“Not to me,” Jimmy said.

“Well, it was—and it still is—to little ol’ naive me,” Tess said. “And yes, Khosa’s handler was Matt Hallfield—the former head of Agency support. Although Russell Stafford’s name also came up because he’d had plenty of in-person dealings with Khosa, too. You said he was Hallfield’s assistant?”

“That’s right. Although why he would have gone to Kazbekistan is beyond me. Hallfield, yeah, he was a field agent himself in his day, but Stafford? That’s flat-out weird.”

Tess agreed. “Stafford’s wasn’t a name I recognized, so I flagged it. And I gave the entire report to—wait for it—Doug Brendon, who was my immediate supervisor, and he goes Good eye, Bailey, but it’s being handled.”

Yeah, that sounded like Dougie Brendon, the current head of the Agency and prick extraordinaire.

“A week later,” Tess continued, “the missing fifteen million shows up on the reports about Talpur’s assets, with an asterisk. Someone’s added a note, saying that the money is missing and the subject of an ongoing investigation. As far as Khosa’s files? They were gone. They didn’t just lock me out—”

“Which wouldn’t have worked.” There was no such thing as hack-proof as far as Tess was concerned.

“They were completely erased,” she told him. “ Good-bye. I tried to figure out where they’d moved them, but I never did find them.” She paused. “Except for the copy I had made, to include with my report.”

“Please tell me you still have that.”

“I do,” she said. “It’s on a flashdrive, with all of the other reports I wrote when I worked for the Agency. It’s... somewhere safe. Deck actually recommended I do that—keep a record of everything—back when I first left the Agency.” She paused. “And, in fact, I’m pretty sure now that that’s what they were looking for when our apartment was ransacked in July.”

Their apartment had been completely trashed, their sofa slashed, every dish they’d owned broken. The place had been searched, but it was a search with an attitude—and a threatening message.

“But okay,” Tess continued, “back in 2003, I see that asterisk on the report, and I go back to talk to Brendon, who tells me, off the record, that the ghost group operative who took out Abida Talpur was being questioned, but that these things happened—that operatives of this sort often took their own bonuses. It was a part of doing business with the men and women who had those kinds of special skills. Wink. Wink.”

“No one ever asked me anything about any missing money,” Jimmy said.

“Well, all right then,” Tess said. “There’s where we start. With Russell Stafford and Doug Brendon.”

“So this is about money,” Jimmy said. “Jesus Christ, fifteen million isn’t even that much by today’s standards.”

“It’s not just about money,” Tess said. “It’s about accountability and, well, treason. On the chopper flight out here, I dug to see if there was any additional information—recent info—on either Talpur or Khosa in the Agency files, and turns out Hersek Khosa not only had al Qaeda ties, but his name came up in connection to perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. He was an al Qaeda leader, and he went on to help fund the Bali bombing as well as set up terrorist training camps in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Algeria, and Kazbekistan. The real kicker is that there were reports—that had been conveniently buried or best case negligently overlooked—that confirmed this information as far back as 1997.”

Fuck. “So you think Russell Stafford brokered the murder of Abida Talpur in exchange for fifteen million dollars from Hersek Khosa,” Jimmy said, “knowing he was putting money and power into the hands of an al Qaeda leader?”

“I think,” Tess said, “that in 1999 al Qaeda didn’t mean the same thing it does now. It was just another random terrorist group that posed a threat to people living in already dangerous places. So, yeah. For fifteen million dollars, Stafford brokered that deal, got the Agency—and you—to do the dirty work, buried the reports on Hersek Khosa, and went on his merry way. According to his personnel file, he was in line to take over Matt Hallfield’s job. Instead, he vanished. I think 9/11 happened, and everyone started looking hard at anyone with money in the region. And Hallfield—out of the blue—commits suicide on October 4, 2001. Yeah, he’s got cancer, but everyone’s shocked—”

“Oh, tell me you think that Russ Stafford killed him.”

“I do think Russ Stafford killed him,” Tess said. “I think Hallfield correctly made the connection between Khosa and al Qaeda, and was going to create trouble for both Stafford and the entire Agency. And although I think Doug Brendon may not have been involved, I think he knows enough to go to jail.” He could hear her smile. “We got ’em, Jimmy.”

“You do know that I think it’s beyond hot,” Jimmy told her, “that you’re so freaking smart...?”

Tess laughed. “We got ’em.”

Yeah, right. “So how do we use this information to make ’em give us back Dave?” Jimmy asked.

“That,” Tess said, “is where it gets even more tricky....”

Sophia was sitting in the Troubleshooters women’s locker room, wet hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing Tracy’s jeans and a T-shirt, with her own sneakers—left in her locker last week—on her feet.

At her request, Lindsey and Tracy had left her alone.

She’d needed to throw up again, and she didn’t want her friends to see or hear her. She didn’t want them to know that she was pregnant. She couldn’t risk one of the team leaders—Alyssa or Jules or Decker—deciding that she was too fragile to help rescue Dave. And she was going to help rescue Dave.

She’d already started working out a plan. Apparently, the men who’d taken Dave had access to all of the information on Tracy’s computer. So Sophia would send an e-mail from Tracy’s computer—it didn’t matter to whom. She could send it to herself, and they’d receive it.

She would tell them that she was willing to trade whatever information they wanted in return for Dave. Except they wouldn’t want information, they’d want Nash, and seeing as how that would piss off Tess...

Okay. So, Sophia would tell them that she was willing to trade herself for Dave. She would be their hostage in return for them dropping Dave at the nearest emergency room. His knife wound needed immediate treatment—it would buy the TS Inc. team at least a little time.

And really, as far as being their hostage went, what could they do to her that hadn’t already been done before?

Except, dear God, this time she was pregnant. It wasn’t just her own life she’d be risking.

A soft knock on the door made her look over to see Lindsey peeking in at her. “You dressed?”

“Yeah,” Sophia said. “I’m just bracing myself to come out there.”

“Deck wants to know if it’s okay if he comes in,” Lindsey asked, and Sophia stood up, her heart instantly lodged in her throat.

“There’s been no news about Dave,” Deck said, pushing the door open so that she could see him. And she could, indeed, see his words confirmed by the calm certainty on his face, in his eyes.

“Sorry,” Lindsey said. “Crap. Of course you’d think... God, I’m sorry.”

“May I come in?” Deck asked. “I thought this would be a good place to talk privately.”

“I was so glad to hear about Jimmy,” Sophia told him. “So glad.”

He nodded, and even smiled—and she looked at him harder. What was different? Something was. It wasn’t his clothes. He had on faded blue jeans with those giant boots that she’d sometimes seen him wear during PT. Dave had told her it was an old SEAL trick. Anyone could run five miles in sneakers, but doing it in boots, in soft sand? That was a workout.

His T-shirt was standard, too. A faded shade of grayish green, with a faded blue trim around the crewneck collar and sleeves. He must’ve bought a dozen of them, on sale, in different colors. He usually wore a shirt over it, to hide his shoulder holster, but his holster was currently nowhere in sight.

Okay, so that was unusual, but... The difference was more in the way he was standing, in the energy that radiated from him. He was somehow less tense, less tightly wound.

Which didn’t mean he wasn’t still exuding buckets of grim. He was. His concern for Dave was clear. And yet there was a peacefulness to him that she’d never seen before.

“It was hard,” he told her, “keeping the truth about Jim from everyone like that. I’m sorry, because I know it must’ve been—”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Sophia reassured him. “We were part of your cover. Dave and I both understood that. And I am incredibly glad that you didn’t lose him, Deck. That we didn’t lose him. I’m glad for Tess, too.”

Decker nodded. “May I...?” He was still standing in the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course, come in.” She forced a smile. “As long as no one out there needs to, you know, pee.”

“They’ve been cleared to use the men’s.” Decker nodded his thanks to Lindsey as he let the door close behind him. He came over to the cluster of easy chairs in the corner, where she was standing. “This is nice. We don’t have anything remotely like this in the other locker room.”

“My guess is that you’re probably not doing a lot of breast-feeding in there,” Sophia said. After Ashton was born, Alyssa had started bringing the baby with her into the office. But she found it difficult to switch instantly from company XO to mommy, which was frustrating for both mother and child. And everyone else in the office, too, considering Ash’s healthy lungs.

Tracy had been the one to come up with the solution—to create a quiet place here in the women’s locker room that would allow Alyssa to leave the chaos of her office and relax during Ash’s feedings. Tracy had also repainted the walls a soothing shade of blue—coming in on a Saturday and Sunday to do the work herself. She’d bought lamps and new dressings for the window, and a plush throw rug for the tile floor.

The entire transformation had taken place over the course of one single weekend, and Alyssa had hugged Tracy when she’d seen it. Which was saying something, because the XO wasn’t exactly the president of the Tracy Shapiro Fan Club.

Deck now hovered near the second easy chair, unwilling or more likely unable to sit before Sophia did. The man was nothing if not terminally polite.

“Please.” Sophia sat. “You’ve really never been in here?” she asked. “Even after hours, when no one’s around?”

“Never.” It was such a Decker thing to say, a Decker thing to do. And, in another Decker move, he cut to the chase. “Dave needs to get to a hospital. The samples from the knife that Liam Smith used to stab him started growing all kinds of bacteria in the lab. Do you have a sense of when his infection started?”

She shook her head and forced herself to breathe past the fear that filled her throat. “He seemed fine, right up until he face-planted. But he changed the bandages himself after we got to the hotel.”

“Okay,” he said. He looked out of place sitting there, on the very edge of that chair, elbows on his knees as he leaned slightly forward, eyes narrowed as he.... Ah, yes. He’d caught sight of the bruise that was forming on her cheekbone and around her left eye.

She angled her head so that he had better light with which to see it.

“You all right?” he asked, searching her eyes as if to make sure she wasn’t going to lie about it.

“It hurts.”

“It must’ve been a surprise—having him hit you like that.”

“It was,” she said. “But he thought they were going to kill me and he wanted—”

“He ever hit you before?” Decker interrupted.

Sophia laughed. “Please,” she said. “Dave?”

Decker nodded, but then said, “You know how when you go to the emergency room, and the triage nurse is required to ask—”

“He’s never hit me before,” she said. “These are not the questions you need to be asking. I’m fine.” She stressed her words. “Dave, however, is not.” She leaned forward, too. “Who’s got him, where have they got him, and how are we going to get him back so we can get him to the hospital?”

Her proximity made Decker sit back in his seat—he never did like to let anyone get too close. No, make that her. He didn’t like to let her get too close.

“We’re working on it,” he said.

“Great,” she said. “What have you got, because I want to work on it, too.”

He was silent, then, just looking at her.

Dave would have been talking a mile a minute, using diagrams and other visual aids to make sure she understood every single thing that he knew about the situation.

“Why did Dave rewrite his will before leaving your hotel room?” Deck finally asked—and she sat back in her seat, too.

Dave rewrote his will? This was the first she’d heard about it.

“See, I can’t figure out why he would’ve done that, unless he somehow knew this attack was coming. Is it possible that he was in contact with the kidnappers?” Decker asked her. “Was he being, I don’t know, blackmailed—because they tried that with Nash, and I know this Anise Turiano thing was a big problem for Dave a few years back. If they somehow threatened to resurrect it—”

“They did,” Sophia said. “They resurrected it. You know that they killed a CIA agent to make it look as if Dave...” Oh, God. She exhaled hard. “Deck, I’ve been with Dave pretty much constantly over the past few days—”

“Pretty much isn’t constantly,” he pointed out.

“It’s close enough, considering that the times I wasn’t with him he was under guard, or with an FBI agent, or with Tom and Chief Karmody.”

“You slept though, right?” he said. “So it’s possible—”

“It’s possible,” Sophia said sharply, “that Lindsey’s going to come running in here to announce that she’s won a Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s not at all likely.”

“And you have no idea why Dave would, essentially, get his life in order? Cross all his t’s, dot all his i’s,” Decker asked quietly as he dug in his pocket for something—a folded-up envelope. “Because he didn’t only write a will. He also wrote this. Karmody had it, but it was addressed to me.”

He took what looked like a letter from the envelope and held it out for her. So she took it and yes. This was Dave’s familiar handwriting. She unfolded it and...

Lawrence, Dave had written.!!!I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few days. I’m determined to come through this, but I fear determination alone won’t win the day. I’m uncertain as to the identity of my enemies. I know only one thing for sure—I will not put Sophia into any additional danger.!!!She wanted me to ask for your help—you are, after all, the one and only Decker—so I am doing that now.

Please don’t let her come after me. If I don’t come back within a few days, it’s because I’m dead. But the threat will be gone— provided the instructions in my will are followed and the trail of my assets doesn’t lead back to Sophia. Make sure that doesn’t happen.!!!I believe firmly in fate, and if I don’t return, it’s because it was meant to be. I can only hope that my death brings you and Sophia together.

“Oh, my God,” Sophia said, looking up at Decker.

“It gets worse,” he said.

I think you’ve long been holding the assumption that loving Sophia would be painful or difficult. I assure you, it is anything but. She’s worked hard to put the past behind her, although there is one topic she and I have never discussed.

The death of her husband.

I went to Kazabek recently to get the answers to questions that Sophia seemed unwilling or unable to reveal. And I discovered the awful truth by talking to a number of women who worked in Padsha Bashir’s palace while Sophia was held prisoner there.

Bashir used his sword to behead Dimitri as Sophia stood by, powerless. The blade was sharp enough, and he was strong enough to do the deed in a single blow. But the horror didn’t end there. As we well know, Bashir “married” Sophia, and took possession of her assets—but this apparently happened while her husband’s body twitched, while she was covered with the still-warm spray of his blood. Bashir claimed possession of Sophia as his bride shortly after—in any other culture this would have been called rape—with Dimitri’s head on a table beside the bed.

Yes, you read that right.

I was told that it remained there, locked with her in her room, until it started drawing too many flies.

I’m telling you this because I feel confident that Sophia herself will never speak of it. But I wanted you to know.

It was meant to break her, to change her, to weaken her, to control her. To make her passive and hopeless, unwilling to resist or run.

And yet, when the opportunity arose, Sophia used Bashir’s very same sword to run him through. She tried to kill him, and then she escaped.

Sophia is not a victim, she’s a survivor. She’s not fragile or weak, she’s unbelievably strong. She’s not filled with despair or depression over all that she lost—and she lost a man whom she loved with all of her heart. She grieved that loss, and has since acknowledged—with gladness—that she’s still alive.

And hers is not a life that she’s willing to live grudgingly, filled with regret and weighed down by remorse. With Sophia, each day is a glorious celebration, a joyous tribute to life. With Sophia, each day is a blessing and a gift from God.

Which brings me back to where you found her in Kazabek, all those years ago.

She’s told me very little about what went on between the two of you after she fled Bashir’s palace. I can only imagine how frightened—practically feral—she must have been when you first met. What I know about the event in question, I learned from you, a day or so after it transpired. She’s long forgiven you—you need to look her in the eye and let her accept your apology. It’s long past time for that.

And then—if I’m truly gone—you’ll be able to take her hand and see the Sophia that I see, the Sophia that I love. And I know that you will be unable to do anything but love her as completely as I do.

Of course, if I’m still here and you do that, I’ll challenge you to a duel, but I suspect if you’re reading this, you don’t need to worry about that.

Please, please make her happy. It would take such little effort.Just close your eyes, dear friend, and let go of the past.

He’d signed it Dave, but then added a P.S.

If, someday, someone asks you if I killed Anise Turiano? You can say with certainty that you heard it directly from me that I did not. I was, if anything, guilty of loving too easily and too foolishly. But not so with Sophia. I loved Sophia with all my heart—even when it wasn’t easy to do so. But it was well worth it. You can tell whoever asks that I died having lived my dream.

Sophia was crying when she put Dave’s letter in her lap. It was so unfair—she’d long prided herself on not being the kind of person who burst into tears every fifteen minutes. And it wasn’t just her hormones, crazy as they were, that had done it—it was the way Dave’s voice came through in every word he’d written.

“It sounds, from reading that,” Decker said quietly, “like he was planning to leave.”

“No,” Sophia said. “I mean, yes, it sounds that way, but... No.”

He shifted in his seat. “Sophia, I don’t like asking this, but I have to. Before we risk more lives, I have to know if there’s a chance that Dave went with them intentionally—the men in the elevator.”

“No,” she said again. “Absolutely not.”

“Intentionally doesn’t mean willingly,” he told her. “If he was working with them, he was surely pressured—”

“No,” she said adamantly. “He must’ve written this before Jimmy called. The reference to Anise Turiano...? When he wrote this, he didn’t realize that the attack in the parking lot was really all about Jimmy. But it was. After he spoke to Jimmy, he was certain that it was.” She could see that Decker wasn’t convinced. “Dave asked me to marry him in the elevator, moments before the attack. He wouldn’t have done that unless he thought he had his life back.”

Decker nodded. “I do believe that he loves you. Very much.”

“Yes, he does,” Sophia agreed, the lump back in her throat. “Please, let’s focus on getting him back instead of—”

“He’s never written a will while on assignment before—”

“God, you can be so stubborn—”

“Careful,” Deck corrected her. “I’m being careful—”

“Too careful,” she said hotly. “You always were—”

“No, not always,” he countered.

And there it was—right there, as if it were sitting between them—everything that they hadn’t said to each other for the past four years, since she’d tried to kill him in another ladies’ room, very different from this one, on the other side of the world.

They’d come full circle, and Sophia had to wonder—because he was Decker, and he was so damned careful—if he hadn’t intentionally chosen this place to have this conversation here and now.

But he swore under his breath, as if he’d realized, too, exactly what she’d been thinking. “Jesus, maybe it’s true what they say about always returning to the scene of the crime.”

“There was no crime,” Sophia said emphatically. “I didn’t kill you, and you didn’t kill me. And I’m sorry, but the sex was completely forgettable.”

“Not for me,” he said tightly.

“Yeah, well, for me? You were one of scores of men that I... I... serviced in those months right after Dimitri died. And I considered myself lucky if all they wanted was a blow job before they sent me back to my cell.”

He was silent.

“I know that still bothers you,” Sophia said quietly.

“Bothers?” he asked. “Yeah, it still bothers me.”

“I did what I did to stay alive,” she told him. “I used to beat myself up for that, but I don’t anymore.”

“Well, I do,” he admitted, his voice rough. “I still beat myself up because I didn’t help you. Because I took advantage—”

“So what?” she said. “Get over it already! You were human and you made a mistake, although you know, if I’d been in your shoes, I would have killed me. Right there. A bullet to the brain. Good-bye. But you didn’t do that. You also didn’t take me to the police, you didn’t bring me to Bashir’s palace—and either one of those things would have been a death sentence for me. My head, Deck, on some other woman’s bedside table, as a warning to her. Maybe some fourteen-year-old he’d married, who hadn’t yet realized how hopeless her life truly was.”

“Jesus,” Decker said.

Sophia leaned forward. “So what if you didn’t help me right at that moment. And if you don’t think that helping me later—searching for me, protecting me, getting me out of there, lending me money, getting me this job that I love with these people I love—all the things you’ve done for me, Decker... If you don’t think that makes up for one small, humanmistake, then help me now. Look into my eyes and believe me when I tell you that Dave had his reasons for writing that will, and that it’s personal. I know what it is, and he didn’t want me to tell anyone. Not even you—or he would have told you in here.” She waved the letter. “Kind of like you not telling us about Jimmy.”

He still didn’t say anything. He just looked at her—that quiet, complicated, dreadfully damaged man whom she’d once thought she wanted. What a mess that would have been. She hadn’t known it at the time, but he’d needed to heal as much as she had. A fact she was now well aware of.

“Help me now,” she whispered. “I want Dave back. I love him, Deck. I really do.”

Decker sat in the Troubleshooters women’s locker room, looking at Sophia, and realizing that the words Dave had written were true.

She wasn’t a victim—not even that of his own poor judgment. A human mistake, she’d called it. He’d made it, he was human—no doubt about that—and, yeah, despite that mistake, she’d survived.

The sex they’d had all those years ago was completely forgettable, she’d said—but it wasn’t, not to him. But its unforgettable stature wasn’t because it was Sophia’s mouth, Sophia’s hands, but rather because it had been so dangerous on so many levels. And because it seemed to confirm his fear that there was something wrong with him—for loving that mix of danger and sex so very much.

But Tracy was right—the only thing wrong with him was that he was a freaking prude. The sex he’d shared with Tracy just a short time ago had been off the charts. Best sex ever. Ever. And Tracy had been completely willing and eager. The danger she’d helped create was of a different kind.

There wasn’t just hope for him, there was a real chance at serenity hanging out there on the horizon of his not-so-distant future. Serenity, embellished with moments of joy and true happiness.

A few days ago, he never would have believed that possible.

“Please, let’s find Dave,” Sophia whispered, and as he gazed into her eyes, as he looked at her tired, anxious, and yet still stunningly beautiful face, he said—at the exact same moment that she did—“I trust you.”

He had to smile. “That’s good,” he said.

But she had more to say. “I’m pregnant,” she told him. “That’s what Dave didn’t want anyone to find out, because he believed it would put me in danger. But I do trust you completely, Deck, so there’s really no reason why you can’t know.”

She was... “Wow,” he said. “Is this... good news—you know, something that you... wanted...?”

Sophia laughed. “You don’t know me very well, do you?”

Deck shook his head. “I guess I, uh, really don’t.”

“It’s unplanned,” she said, “but wanted. Very much wanted.”

“That’s great,” he said quietly, and yeah, he felt a twinge of something that wasn’t quite envy. It was awareness. Acknowledgment of something that might’ve been possible if they’d met in a different lifetime, or on a different planet.

But they hadn’t. And it was clear to him that whatever she had, at one time, felt for him, it was nothing compared to what she now felt for Dave.

“Please don’t tell anyone else,” she warned him. “And don’t even think about wrapping me in gauze and telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m healthy and strong. And I’m going to help you get Dave back. So tell me what you know. How are we going to find him?”