“You can’t leave,” Yuri said over breakfast.

Mendez’s gut tightened. Last night, he and Yuri’d had fun talking and drinking. Yuri had promised him weapons, black-ops technology, and a car. The drive back to Moscow was around thirty hours. More than that when you counted stops for food and bathroom breaks. If he and Kat split the driving, they wouldn’t have to stop for sleep.

But there wasn’t any time to waste. They had to get there and find a way to get to Sergei Turov before the summit started. He didn’t know what Turov’s plan was, but he intended to put a stop to it before it could happen.

He had Ghost, along with the HOT boys and girls, at his back. But it still wasn’t going to be easy. Risky as fuck. And the timing absolutely couldn’t get knocked out of sync. The window of opportunity would be short. They had to get to Moscow and get the job done ASAP.

“Why not?” His hand automatically dropped to the Glock at his side. Kat, he noted, was similarly wary. He’d bet money her fingers were also on the trigger.

Yuri sliced the air as if dismissing their apprehension. “There’s been a patrol up there. Someone is looking for you.”

“Turov.”

“Yes, I believe so. You left one of his men handcuffed in the cemetery. It is only logical he would expect you to come to me if you are in the area. I took care of the Kia so there’s nothing up there—but they’ll patrol and watch for you. They’ll go away in a few days.”

“We don’t have a few days. Surely you have a way to get past them. You’ve got everything else in this place.”

“My friend, this is a luxury bunker with enough food and supplies to keep me alive for the next ten years. I don’t need to go out. I can wait.” His gaze slid to Kat. “Besides, there is something else I wish to know… Who is this woman?”

Mendez glanced at Kat. Her expression gave nothing away, though her mouth had tightened around the corners. She looked worried. He thought of her in his arms this morning—in his arms last night—and he wanted to slay dragons for her. Not that she wasn’t capable of it herself, but he was an alpha male and that’s what alphas did for their women.

He blinked. His woman? No, he couldn’t say that’s where they were yet—or ever would be. She was still a mercenary and he was, if he got the job back, the commander of an elite US military unit. But damn, he sure did like thinking of her as his—even if his feelings about it were complicated since she was the sister of the woman he’d loved.

“I told you who she is. But who do you think she is?”

Yuri took a glass from somewhere beneath the table and set it on the wooden top. “Your fingerprints are on this glass, lady. I had to dig, but I found your records at the FSB. You are not who you say you are.”

She lifted her chin. There were two bright spots of color in her cheeks. “I am Ekaterina Rostov. I changed my name to Kasharin when I left Russia eight years ago. It’s no mystery.”

Yuri’s jaw hardened. “No, that is not quite the name.” He swung his angry gaze to Mendez. “Why is she lying to me? Are you hiding something from me? Is this a ruse and you’re really bringing your military team down on me instead of needing my help?”

Alarm beat a drum in his brain. He couldn’t afford to lose Yuri as an ally. But there was something bigger going on here—and he suddenly knew what it was. He just fucking knew. His pulse zipped into the danger zone. He was typically never in jeopardy of losing his control—but this might be the moment it happened.

“I think maybe she’s hiding something from both of us,” he said, glaring at the woman he’d shared a bed with last night. A woman who’d made him feel something for the first time in a long time.

That should have been his warning, shouldn’t it? That he’d felt something for her when he hadn’t gotten emotionally involved with anyone in twenty-one fucking years? He’d tortured himself with the thought he was tangling his memories of Valentina with his attraction to Kat—but she’d been lying to him all along. There was no Kat.

Her color was still high. “I’m Kat Kasharin. That’s who I am now. Who I was before is irrelevant.”

Mendez punched the table with a fist. Dishes flew up in the air and then clattered back down. It was violent, but not nearly as violent as he needed. He didn’t look at Yuri. He no longer cared that anyone else was in the room. All he cared about was that she was here, looking at him with those eyes that he’d once loved so fucking much it nearly killed him when she’d no longer been in his life.

“Twenty-one damn years,” he growled. “You lied to me. You lied.”

“I had to,” she hissed, and his world fell apart with those words of acknowledgment. “They gave me no choice. You would have been killed, as would I. I did what I was ordered to do, the same as you have done every day of your life in the military. And if you think I have not suffered for it”—her eyes flashed and hot color flooded her entire face. Her lips were white. She shot to her feet and leaned over the table, anger sparking from her like an electrical storm over the ocean. She was magnificent and he wanted her. He also hated her in that moment like he’d never hated anyone—“then fuck you, Johnny Mendez. Because you are not the man I thought you were.”

She whirled and stormed out of the room. But then she whirled back again, thumping her fist to her chest while her eyes glistened with the tears she was trying to hold in. And then she said the words that burned everything he thought he’d known to ash.

“I am Valentina Alexandrovna Rostov. I’m forty-three years old, I’ve lost friends I cared for, a child I would have died for, and the man I loved. I don’t care what you do to me, Yuri Budayev. You cannot make it worse than what I’ve lived with for the past twenty-one years of my life.”