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“Everyone can see us,” he said, meaning it as a warning, but it came out ragged and at loose ends.

She waited a beat, and he realized he should have dragged his hair over the camera by now to keep her expressions away from prying eyes, so that even if she had to watch her words, she could be human for a minute or two.

He was still holding the bottle. He didn't move.

When Suyana caught on, she looked him in the eye
(the hair at the back of his neck stood up, always), and then looked right into the camera. Her throat sounded dry when she asked, “What should I know?”

It shouldn't have infuriated him that this blowup was going according to plan, that her focus on what he could do for her would work to his advantage. It really shouldn't have.

“Wow. Cut right to the fucking chase, don't you?” He crossed to the counter, pretending not to notice that she pulled back from him just enough to keep a clear path to the door.

“Daniel, this place is high risk. You wouldn't be here unless something was really wrong.”

“Yeah. Kipa's bringing a friend to wherever you're headed after this. I'm not sure it's a friend you want to see, but what do I know—she's a
mutual
friend, though it would have been nice if I hadn't had to find that out from Kipa.”

The meaning landed on Suyana. Then she glanced in the mirror and back at him, and it took him a long, heavy heartbeat to realize she was looking for options in case the worst happened and she had to fight him and run. The whole place suddenly smelled like lemon polish; he could hear his shoe squeaking on the floor as he moved closer to her.

“I'm sorry. I'm just—just don't go wherever you're supposed to go. They could have anything planned. We know
they could.”

She cleared her throat, looked at the floor. It sounded like she'd gone a week without water. He imagined her drying up all at once, like everything he'd seen in the last year had been her slowly pulling away on the inside; maybe she was just a husk now that did as it was told.

“Thanks for the warning. I'll be careful.”

He took a step back. “You'll be careful . . . when you go?”

“I can't change plans. Magnus will be suspicious; it's not worth the risk. I'll be all right. They wouldn't try anything that could make me a martyr.”

It felt like all the blood vessels in his jaw were going to burst. She was better with information than this. He knew she was. He dragged his free hand down his face. “Suyana, every time I speak with you, I'm risking everything. My boss is probably on her way over right now—they're all listening to this goddamn feed, all the time, any time they want. They might be outside the door waiting for me. Why the fuck am I risking everything to help you if you won't even keep yourself safe?”

Suyana looking at him always left a scorch mark. Her eyes were so dark, and just at the ends there was some deep-purple shadow that made it look like she hadn't slept in years, and he couldn't even tell if it was on purpose.

When she spoke, she dropped her eyes again, and her voice was the one she used during the contract negotiations
to date Ethan, in a room full of American men who had to be carefully explained to.

“And I appreciate it. But I need to know what's happening—it's more important for me to know than to be safe.”

Not to me, Daniel thought, the words a hot lump at the base of his tongue, but he didn't say it. Li Zhao should be listening by now; he couldn't imagine her face if she ever heard him say something so lost. There was a snap being overly involved with his mark, and there was someone who'd gone pitiable over someone they'd already lost, and he had to be careful. Suyana was a loss he had to accept, but a lot of things were less important than pride.

“Fine,” he said, with the sense of tipping off a ledge, falling closer to something he'd tried not to think about. “Good luck. I'm headed to Paris, probably, since she's going to reassign me the instant she sees this footage, but since you're going to ignore warnings anyway, it doesn't much matter.”

The hiss of the faucet pressed against his ears. When he looked at her again, she wore the expression he remembered from that long day a year ago; the Lachesis he'd seen in the moment she wanted him dead.

“I can't imagine why you're so angry,” she said, the edge of her voice like a blade she was slowly drawing. “I don't want to think that you imagine I'm ungrateful because I don't simper for you like I do for strangers—I can't believe you'd think
that. Or that I don't appreciate your warnings. And even your witness, despite the details of your watch.”

Her gaze flicked to the camera, and Daniel wondered if, three thousand miles away, Dev was recoiling from the contempt on her face.

The gunshot scar shone under the lights as she stepped forward. Daniel fought the urge to look around him like she had; it would be giving in. (To what, he didn't know. This had started out deliberate. Now he was afraid.)

“But more than anything,” she said, and the knife was out in every word, “I wouldn't want to think you resent me unless I'm covered in blood and begging you for help.”

They were nearly touching. Three strands of hair that had come loose from the knot were floating near enough to cling to the static of his shirt. He didn't know when she'd moved closer. He'd never have let her. She was warm; her eyes were two black circles, dark and deep.

She'd killed a man this way once, standing this close. His body remembered it without his permission and went cold, his wrists heavy. If he wanted to brush the three hairs back behind her ear, he couldn't lift his hand.

“You should get going,” he said. “Grace will be waiting at the table for your next photo op.”

He'd leaned in to intimidate her, he thought as the door swung closed behind her. He'd leaned in to force her to move
away, because of course she would have, because she'd bluffed him and he'd called, that was all. There was never any question what she'd do.

He threw the bottle into the sink so hard it broke, and took the exit stairs without even a look around to see if she'd ratted him out. It didn't matter if she'd broken their confidence. It didn't matter. He didn't give a shit where she was. She wasn't his problem any more.

“Dev,” he barked as soon as he was on the street. “Is her new tail in place?”

There was a long pause that would have sounded like dead air except he could hear Dev holding his breath.

“Yeah,” came over the line at last. “I can't tell you who—”

“I don't care who it is. I just want to be gone. I know you've talked to Li Zhao. Who's my new assignment and where are they
now?”

Miserably, Dev said, “Um.”

“Dev, just—who is it?”

“Grace.”

Grace always entered a nightclub looking like whatever she was wearing was a lucky plume of smoke from which she had just emerged via some other, better realm.

Before the assassination attempt, Suyana had mostly been concerned about scoring invitations to enter the nightclub at all. Since the assassination attempt, Suyana knew she entered clubs like she was daring them to throw her out. She couldn't help it.

She'd worried at first that it looked too aggressive, that it looked like she was hiding something and she was sure to be found out, but it turned out that in pictures it just looked like she was a stocky newcomer, suitably aware of how close
she was standing to Grace or Martine—a lucky C-lister raised up through the goodwill of others until she could stand next to her betters.

As she and Grace posed on their way into Empire, Suyana cheated her scar forward.

The Empire (“That's terribly pointed,” Grace said on opening night, at the same time Martine said, “They cannot fucking be serious,” and all along the gauntlet of photographers on the red carpet, the three of them were careful to pose so that no one got them and the sign in the same shot) was a nightclub of the old kind. Inside, it was a comforting maze of small tables and dim light and breaks in conversation as the bandstand introduced a singer for a handful of low-key torch numbers at a time. It was the sort of nightclub you could go to right after an explosion on your home soil, and magazine readers would believe you'd wanted to go there to think.

Grace headed for the bar. Suyana headed for the tables on the low, deep mezzanine, where she could sit facing the door. One chair she left open opposite her for anyone who wanted to take their chances.

(“You won't want to be involved in what happens,” Suyana had explained in the car, and Grace had looked at her, the thin silver necklace at her neck casting a constellation against her dark skin, and said, “A
bit late for that, don't you think?”)

It was relatively early in the evening, as IA parties went, and Suyana could rake through the crowd for Kipa and Columbina. Not that she could prepare for much—if Kipa had fallen in this tightly with Chordata, there was little Suyana could do without disaster—but there was no allure in being taken by surprise.

Suyana wished she'd ignored Zenaida's warnings and been closer with Kipa. They talked at a brunch here or a charity bowling tournament there, but it was dangerous for anyone to connect them, so Suyana had never connected. And Kipa had done her one better; while Suyana had been hurling herself into the limelight, no one knew anything more about Kipa than they had a year ago. That took a kind of quiet skill you had to be born with. Suyana admired it and feared it in equal measure; there was something thrilling about someone she couldn't read.

(Grace and Martine had seen the connection between them a year ago, but neither of them had ever mentioned it since—not even Martine, not even as a joke. Suyana pretended along with them; she was happy to pretend.)

If Kipa sat with her and Columbina kept her distance, then Kipa was in control of the situation, and was still her friend. Suyana could manage that; she could smooth things over and tell Kipa whatever Chordata needed to hear in order to take her name off the list of liabilities.

If it was Columbina—and Suyana could see it happening, Columbina's dark hair swinging as she took a seat, Kipa standing behind her, nearly swallowed up by the gloom—then Kipa was just an accessory to someone else's wishes, and all Suyana could do was make sure Kipa realized the trouble she was in before the worst started. Before she called Suyana by the name of something that had no spine. Whoever had chosen it had been deliberate; Chordata had so many heads there was no knowing. So long as it wasn't Zenaida; Suyana let herself imagine that Zenaida wouldn't let her be erased without a fight.

So much would go wrong if they really turned on her. But her anger at Daniel had burned away the last of her fear, and the inconvenient flickers of self-preservation were gone. Some habits were hard to shake, and the first thing she'd ever done when she looked at an enemy was to imagine them vanishing.

She saw Columbina first—clumsy, moving into a puddle of light—and before she'd decided whether it was more strategic to pretend not to see, Suyana was staring. Then it was too late, and she decided she might as well level a look at them as they crossed the room through the pockets of the crowd, Columbina occasionally glancing at Suyana and then away.

But the first person who actually approached her
was Grace, who delicately dropped two glasses on the table and availed herself of a third chair she seemed to conjure at the edge of her fingers.

“Grace.” Suyana didn't look over, nearly sorry for how rude it looked. “I thought we had a plan. That wasn't even close to an hour.”

From the corner of Suyana's eye, Grace stabbed the lime wedge in the bottom of her glass with her straw and pulled it out, wringing it to death between two fingers. “It's not that I don't believe you when you say you're in trouble—last time you told me that, Colin had to rescue me from IA Peacekeeper custody in my own bolt-hole flat, so trust me, I damn well believe you.”

Grace had never mentioned that before. She sounded like she hadn't wanted to mention it now, like nerves had wormed it out of her. Suyana's stomach turned over absently, like she was sorry for someone she'd never heard of.

“But,” Grace went on, her pleasant smoothness back in place, “I'm increasingly worried about being kept in the dark, and I'm not sure I'd be much safer at the bar than I would at this table.”

“It's worth your life.”

Grace looked at her, on the verge of saying something, and Suyana waited for her good sense to win out. But she only settled her back against the wall.
“Being caught in your wake has a way of altering one's evening,” she said, and flashed one of the grins Suyana used to think was masterful practice and turned out to be just the way Grace smiled. If it weren't for the tightness of her hands in her lap, you'd never know she was nervous.

Grace had always had more faith in Suyana's reasons than Suyana's reasons deserved.

Kipa and her guest had paused when they saw Suyana wasn't alone, and the back of her neck started to itch. She looked over at Grace.

Who was staring at Columbina.

She'd always been a bit slow about where people's hearts lay, so it took Suyana a full ten seconds to guess why Grace's lips had parted slightly like she was about to call a name, or was having trouble breathing.

“How long ago?” Suyana asked, trying to keep an eye on Grace and still watch Kipa and Columbina approaching.

“Two years. It was in Paris.”

She wondered why Columbina had gone to Paris when Chordata had a presence there and probably some operatives who would have been ready to seduce an asset, but it was better not to guess how far Chordata would go for that kind of thing. It was enough to know they'd found someone who fit Grace's tastes (beautiful, cold, hurts), the way they'd found Zenaida to take Suyana aside and mother
her in drops.