Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
My shin makes contact with Kat’s side.
There once was a time when it would sting, bruise, and remain sore for a few days. Not anymore.
The ISA is successful because of how it diversifies our training.
When I say we’re the best intelligence agency in the world, it’s not a brag.
Each of us spent years as kids at the academy in the remote forests of Lauterbrunnen, tucked away from society and meticulously transformed into masters of our craft.
Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Taekwondo, Judo—our trainers took the most efficient, most lethal practices and techniques from across the globe and created the ISA way.
Basically, we’re really, really hard to kill.
It’s why I can’t feel a thing in my shins. Kicking trees like the best fighters in Thailand will do that to you. Although, trees in the Swiss Alps tend to be… well, frozen.
Kat huffs a laugh, easily slips my right hook, and lands a punishing kidney shot. “Don’t get cocky.”
Did I mention that Kat was recruited younger than any of us? Raffaele found her on the streets of Japan at ten. She started in the field at fifteen, working alongside the older Delta team until the rest of us in Epsilon finally graduated.
You can see it in her eyes, I think. The haunted look that comes with being forced to grow up too soon.
Not in the same way as me—stuck in a crumbling foster home, destined for a similar death as my parents’—but the kind of exhaustion that comes from shouldering international crises before she could even vote.
If she’s comfortable, she might let down her guard long enough for the anguish to peek through.
Meaning Kat, so petite she can hide in a piece of luggage, can also beat anyone on the Epsilon team while blindfolded. We tried once.
Petyr walked with a limp for days.
When she sweeps my legs with a precise kick, I don’t try to fight gravity. The sparring timer is about to go off in three… two… one…
It buzzes right as Kat’s about to stomp my solar plexus.
Her eyebrows pinch together. “You ran out the clock on purpose.”
“Maybe.” I swat her foot, still suspended in the air above me, and roll out from beneath it when she doesn’t move. Best not to test my luck. “Maybe not.”
“There are no timers in a real fight.”
Stretching for a second on the mat, I debate falling asleep here, before thinking better of it and jumping to my feet. Best not to give her the advantage—timer or no timer. “You do realize I’ve been in the field for nearly seven years?”
She studies me as I head to a bench by the window, where I wipe my face with a towel and drape it around my neck.
Kat sneaks up on me, like she always does, and I force myself not to react. “Agents can get lazy. Tired, careless—I’ve seen it before,” she replies, each word landing sharply between my ribs.
“Should I be insulted?”
“I didn’t say which one you are.”
After chugging some water, I drop onto the bench.
The Bernese Alps stretch all around us, already drenched in untouched, stark white that would make you squint if the quadruple-paned windows weren’t made of bullet-proof, tinted glass.
Somewhere on a smaller mountain beneath us, shrouded by snow-capped trees, a veritable fortress of recruits is living in the place I called home for four years.
The academy—at least, that’s how we refer to it. There’s no official name.
I wouldn’t really call it a home, either. A passing-through point between life before and life after. We arrived as troubled children and left as something else entirely.
Every now and then, when my apartment in the east wing is particularly quiet, I wonder if the remote location is less about a tactical advantage and more about isolation. We live and breathe the ISA. My neighbors are more ISA agents, not that I ever see them.
Fraternising is ignored. Sometimes encouraged—maybe that’s only to keep us content. To prevent us from wandering off on missions and falling in love.
If the one our heart belongs to is back at HQ, then no matter how hard we yank, the web of ties that strangle our limbs will always tug us back here. Perhaps that’s why I’ve felt so restless since Chelyabinsk.
I don’t like when it’s quiet.
“You think I’m tired,” I say, after too long of a silence has passed between us.
“No,” Kat replies as she sits beside me. “I know you’re tired, and it’s making you careless.”
I’d never admit to that. Not to myself, and least of all to someone who practically has ISA regulations pumping through her veins.
“Rafaele’s been running me ragged. One dud mission after the next, and now I’m saddled with Graham Baudelaire, a criminal. Even you would be a little frustrated.”
I haven’t seen him since we arrived at HQ last night—I dropped him off at his designated quarters in the handler wing like a piece of unwanted luggage.
As far as I’m concerned, someone else can babysit him.
I’ve already had my fill after less than two days together.
Once he’s fulfilled his purpose, I’ll never have to see his smug face again.
Besides, I’ve got two days off, and he only has clearance for his own quarters. He’s practically in a brand-new prison.
Kat hums in response, clearly skeptical of my excuses.
What most don’t know is that a truly undetectable lie always has some truth.
No matter how excellent your poker face, if a good lie is standing between you and a pine box, you’re better off peppering some reality in there.
There’s always going to be a give and take if you want to get away unscathed.
Except that I’m almost positive Kat’s twice as shrewd as Raffaele.
“I’m only saying you need to be careful, Sloane,” she says. “Chelyabinsk itself was one thing, but you barely got it together after?—”
The heavy metal door to the gym beeps and swishes open. Neither of us turn, the gait unmistakable.
My heart hammers and I school my features into complete neutrality. I’m thankful for the interruption, because I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted if she finished that sentence.
“Mi amor.”
Mateo sweeps Kat into his arms, and I flatten my lips against a smile as she melts into him. He whispers something in her ear that I try to block out. A strange sharpness rises in my chest that I quickly lock away. When we make eye contact, I give him a curt nod and a, “Sir.”
“I see you managed to survive sparring with Kat,” he says. The words send a blush to her cheeks. A blush.
“Some might say that means I’m better than you,” I quip.
He lifts a brow. “Such insubordination.”
Mateo Fernández Ruiz, our Head of Operations, is one of the rare outside hires.
And by rare, I mean he’s the first-ever outside hire.
A former NCA hotshot with a tendency for pushing the limits, he’s ten years our senior and used to spend every available moment reminding us.
He breezed in one day, all six-foot-three of him, flashing the type of handsome-and-he-knows-it smiles every chance he got.
At first, I couldn’t even fault him for it. With deep umber skin, broad shoulders, black hair and a well-trimmed beard cropped close to a strong jaw, he was a welcome addition.
The arrogance didn’t stick around for long.
One day, he challenged twenty-three-year-old Kat, half his size and three times his ego, to a sparring match. He walked—well, hobbled—away with a broken knee and a budding admiration for Katsumi Yamada.
Which morphed into the occasionally grotesque lovey-doveyness we’re subjected to watching whenever she’s home from assignment. It’s not often that people in our line of work are able to relax. Kat, even less so. The mere presence of Mateo transforms her.
I can’t possibly fathom that for myself.
“Rafael wants you in Command.”
Whatever sliver of contentment I felt moments prior disintegrates with a frown. “I’m on leave for two days.”
“Leave,” he echoes with an amused smile.
Another reason we live at HQ on a remote mountain with all the perceived comforts we could ask for: time off is a figment of the imagination. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just returned from a months-long mission in Paraguay. If you’re needed in Taiwan, it’s time to re-pack your bags.
On the way to Command, stationed at the center of the compound’s various wings, I clasp my hands behind my back and keep my gaze trained forward.
There’s nothing to look at, anyway, besides a half-mile stretch of polished concrete and the odd window showcasing the surrounding mountaintops, snow, and more snow.
Despite there being a handful of other active teams, we never rub shoulders thanks to shifting assignment schedules and the miles-wide gap between opposite wings.
It’s strange how much warmer the academy felt, despite the freezing walls and six months of perpetual fog. At least we were able to wander into the village on occasion.
So what if the excursions were merely for training purposes?
When we graduated and the Epsilon team was formed, we had no time to grasp onto our childhoods with the tips of our fingers or allow our youthful naivete to linger.
Our first official assignment—El Paso, in the balmy month of June—was explained to us as an exercise in team mechanics.
Too bad some scumbag in the human trafficking ring we were tailing caught word of our presence.
We ended up in a firefight in the middle of the desert.
I was shot in the right shoulder and Petyr nearly died.
None of us walked away unchanged, our hands bloodied past the point of redemption.
Truckloads of women and children were freed.
I repeat that fact to myself like a prayer every time I wonder what if.
It’s what makes the gruesome reality of this job bearable—that at the end of each mission, the world is a little safer for the kids we used to be.
That the scales of justice have been tipped back into balance.
Regrets are dangerous, anyway. Constantly checking the rear view mirror only gets you killed.