Sorting the options rapidly, she decided against using a liquid, normally her preferred choice. In this situation, hiding the bottle or syringe after doctoring the wine, then ducking back to her room to rid her hand of it, would be difficult. Her actions might seem suspicious.

She’d have to go with the pills and hope they performed as fast as she remembered. Carefully, she extracted the pill she would put in Jude’s wine. This particular poison was slow acting and the effects were compounded with each dose, killing the victim gradually. He’d suffer badly before he died.

After the first dose, he’d become ill, vomit. Believe he had the flu; then he’d feel better. With the second, he’d vomit blood, maybe have a nosebleed. After the third, he’d begin hemorrhaging inside, his organs toast. Without the antidote, he’d die in a couple of days, whether he got the fourth dose or not-that one was a mere formality.

Her stomach hurt and dinner threatened to rebel, but she managed to keep it together. This untraceable poison was the correct one for the job because he must appear sick and in declining health. Which he would be, and the symptoms mocked so many illnesses, no autopsy would ever learn anything helpful.

From another bottle, she removed a simple sleeping pill for Liam, harmless but strong. He’d be out cold for the rest of the night.

She locked the case again and took one tablet in each palm, taking scrupulous care to keep them separated. As she walked back into the room, Liam grinned.

“About time. Did you fall in?”

“Something like that.” She walked straight to the table, glancing at the pair. Both were reclined, Jude with his hands behind his head, Liam’s eyes closed. She filled each man’s glass half-full of wine and quickly dropped the tablets in their respective glasses.

In a tiny burst of fizz, each one was gone in ten seconds, in the time it took Lily to pour her own glass. Steeling her nerves, she took their glasses over to the pair, handing them off. She returned for hers and crawled onto the bed with it, wedging herself between their naked bodies.

“To us,” Jude said, holding his glass out for them.

They clinked theirs to his and drank. Lily was hyperaware of every swallow, the life pulsing through the two men. Of their heady male scent, their beauty. Of life being destroyed.

They talked of inconsequential things, sipping the damned wine until Lily thought they’d never finish. She wanted this done; the sooner the better.

Finally, Liam’s eyes drifted shut for good in the middle of their conversation. In moments, his hand fell to the bed, stem of the glass in his limp fingers.

Jude reached out. “Liam?”

“He’s sleeping.”

“Guess we wore him out, huh?” His voice was tired. Slurred.

“Yeah, we did,” she said, aching inside. “Why don’t you get some rest, too?”

“Wanted to… make love to you… again.”

Not fuck. Make love.

Those were the last words he spoke before his glass hit the floor.

Nine

Lily snatched the glasses and rinsed them in the bathroom sink, then placed them on Liam’s cart. Next, she returned to her room, donning loose warm- ups and a pair of tennis shoes. When descending into a strange basement area, one never knew what to expect.

A thumb drive went into the pocket of her warm-ups, in case she located the two remaining files. Last, she grabbed a flashlight and walked through Jude’s bedroom again, pausing to study the figures on the bed. An emotion very much like grief forced its way into her throat, foreign and bitter.

Both men were so handsome, sculpted chests and stomachs, strong arms, long legs. Jude could’ve been hers for the taking if circumstances had been different.

But life was rarely fair.

She’d learned that the day a traitor had killed her father.

In Jude’s closet, she went to the panel and pressed the molding. As before, it slid open easily. All she had to do was infiltrate the enemy’s den.

Testing the rungs, she found them stable and began her descent, flashlight in one hand. Down, down into the bowels of the house until her shoe met solid floor.

She turned on the flashlight and stared at her surroundings in awe. “Holy shit.”

This setup could rival NASA’s with all the monitors, keyboards, and other technical crap she couldn’t begin to name. Against one wall stood a rack of clothes in various styles, and another entire wall bristled with weapons of every kind imaginable, both legal and not so legal.

Rifles, scopes, pistols, hand grenades. A fucking rocket launcher!

Fishing around, she found a light switch on the wall next to the ladder and flipped it, flooding the room with light. She turned the flashlight off and set it at the foot of the ladder for when she left.

How the hell was she supposed to find one file in this massive setup? By searching each hard drive, methodically ruling it out until the correct one was found. This could take all night.

Disheartened, she set to work, booting up the machines. The password was no problem; she used SHADO’s bypass code the top brass shared only in need- to-know cases. This being one of them, in order to get the dirt on their own man.

Running the virus-search program she’d used to locate the other files, she resigned herself to the boring task. Four hours later, she was on the next- to-last machine when the message popped onto the screen.

VIRUS LOCATED.

She bolted upright, blinking at the screen for a few seconds before it registered. She’d found it.

A few commands later, she had the worm isolated, but like the others, it wasn’t a readable file. The damned thing was encrypted, not her area of expertise. Oh, she could figure it out, but it would take her several days to crack. Days she didn’t have, with Dietz phoning tomorrow.

But if she could stall him… yes. She might be able to put Dietz off long enough to take a good look at this little gem that had him sweating. She wasn’t sure how she’d avoid him, but she’d manage.

Feeling better with this plan, she downloaded the file to the thumb drive, double- checked to be certain it was there, then destroyed the worm on the hard drive. Poof. Gone as if it had never been.

She started to fry all of Jude’s computers, but knew once the house was empty, SHADO would just send in a cleanup crew anyway, so there was no need.

She shut everything down again and, after taking a last look around, grabbed her flashlight, turned off the light, and made her way back upstairs. Emerging in the closet once more, she wondered if this was how Alice had felt after going down the rabbit hole and coming back. Like traveling between parallel universes.

After secreting the thumb drive in one of her locked cases, she undressed and again settled herself between Jude and Liam. She wanted to retreat to her own room and hide, but they would be concerned to awaken and find she hadn’t wanted to stay.

So she remained there.

But sleep didn’t come for a very long while.

Jude came awake as though from a deep, dark tunnel. The first thing he became aware of was that he ached all over. Bone deep. His head hurt, too, but not like one of his migraines. No, this was different.

He rolled to his side, and that’s when the nausea began. Low and ominous, in the pit of his belly. Roiling like a stormy ocean.

“Oh, God.”

He was going to throw up. Any second.

Scrambling off the bed, he stumbled in the direction of his bathroom. He didn’t have time to grope for his cane, didn’t care.

Hitting the doorjamb hard with his shoulder, he grunted and fell inside, crawling. Felt desperately for the toilet because he couldn’t stop-

There. He shoved the lid open and lost the meager contents of his stomach, heaving until he sat with his forehead on the rim, shaking and miserable.