When one was trying to draw a coyote into a trap, one had to be very careful not to set off any alarms. Coyotes—in this case Axel MacNamara—were sly and notoriously skittish. Joan Kingsley knew she didn’t have a prayer of getting close to him, therefore he had to come to her. That was where the trap came in, because he couldn’t know she was involved in any way. If he even suspected, he not only wouldn’t venture into the trap, she was likely to lose her own life.

Sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t already been assassinated, but the knife edge of grief had been so keen she hadn’t really cared. He could easily make her death look like an accident, though really that could be gotten around just by controlling the “investigation.” The fact that he hadn’t made her suspect he anticipated having some use for her in the future, by blackmailing her into cooperating with whatever scheme he’d concocted. There was nothing she put past him.

Perhaps she wanted to live, now, though she hadn’t at first after Dexter was killed. Not even their son had been enough to ease her grief. He was grown, and no longer lived at home; though she loved him very much, he was no longer a part of her everyday life and she accepted that he never would be again. Nevertheless, part of her wanted to stay alive because of him, because of the possibility of future grandchildren that would be Dexter’s grandchildren as much as hers.

For that, she would live. And to live, she needed to rid herself of the pestilence that was Axel MacNamara.

She had a plan. It would involve moving some chess pieces into place without MacNamara realizing who was doing the moving. At this point Devan was doing all the actual work, because she had to look absolutely uninvolved.

Devan likely thought she was still in the dark about his real identity, and in a sense she was, because she didn’t know the name he’d been born with. Nevertheless, since Dexter’s murder, from Devan’s actions and resources she had concluded that he was a Russian plant, perhaps even Russian himself. Instead of disappearing and protecting himself, he’d remained in touch with her, subtly feeding ideas of vengeance to her. At least, he thought they were subtle. Joan Kingsley was a born politician, and she could spot half-truths and emotional bullshit manipulation from a thousand yards away.

Before Dexter’s murder, she had even appreciated the lack of bullshit in Axel MacNamara. That was likely his only good point, but having no subtlety himself meant recognizing it in others was difficult for him. He functioned in D.C. only because those in power saw the benefit of having a rabid wolverine on their side.

But she would bring him down. The end game would be his death, but before then she would drive him mad by attacking what he cared about the most: his precious GO-Teams, and using those attacks to maneuver him into position.

Graeme Burger, South African banker, obscure and easily manipulated, was the current chess piece to be moved into place.

The game had begun.

“Guys,” Jina said the next day when they were taking a break, sitting on the ground and guzzling water. The September sun was hot, the sky a cloudless blue bowl overhead. “What do you tell your family about what you do? My parents are making noises about visiting.” She hated being worried about seeing them, but reality was reality and she had to deal with it.

Boom scratched the side of his nose. “My wife knows, in general. Not the details, but she knows I can get called at any time, and that I can’t tell her where I’m going or how long I’ll be gone.”

“Ditto,” Snake added. “No way to hide it, when you’re married. My kids are too young right now to ask questions, they just accept whatever we tell them. I don’t know what we’ll tell them when they get older, just play it by ear, I guess.”

Behind her, Levi folded his long length to the ground; she knew it was him without looking around. Her skin tingled, up her spine and neck, and abruptly she felt as if she was being blasted by heat. She was always acutely aware of his location, though they seldom spoke directly to each other. He didn’t want her there and she knew it, knew too that proving to him she could do the job was way too important. She didn’t want it to be, but it was. The best she could do was keep him from seeing how he affected her, even if only for the sake of her pride.

Crutch tilted his blond head back and poured water on his face, then flopped on his back and folded one arm back to pillow his head. “I told my mom I work for an engineering firm that gets sent all over the world.”

“What’s weird about that is he doesn’t have an engineering degree, and his mom buys the lame-ass excuse anyway,” Jelly said, snickering.

Crutch shrugged, as if to say there was no explaining what people chose to believe.

“My mom would never buy that.” Jina squinted up at the blue sky. “I told her I was learning a new computer program.”

“True enough, as far as that goes,” Snake said. “But, yeah, they’d have to be blind and stupid to buy that’s all you’re doing. Look at you.”

Look at her? Jina looked, frowning. Okay, she wasn’t dressed like someone who normally worked with computers; she knew computer nerds, given that she had one foot at least halfway into nerdhood herself. She should be wearing jeans and sneakers and a tee from some obscure rock concert. Instead she wore lace-up boots that looked as if she’d run a hundred miles in them—she had—and brown cargo pants. She was definitely wearing a tee, but it was a sweat-stained dingy white. “Not wearing this, no, but I can change clothes. I was talking about the hours I spend with you guys, and how dirty I am when I get home unless it’s a swim day.” Thank God for swim days; at least then she could shower before she went home.

Trapper snorted, leaning back on his elbows. “The girl doesn’t have a mirror,” he commented to the others.

“Do too. I brush my teeth and hair every morning.”

Several of them chuckled. She slugged back some water, enjoying the level of camaraderie she and the guys had established, with the exceptions of Levi and Voodoo. Voodoo didn’t like her, but as far as she could tell he didn’t like anyone, so she didn’t take it personally. Levi, though . . . he watched her with cold assessment, as if waiting for her to screw up so bad he could legitimately refuse to let her join his team. She knew he could do it, too; the team leaders had a lot of autonomy, because a smooth-working team was so essential to their success. She’d busted her ass for three months to keep from giving him that excuse. Whenever she had the time to think about it logically, she should be giving him that excuse, rather than half killing herself trying to do what they asked of her. Because she couldn’t think of any logical reason for her illogical actions, she had long since given up trying to explain it to herself.

“You’re skinny and tan and have muscles,” Jelly explained.

Huh. According to the scale, she’d actually gained about ten pounds, after some initial weight loss. Despite gaining weight, though, all her old clothes were too big for her now, to the point her sweatpants barely hung on her hips and she didn’t dare wear them out of the condo. But buying more meant going shopping, and she didn’t have the time, energy, or interest. She’d made the effort for boots, but the boots were important. She’d ordered the cargo pants—several pairs—off the internet. Other than that . . . meh. She’d shop some other time, like maybe next year.

She hadn’t been heavy before—the description that kept coming to her was “normal.” Not tall, not short; not heavy, not skinny. She kind of wasn’t normal, now, and whenever she caught sight of herself in the mirror she was briefly taken aback, but the truth was that beyond the teeth-and-hair brushing she seldom had time to even check what she was wearing. She’d never been blessed in the boob department, but now they were almost nonexistent because she’d lost so much body fat while adding muscle. She did like her arms, though, liked the definition of her triceps, and being able to pop her biceps up. In just three months she was so much stronger that even though she was always tired at the end of the day she could bound up the stairs to her condo.

“Maybe I could tell them I’ve been working out,” she mused. “That’s true enough.”

Two or three grunts answered that. “They won’t believe that, unless they’re dense,” Boom said. “You don’t have gym muscles, and that wouldn’t explain the tan.”

Well, damn. Her folks weren’t dense. They hadn’t successfully raised five kids by being either naive or gullible. Three months before, Jina wouldn’t have known the difference between gym muscles and the kind of muscles achieved by hard work, but now she did. Gym muscles were for posing; work muscles were for doing, and there was a definite difference.

“Maybe they won’t come,” she said, feeling guilty because not wanting to see them felt awful. She loved her family and normally saw them four or five times a year—until now. Maybe she could go home around Christmas, and by then her tan, attained despite a liberal application of sunscreen every morning, should have faded. And she’d still have to run, even on vacation, because staying in shape was a constant effort. When the guys weren’t on a mission, they were either working out or going through training exercises, keeping their skills sharp. She’d be expected to do the same, so her family would see her running and assume her weight loss and muscle gain was because of that.

“Do your families ever meet the other team members?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity. To date, she hadn’t met any of their family members or outside friends. Maybe they were like her and were too tired when they got home to hang out with friends.

“Sure,” Trapper said. “There are cookouts, things like that. Boom and Snake both have kids, and their wives do things together, take the kids to do stuff.”

Jina wondered if they’d had any cookouts in the past three months, because if they had, she hadn’t been invited. She didn’t let herself feel hurt; though she’d been assigned to Levi’s team, she wasn’t yet an official member because she hadn’t completed training. If—when—she was cleared and began going on missions, and they still didn’t include her, then she’d let herself brood about it, but that time wasn’t now.

While they were in a talkative mood, she pressed on. “Do your families call you by your team nicknames?”

“In a way,” Snake said. “My wife calls me by my name, but everyone else’s family members call me Snake.”

“Why Snake? Do you crawl fast on your stomach, or something?” She’d wondered about all their nicknames but was usually so busy trying to keep up and stay alive that she hadn’t asked.

In answer, he pointed to the two round scars on his forehead, rolling his blue eyes up as if he could see them.

She gaped at him. “A snake bit you? Really? What kind?”

“A rattler. I guess the only reason I’m alive is it didn’t eject any venom. I about pissed my pants, though.”

“You’d probably be called ‘Snake’ even if you weren’t on a GO-Team,” she muttered. “Why do we need nicknames anyway?” She didn’t like “Babe” at all, would never like “Babe,” and wouldn’t like it even if she was a babe, which she wasn’t.

“Technically, we don’t.” After their heart-to-heart talk in his truck on the first day, when he was making it plain to her she was the most expendable person on his team, Levi seldom spoke directly to her except in command. Hearing his voice behind her made her heart jump, and her stomach went into the jitters. She didn’t turn to look at him, though, instead holding herself as still as a rabbit being eyed by a cobra. “But we aren’t military so we don’t have the protection of a military structure behind us. We’re civilian, and officially unauthorized, no matter how unofficially authorized we are. It’s safer for us not to have our real names broadcast over a radio.”

She sighed. Unfortunately that made sense, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to jettison the “Babe.” Calling her that was probably already too ingrained, anyway. She wasn’t certain any of them even remembered her real name.

“What about you?” she asked, moving on to Jelly. “What’s behind your name?”

“Nothing as special as a snake bite, I just like jelly.” He gave her one of his beatific smiles that made him look about sixteen.

“On almost everything,” Snake pointed out.

“I like what I like.”

One by one she got the stories behind their nicknames. Boom got his nickname by falling on the top of a vehicle and making a loud boom; Voodoo’s name was because he was from Louisiana, Trapper once constructed a small trap out of sticks and caught a mouse, Crutch had broken three toes the first day of training and gimped around on crutches for a couple of weeks, and Levi was called Ace because he’d once played in the World Series of Poker. He hadn’t won the big pot, but he’d walked away with a couple of hundred thousand. Jina was impressed despite herself; she didn’t play poker, but she’d—out of boredom—actually watched some of the tournament the year before, so she wasn’t completely ignorant. Yeah, she could see him sitting stone-faced at a poker table with a bunch of other stone faces.

“You get the nickname trophy,” she said to Snake, smiling. “Getting snake-bit on the forehead is kind of exotic. Everyone else’s nickname is boring compared to yours.”

“Break time’s over,” Levi said brusquely. “Let’s get back to it.” He two-pointed his empty water bottle into the trash bin nearby and rose effortlessly to his feet, his powerful leg muscles and abs doing all the work.

Hah! Jina could do that too . . . now. She’d even practiced doing so at home, so no one would see her when she gracelessly collapsed to the floor. Getting up unaided required all sorts of muscles, muscles that she now had. She got to her feet, and per his instruction got back to it.

She could do this. She could handle anything he threw at her, and she was far more confident now than she’d been three months ago. She had this.

Two months later, she regretted even thinking those words. “Say what?” she said in horror. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. She couldn’t have heard him right. This was so far out of her capabilities it might as well be in outer space.

“Parachute training,” Levi repeated.

“Uh-uh. No.” Jina began backing away from him, as if distance would help; her hands were up as if she could ward off the words. “I can’t do that. I can’t jump out of a plane. That’s unnatural. Only crazy people do that.”

“Are you resigning?” he asked neutrally, though his cold dark eyes were boring into her. The other guys stopped what they were doing to listen; Voodoo snickered, but she didn’t expect anything else from him, the jerk, so she ignored him. In turn, they all ignored that she’d just called all of them crazy. Hey, if the tinfoil hat fit, wear it.

“No.” The word was thick on her tongue, but she managed to get it out. “Resign” was another word for “quit.” And though she’d stuck it out this long—five months now—climbing a freaking rope and running for miles and all sorts of other crap wasn’t in the same category as jumping out of a plane. Her survival instinct was too strong for that, and her need for an adrenaline rush way too weak. Pain and bone-deep fatigue had become her new normal, but jumping out of a plane . . . she didn’t know if she could.

“I’ll try,” she said, hearing the doubt in her own voice. She wanted to run screaming, because she knew—she knew—she wasn’t going to be able to do any suicidal leap out of a plane, but pure cussedness kept her in place. She was already beginning to shake in dread, just at the idea. God only knew what would happen when she was actually in a plane faced with the imminent prospect of plummeting to her death—pass out, maybe. Yeah, that would work. Maybe. She wouldn’t put it past him to pick up her unconscious body and toss her out of the plane.

Levi had thrown that bombshell at her while they were all kind of winding down after a long day of small-arms training, running, lifting weights, then swimming in the Olympic-sized pool in the gym the GO-Teams owned—or rather, that the government owned, unofficially and completely off the books.

While they’d been off doing other stuff she’d also spent a couple of hours with the drone, too, the real drone, a thing so miniaturized it was the size of a small bird, but equipped with high-definition cameras in both infrared and live-feed digital. With the equally state-of-the-art laptop and highly classified program, she could finesse Tweety, as she’d come to think of him, into a small pipe if she wanted to. She could perch him on a limb, peek from behind a rock, evade a diving hawk, which had taken her by surprise, but she had since learned raptors tended to see her little Tweety as prey. She was determined that Tweety would stay safe on her watch.

Sometime along the way, she had started hanging out some with the guys after training was over for the day, nothing social but sitting around afterward and shooting the shit. There had been some other socializing away from training because she’d heard them talking about it, but she still hadn’t been invited, and she’d noticed she was being excluded even if she hadn’t let herself react. She was damned if she’d let them know it bothered her.

Until now, swim days had been her favorite days of training, but she didn’t know if they could recover that ranking after being linked in her mind with parachute training. Still, good old swimming had a lot going for it; at least when there was swimming involved there were also showers, both before and after the swim, and she now took a change of clothes—or two—in her car wherever she went. She didn’t have to go home filthy and tired, just tired. Being clean made a big difference. And she liked swimming, in a way she would never like climbing a rope or running in weather so hot she felt as if her skin was melting.

Other than the times when they were gone on unspecified missions, almost all her awake time was spent with the guys, so it was a good thing they were on better terms now. For better or worse, they were a team . . . for the most part. She was still sometimes taken aback by their guyness. She didn’t know a single woman who would think it was hilarious to dump a bucket of mud over the top of a teammate’s head, but Crutch and Jelly had laughed themselves sick after doing that to Trapper. Then they’d eyed her, and she’d given them a stony look and said, “Whoever dumps mud on my head will have to wash my hair and blow it dry.” Considering how long her hair was now, because she hadn’t had time to even get it trimmed since starting training, they had immediately disavowed any intention of getting mud on her. Uh-huh, sure; she believed that like she believed in the tooth fairy.

But because she liked them—for the most part—and because she wanted to shove Levi’s conviction that she couldn’t do the job down his throat, she had worked her ass off for the past five months. To become worthy of being on the team she had pushed herself so much further than she’d ever thought she could go. She could run an easy eight miles now, ten if she pushed herself, which she constantly did. She could do a hundred pushups, though chin-ups still gave her problems and her numbers went way down with them. She’d mastered the technique of hook-and-pinch on the rope, though they called it brake-and-squat, and could go over the wall almost as fast as they could. She had qualified with small arms, learning how to handle a variety of weapons even though her job description didn’t call for that, but as Levi put it, every day things happened in the field that weren’t planned for in the book. She hadn’t turned a hair at handling weapons; being a country girl from south Georgia had made her comfortable with rifles and such long before she was old enough to drive.

She had changed; there was no way she could have avoided changing. She was far more sure of herself when it came to her place on Levi’s team. The woman she saw in the mirror was slimmer, harder, refined down to muscle and bone . . . and she liked it. She liked being able to do things, liked feeling capable.

She’d paid a price for working so hard to be here. Once upon a time, she’d had a few girlfriends with whom she’d seen movies, gone to bars and concerts, a little bit of shopping. She hadn’t heard from them in months. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from her mother in . . . maybe a month? The threatened visit hadn’t materialized, and abruptly she felt a wave of homesickness. She needed to call home tonight, because Levi was going to kill her tomorrow. He was going to throw her out of a plane.

Reading her expression, Trapper bumped her shoulder with his fist and said encouragingly, “You can do it. You know how it is when you’re afraid of something; you’re nervous only until you actually jump, then after that you’re too busy doing what you need to do to think about it.”

Yeah? She gave him a dubious look. He was assuming she wouldn’t pass out, but she wasn’t assuming anything. Everything else she’d done had been physical effort, pushing and pushing and not letting herself stop, but this . . . this was different. This was terrifying.

“When do I do it?” she asked, too terrified to be embarrassed that her tone was so thin.

“Tomorrow,” Levi said.

Oh, shit.

Jina called her mom that night, and managed to sound normal, managed to keep the conversation general and light even though she felt as if she might vomit from nerves. She slept in fits and starts, unable to ignore the jitters in her stomach or her sense of overwhelming dread. She even handwrote a will—not that she had a lot to leave anyone, but still—and left it on the table, dated and signed. Then she wondered if the existence of the will would make someone think she’d suspected she was in danger, and her parents might be tormented for the rest of their lives wondering if she’d been murdered. Sighing, she wadded up the sheet of paper and tossed it in the trash, then got it out and held it over the lit eye of the gas stovetop until it caught fire. Then she spent ten minutes cleaning up the damn ashes; burning something wasn’t a tidy way of disposing of anything.

Jina’s eyes were hollow with fatigue and dread when she showed up at training the next morning, but she was so wound up she could barely sit still. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, because she was so terrified she couldn’t swallow anything solid.

They were all standing in a clump, arms crossed, waiting for her. Over the months she’d gotten used to how big they were, but now felt like the first day all over again, when she’d felt insignificant and pretty much useless compared to them. Everything she’d done, all the effort she’d made, would mean nothing if she failed now. She’d be kicked out of training and likely she’d never see them again, because even if she was assigned another job with the agency, she wouldn’t have any actual contact with the team. They had become her life, to the exclusion of almost everything and everyone else. Nevertheless, she either managed this or they’d walk away from her and not look back, because a smoothly functioning team meant more to them than any individual.

She walked up to them, her boots crunching on the gravel, the chilly morning air going all the way to the bottom of her lungs. “All right, let’s do this,” she said, trying to sound tough. She failed at pulling that off because her voice wobbled.

The seven of them looked at her woebegone face and burst out laughing, even Voodoo and Levi, who laughed about as often as a blue moon rolled around.

“What?” she asked, stuffing her hands in her pockets and feeling self-conscious.

“You thought you’d jump out of a plane without knowing what you’re doing?” Jelly asked, snickering.

“No, I thought y’all would throw me out of a plane without knowing what I’m doing,” she retorted. “The word ‘jump’ implies I’d do it willingly.”

“Ground training first,” Levi said. “Then we throw you out.”

There were a few more snorts of laughter, none of which belonged to Jina. She tried to look as stony as he did. “What’s ground training?”

Jelly smiled a big, completely distrustful smile. “It’s where we teach you how not to go splat.”