CHAPTER 1 #2
Except, what team? Last I knew, she was fresh out of operatives.
Okay—let me catch you up. Ziggy is a Black Swan. A member of an all-women, elite group of spies, specializing in heists and undercover betrayals and working under the radar. They’re international, but they do a lot of work with the Brits, and also with the Caleb Group.
I should leave. Really. No reason to yank open the door and follow Ziggy inside and say, What the blooming heck are you doing here? Okay, that’s an edit of my actual thought, but we’ll keep it tame.
If she doesn’t care enough about me not to vanish for eight months without a word, then I shouldn’t be standing here like a man with a broken heart.
That might be overstated. Not a broken heart. I just got the wind knocked out of my sails. Felt a little shipwrecked for a while there.
So the Ziggy sighting is probably good news. I can now mark that little annoyance of her disappearance off the list in the back of my brain. Ziggy, back at work. All is normal with the world.
Really.
Nothing to see here.
So of course I walk down the sidewalk toward the hotel so I can get an angle through the glass face of the lobby. Listen, it’s my job.
The hotel lobby runs across the full ground floor behind a wall of glass. Sand-colored terrazzo floor. Reception on the right wall. Two leather club chairs on the left wall under a potted palm in a brass planter. The elevator bank sits deeper, in the middle of the back wall.
The woman in the camel coat stands at the reception counter.
Ziggy is positioned away from her, watching the room. And right then, of course, she glances out toward the window.
I duck down like an idiot.
But yep, it’s her.
I hightail it across the street, not looking and again tuck myself into the recessed shadow of the tabac doorway, outside the streetlamps' throw of light.
She probably didn’t see me, right?
But she’s walked to the window and is looking out.
My heart thumps like the traitor it is. I hold my breath, as if she could hear it. My heartbeat is hard in my ears.
Then she turns and disappears back into the lobby.
I stay in my doorway thirty more seconds, then I walk.
At the corner, I put the earpiece back in.
“You okay?” Logan says.
“Walking.”
“And?”
“A woman arrived. Late forties. Dark hair. Her driver called her Doctor. There’s something going down at the hotel. Have Coco look into it.”
“And the guy?”
“Neutralized.”
“Roy—”
“He’s not dead.”
A beat. “Just tell me you didn’t blow this.”
“I didn’t blow this. I tucked him in the doorway and walked away. I pulled two phones off him. I’ll upload the contents of the SD card to Coco.”
“Okay. She did manage to pull him off the CCTV, and she thinks she has an ID.”
I cut east through a side street. A tabby cat sits in the middle of the alley and holds its ground when I come up. I go around the cat.
“Who is he?”
“We ran him through our database from the Key West event last summer, from the attack on the yacht. Facial match. He’s working for Tomas, no doubt.”
I swallow a word. “So, what, Tomas is assembling a group? Dragan, now this guy?”
“Looks like it.”
“All right. Get me details on the woman, the doctor.”
“Done.” Logan clicks off.
I pull the earpiece out and drop it into my pocket because I need some alone time.
Listen, I know you’re thinking, Roy, you should tell Logan that Ziggy is back. Not yet. I need a little backstory from her before I read him in. Ziggy has…baggage. And frankly, I’m not that keen on her being back at work so quickly. But what do I know? I’m just the guy who saved her life.
Talk about a bad mood. Maybe it wasn’t the tortilla after all, but a deep, instinctual gut feeling that my life was about to get complicated. Dangerous. Heartbreaking. Because that’s part of loving a woman like Ziggy.
Did I say love? Oops.
Ziggy is…Ziggy is…
Ziggy is the thing I can’t escape. Can’t run from.
Ziggy is the thing that keeps me in the game.
But Ziggy costs me, every time.
I am truly not exaggerating.
But let’s all take a deep breath, okay?
It’s going to be fine.
Just fine.