Bitter Burn

Prologue

Eight Years Ago

It was the opera music he remembered afterward.

It spilled out the open door in the back of the building and filled the alley and the grassy courtyard beyond, and it didn’t stop, despite the gunshots, despite the screams—despite his world ending.

It was somehow indelible to the scene, as fixed to the moment as the cloud-black skies or the glassy puddles dotting the streets, and for a single, eternal second, Mark Trevena thought to himself: the third option.

Forget diplomacy, forget war. Just two dead Americans in an alleyway while his SSO yelled in his ear and Turandot threaded through the wet, thick air of Kraków at night.

One of those dead Americans was his husband, Eliot.

But Mark had not been recruited to the Rangers and later to the CIA because he was slow, because he was afraid, because he couldn’t see the pieces on the board.

He saw everything the instant it happened—Eliot meeting with an informant about a new arms dealer on the scene, the American soldiers on patrol, the informant thinking he’d been set up… the flying bullets.

And now the informant was dead and an American soldier was dead and Eliot was dead, and the other soldiers from the patrol were calling for backup.

It was imperative said backup didn’t arrive to find a CIA operative meeting with a known arms dealer—a dealer who had just killed an active-duty soldier.

It was imperative that no one knew the CIA had been here at all.

It was a fast descent from the roof of the botanical library where he’d been watching through thermal monocular, listening in on Eliot’s conversation.

Mark moved quietly, silently, except for the soft exhale he gave when he jumped the final distance from a covered balcony to the courtyard.

The soldiers wouldn’t hear him, he was sure of that; there was one soldier rendering aid to two wounded companions while still trying to cover the opening to the alley, and he was busy and bloody and occupied with heroism.

And Turandot veiled almost every sound—breathing, footsteps, the choked noise Mark made when he turned Eliot’s face to his own and saw the blue eyes he’d once signed his soul away for gone lifeless.

Amidst the soaring tenor of “Nessun dorma,” Mark dragged the bodies of his husband and the informant into the darkness, deep into the shadows gathered near the library until his SSO could arrange for transportation.

For removal.

And when the soldiers finally got their backup and made it to the end of the alley, they found it empty of everything.

Everything but music and spatters of blood.

A few weeks later, Melody Trevena was standing in a cemetery while her brother walked toward her.

The summer sun glinted off their hair, twin haloes of gold and platinum, and with their strong features and ocean-colored eyes, the resemblance was unmistakable.

The Trevena twins had gained such a reputation a few years back that Langley no longer allowed them to work together; they were too easily recognized that way.

If you were a criminal and you were approached by two preternaturally attractive blonds with flawless suits and sociopathic smiles, then you knew the twins had been sent after you.

It put people on their guard unnecessarily; it made things complicated.

It never resulted in a failed mission, but it had resulted in more bloodstained silk blouses than Melody had the patience for.

So Langley had split the siblings up, and while she missed the silent communication and implicit trust, she also didn’t miss the dry-cleaning bills.

“They didn’t give you the flag,” Melody said now.

Below them and through the trees, the mourners were gradually breaking away from Eliot’s grave.

He’d been popular and well loved, and even though she knew Mark hadn’t begrudged Eliot his many lovers, she also knew it stung to stand in a crowd and be just another face.

To have his marriage with Eliot diluted into a long-term assignment, into a professional partnership, into convenient sex by the people they both knew.

Not that Melody thought Eliot himself had always treated the marriage much differently. Mark had always loved Eliot more than Eliot had loved him, and when Melody told Mark so, he’d only murmured a low I know . And what could she say to that?

“They gave his mother the flag,” replied Mark. “It was the right thing to do. She didn’t know that we—she thought I was his ex-boyfriend. That’s what he’d told her the last time they talked.”

Mark’s eyes weren’t on the grave but on the trees beyond—a middle distance where she knew he was seeing a dark alley overlaid on the trees, pale hands flecked with dirt and broken blades of grass from being dragged to a pickup point.

Melody felt pity for her brother and irritation with Eliot for leaving him like this…

a lonely mourner, written off as nobody special.

For finding one last way to remind Mark that their marriage had been an easily dropped toy.

“You have his watch,” she noted, glancing down at Mark’s wrist. “They let you take it?”

“I didn’t ask.”

She looked up at his face. His eyes were dry; she expected no less. But she caught the brief flex of his hand at the edge of her vision—a tell she knew he’d never been able to control as well as he wanted to.

“They’re saying it happened in Ko?ice,” she commented, looking away.

“They would say that,” he finally said. “Safer that way. Less connection to the dead soldier in Kraków.”

McKenzie Reed. Melody didn’t often mourn the dead—it would get exhausting in her line of work—but she did feel a splinter of regret over the soldier, queer and brave and loyal.

McKenzie’s girlfriend was a chatter analyst working the Russian beat at Langley, and when Melody had heard that McKenzie had died, Melody had gone to the analyst’s desk and left a note under the keyboard with her phone number and a short note telling her to ask Melody for anything she needed: fighting the superiors for bereavement leave, untangling possessions and shared leases, or just someone who understood what she’d lost, anything.

“I’m sorry.” Melody didn’t touch her twin, but she did turn to face him fully. “I am so sorry.”

He nodded, accepting her honesty, accepting also all the things that she would never say to him. It’s going to be okay; time heals all wounds; everything happens for a reason .

She did say, “Everyone knows it wasn’t your fault. Everyone knows Lackland facilitated the meeting and forgot to tell the Army liaison after we gave it the green light. Everyone knows this is what happens when we let the goddamn NSA try to help.”

Mark tore his eyes away from whatever memories he’d been staring at in the trees and looked at her.

“Lackland didn’t forget. He made sure that we’d be there, in a city crawling with patrolling soldiers, in an alley with a known adversary.

I think he wanted that informant dead, and he wanted anyone who knew what the informant knew to die too. ”

Melody’s eyes narrowed the slightest amount as she studied her brother.

Neither of them was prone to conspiracies, but they didn’t have any illusions about the serpentine and needlessly convoluted schemes intelligence agencies dreamed up either.

Was it possible that John Lackland, feckless and nepotistic, had committed treason in some ill-advised bid for power?

Absolutely. Was it possible that he could do it successfully ?

That, Melody doubted.

“We’d know if that were the case,” she responded. “He’s not smart enough, firstly, and secondly, he’s too lazy to put together something like this, and across two agencies no less. Why would he risk his position? Future promotions?”

“I don’t think it was his idea. I think he’s connected to the group the informant was working for.”

Ys was a rumor. Nothing more than a handful of sentences spoken by a man in an alley before he died, and sentences that sounded barely credible at that.

Shadowy arms deals, warmongering for profit, corruption at the highest levels of power—and centuries of it.

“We don’t know that Ys is anything yet, much less that anyone on our side is involved. ”

“But if they are…”

Melody felt the smallest twinge of alarm. She trusted Mark more than she trusted anybody alive, but she also knew him better than she knew herself, and she knew he wouldn’t let this go. If he thought Eliot died because he was set up, betrayed, sacrificed , Mark would never, ever forget it.

She realized that the question she was about to ask was the one she should have asked the moment she saw him walking toward her in a black suit, a stolen silver watch glinting on his wrist.

“Mark, what are you going to do?”

Her twin’s gaze slid up to the cemetery path where one or two people still lingered, talking in low, solemn tones.

Eliot’s picture was on an easel by his gravestone, and white magnolia flowers were everywhere, making a garden of an open grave.

Lowered out of sight was the black casket trimmed in silver, its gleaming top now dulled with handfuls of dirt.

“This is the third option,” he said without looking at her. “This is where it got us. We didn’t get a goodbye. We didn’t make anything better. Nobody even knows the actual city my husband died in. What is it for, Melody? What did those three bodies buy?”

“I’ve never known you to be precious about death,” Melody said. “How many people have you killed? How many people have you watched die?”

He slanted a look at her. “Are you suggesting that I take my husband’s death less personally?”

“I’m suggesting that it shouldn’t change your viewpoint of the mission. Of how intelligence and special operations work.”

There was something like a smile on his face now. It wasn’t a happy smile or a brotherly one. It was precarious and sharp. Curved lips, white incisors.

“Well, it does change it,” he said. “I’m going to find the person responsible for Eliot’s death, and I’m going to kill them. And when I kill them, I’ll make sure their body buys something much more expensive than a death notice with the wrong city on it.”

“And what is that?”

“A fourth option.”

And his smile grew even sharper.