Chapter 13 Beacon
BEACON
Outside, the sun was up, and I was still in Bishop’s bed. I hadn’t even thought about waking myself up to leave before dawn.
Bishop. Not Blackjack. At some point last night, the code name had stopped fitting.
His hand was where it had been most of the night, flat over the bruise on my left side that had been fading for a week.
A loon called somewhere on the lake, and I turned to face him.
“Morning,” he said when our eyes met.
“Morning.”
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving.”
We both got up, found our clothes from the night before, and dressed.
I picked up the brace that lay with everything else he’d removed from my body last night before the hours he spent ravishing me.
I carried it into the other room and left it on the side table.
My knee held without it. It was sore, but it held.
Bishop had bacon cooking before I made it to the kitchen, where he stood. I stood behind him, watching and trying to remember the last time anyone other than Anna, my grandmother, or Mrs. Eggers had made me breakfast. I couldn’t.
“Sit down,” he said without turning around. “I can hear you thinking.”
“I’m not thinking.”
“Katarina.”
When I sat, he walked over and crouched in front of me. “No brace?” he asked, running both hands on either side of it.
“It feels better without it.”
He nodded, pressed two fingers into the soft tissue on the inside, and watched my reaction. I didn’t wince.
“Less swelling. Good range?” He moved the joint through its arc.
“No sharp pain.”
“Keep leaving the brace off in the morning. Give it an hour before you put it on,” he said before returning to the stove. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Any way you cook them.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “But which is your favorite?”
“Basted.”
His brow furrowed.
“It’s almost the same as over easy.” I stood and put bread in the toaster because I could manage it one-handed and needed something to do with myself. He didn’t tell me to sit down again. We stood next to each other at the counter. Neither of us said anything, yet it wasn’t uncomfortable.
That was new.
He plated the eggs and bacon, and I grabbed the toast.
The sun rose higher in the sky while we ate.
When our plates were clean, I pulled Horatio’s journal out of my jacket from where it hung on the chair and set it on the table between us. Bishop pushed his plate aside and moved his chair around to sit closer to me.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
I opened to the page I’d folded the corner of the night before. “Dates, strings of numbers, notations I can’t make any sense of.”
I turned to the last page. “This was the only thing of note.”
Bishop’s eyes landed on the word that had been underlined twice. “Romanov?”
“That’s it.”
His brows flared. “It’s certainly a lead.”
“I agree. Everything else appears to be in code.”
“I can take a look if you’d like.”
I closed it and handed it to him. “Maybe you’ll see something the rest of us have missed.”
“Maybe I will.”
I sighed and gazed out the window. “My grandmother and Anna have been awake for hours.”
“Definitely.”
“I’m going to need a better cover story than I went for a predawn walk.” I looked down at my clothes. “First walk of shame. I’m underprepared.” I carried my plate to the sink. He was behind me before I set it down.
He turned me to face him and cupped my cheek. “There’s no shame in what we are to each other,” he said. “Not for me.”
“For me either,” I whispered.
“Good.” He grabbed my jacket, helped me put it on, then walked me to the door and kissed my forehead. “See you at work, kitten.”
I walked in the door that led into the kitchen. Anna was at the stove, facing away from me. My grandmother sat at the long wooden table with both hands around her teacup.
“Good morning, Katarina,” said Anna.
“Good morning,” I said, leaning down to kiss my babushka’s cheek.
“Are you joining us for breakfast?” Anna asked.
“I already ate, thanks.”
As she set two plates on the table, I caught the look that passed between the two women. Where I expected to see judgment, there wasn’t any. In fact, they appeared amused.
“Get some coffee and sit with us anyway.”
I poured my second cup of the day and sat between them.
Mr. Loxley came in through the same door I had with an armload of firewood and crossed to the hearth without a word. Polina watched him stack it.
“How are you this morning, Julian?” she asked.
“Cold knees and a warm heart, ma’am. You?”
“The same.”
He straightened up and brushed the bark from his sleeves. “Can I bring you anything before I leave?”
“Not a thing. Thank you.”
He nodded at me as he left.
“You look rested,” my grandmother said between bites of egg.
“You know I met Horatio when we were both with SIS. We were so young at the time.” I thought maybe this was part of a conversation that began before I came in, but Anna’s gaze rested on me after she said it.
Babushka turned her teacup in her hands. “He was insufferable that summer.”
“He was not.” Anna looked across the table at her. “He was brilliant, and you know it.”
“He was my brother. I know exactly what he was. Brilliant and insufferable are not mutually exclusive.”
Anna smiled. “I was twenty years old and had been with Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service for six months when they assigned me to his section.
Horatio was already running operations. I was meant to support his work by gathering every piece of information I could and turn it into something he could use. ”
The work was the part of the story I’d heard before, but my sense was she was headed in a different direction with it today.
“He caught my attention from the first day. He didn’t notice me for months.”
My grandmother covered her grin with her hand.
“It’s true, Polina,” Anna huffed.
“He noticed you.”
I sipped my coffee, waiting for their bickering to escalate. Today, it didn’t.
“Every time he left on a mission, I worried.” She stood and got more coffee for herself, then filled Babushka’s cup without asking.
“The world is different now, Katarina. In those days, SIS didn’t assign field positions to women. Not because we weren’t capable. It’s just how it was, and we didn’t question it.”
“I understand,” I said. I’d often done what was expected of me without challenging it. It was just how it was.
It made me think of Amaryllis. She’d lost both parents at a young age, murdered by the same people who’d killed mine.
Her grandparents raised her, and she never knew her family’s history until last year.
And yet she chose a career path identical to mine.
Was it nature or nurture? Coincidence or legacy?
Anna covered my hand with hers. “We’re proud of you, Katarina,” she said. “Before you were old enough to understand what the work was, we were already proud. But we were also afraid.” She looked at Babushka. “Equally.”
“For a very long time. Still,” my grandmother added.
I finished my coffee and took the mug to the sink.
“I should start my day,” I said, leaning down to kiss each woman’s cheek.
“You know, Anna, I believe our Katarina is falling in love.”
I studied her, unsure what to say. I hardly knew Bishop. Love? Impossible.
Her eyes stayed riveted to mine. “He seems like a good man, like your grandfather was.”
Anna squeezed my hand once and stood. “I told Julian I’d walk down to the boathouse with him this morning. He wants to show me something on the shore.” She set her cup in the sink and pulled her coat off the hook by the door. “I won’t be long.”
“That reminds me, Katarina. I want you to see the spot your grandfather and I used to visit. Bishop should come too.”
“Whenever you’re ready, Babushka.”
“Not yet,” she said. “But soon.”
I was about to leave for the second time when Amaryllis came face-to-face with me in the doorway. I stepped aside, and she sat at the table.
“Aunt Polina, can I ask you something?”
“You may ask me anything, Charity.”
“Is there something romantic between Grandmama and Julian? The way the two of them—”
“Romantic?” Polina’s eyebrows went up, and she made a sound that was half scoff, half laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s—” She stopped.
“He’s what?” I asked.
Her lips pursed. “He’s not her type.”
I let it go. But I thought about it on my walk to the boathouse.
Julian was Anna’s age, or near it, and fit considering he had to be in his seventies, and he was quite good-looking.
My aunt also seemed to enjoy his company.
So how was that not her type? On the other hand, perhaps my grandmother couldn’t envision Anna with anyone other than her brother, regardless of how long he’d been dead.
The command center was buzzing when I walked in.
Dagger had Vasiliev’s known operational network on the main screen.
It wasn’t new intelligence, but everything they already had was organized into a map of nodes and connection lines.
It showed them less than any of us wanted and more than we’d had before we started.
I took a seat and set my tablet in front of me.
Bishop was already at the head of the table. We didn’t make eye contact.
“This is the baseline,” Dagger said. “Known associates, confirmed locations going back five years, financial movements we can attribute to him directly. The gaps are as useful as what’s there. He doesn’t leave much, and what he does leave is deliberate.”
“He wants to be seen where he wants to be seen,” Delfino said. “His FSB support means he operates with a confidence most targets don’t have. He’s not hiding. He’s controlling the picture.”
“Then, we work the edges of the picture,” Bishop said. “What falls outside the frame is where he actually lives.”
Bishop’s questions landed exactly where my analysis left gaps, not because we planned it, but because his mind moved through a problem the way mine did, but from a different angle. I’d worked alongside a lot of people. It had never felt like this.