“I’ve been authorized,” Matthias said, hunched over a work table in the barn. The lighting was low and almost orange, and Ethan could see him squinting down at his work. “So don’t worry.”

“Why would I be worried?”

Matthias was shaking his head. “Sam thought it might be some kind of bomb.”

“It doesn’t look like any bomb I’ve ever known.”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “I thought it was a . . . for a lack of a better word, a ‘booby trap’.”

“Jesus,” Matthias said, chuckling but still looking down and working on one of the electronic devices they’d found in the cellar. “Jesus, a booby trap?”

“For lack of a better word.”

“And you’re supposed to be some sort of professor?” Matthias said.

“You know I quit that a while ago.”

“And you’re supposed to be some sort of DARC Ops agent? Talking like that?” Ethan said, chuckling. Ever self-deprecating—probably to throw people off the thought of him as a threat—Sam was easy to joke with. Ethan was standing over Matthias’ shoulder, watching his work. He turned to see Sam’s reaction, how he looked sitting in his favorite lawn chair. Sam could be sensitive. He had to be somewhat sensitive for his work, for analysis of the sensitivities in others. And for being open enough to pick up on them. It wasn’t a weakness, or so Jackson would say. But it was definitely worth a laugh.

He just sat in his lawn chair, face stuffed into his latest book.

Matthias said, “You okay, Sam?”

“Totally okay,” he said. “I think you’re confused about my work area and what it might mean for a behavior analyst’s personal mindset. Their personality.” His nose was still in the book. “I think you’re giving me a lot more feelings than I actually have.

“Oh, you’ve got feelings,” Matthias said, singing it slightly, teasing.

“Right now I do,” Sam said. He raised his book in the air, flashing the cover. “I’m reading Clara’s poetry.” He turned it around to show the back cover, the elegant black-and-white headshot of his girl. “It’s her latest book. First half is about survivor guilt, second half is surviving that and then feeling guilty about surviving yourself. In the end, everyone’s happy.”

“Yeah,” Matthias said. “Sounds real happy.” Ethan watched him laugh quietly to himself until dropping a screwdriver made him flinch. A big flinch that even Sam noticed from behind his book.

“What’s wrong?” Sam said. “Did the bomb go off?”

Matthias was frozen for a minute, looking down at the pieces of equipment he’d been opening up. And then his shoulders shook again with a chuckle. “Everything’s fine. We survived.”

“Looks like we’ve all got survivor’s guilt now,” Ethan said automatically.

Sam looked at him cold-eyed. “That’s not funny.”

It wasn’t meant to be very funny. And then Ethan remembered what Clara had actually survived. And it wasn’t funny at all.

“Sorry.”

“So, let’s get to work, huh?” Matthias said. “How about it?”

“Who?” Sam said. “Me?” He’d dropped the book in his lap but still wasn’t looking very interested in “work.” “Give the kid something to do,” he said, nodding to Ethan.

“The kid?” Ethan said to him.

Sam didn’t look away from Matthias. “I spent the whole afternoon with her,” he said, meaning Lea: his subject. “I don’t even think I can say ‘Hi’ to her at this point. She needs a break.”

“Sounds like you’re getting to her,” Matthias said.

“But that’s not my intention. Some jobs require it, to stir up a reaction. Rustle up some data points. With her, though, she makes things pretty clear.”

“Sounds like progress, then.”

“She makes things clear,” Sam said, “by trying as hard as she can not to make them clear. The effort of the subterfuge, in this case, spells everything out.”

Matthias had finished working, setting down his last tool. “So what are you waiting for?”

Sam just stared at him.

“When were you planning on spelling it out for us?” Matthias said. “We don’t have time for a report.”

“I already told you that she’s deceptive. With any of the pressure points, she’s deceptive. I get clear indications of that. And just for your own information, both of you . . . Ethan?”

“I’m listening.”

“Just so you know,” Sam said, “Whenever she makes any kind of unnecessary movements with her lower jaw, she’s being deceptive.”

“You mean like when she’s talking?” Ethan said, trying not to laugh but picturing how often the normally talkative Lea had moved her lower jaw so far.

“I mean unnecessary,” Sam said. “I mean extra. Superfluous. When she’s not talking. Any time she’s not talking and you see that jaw move, just start thinking long and hard about what she’s not saying. What’s she’s really not saying.

“What do you think she’s not saying?” Ethan asked.

“Well, I’m not a mind reader.”

“You’re the closest thing to it.”

“No,” Sam said. “I think Kalani is. And that’s where you come in.” He looked at Matthias and said, “Right?”

Matthias said, “He’s right, Ethan.”

“What? How?” Ethan said, his mind sputtering at the end of a long day. “I mean, how do I come in?”

“Kalani knows her sister best,” Matthias said.

“And you know Kalani best,” Sam added.

Matthias laughed. “That’s an understatement.”

“I’m trained for analysis, and to spot deception,” Sam said. “But that can only go so far. Here we’re lucky to have her sibling and we—”

“Wait, let’s be clear,” Ethan said, interrupting Sam. “Let’s be clear about one thing. We’re not going to use Kalani. I’m never going to use her for . . . So we can . . .

“What do you think this whole thing is?” Sam said.

“No,” Matthias said. “It’s not us using her. If anything, maybe the federal prosecutors are using her. I mean, technically, literally, they are. But for good reason. So they may be using her, but we’re protecting her.”

Ethan nodded. He said, quietly, “Yeah.”

It was strange to hear it, a concept that had been so natural to him. A truth that had deeply engrained itself into his interior life, his interior thoughts. After a few short months, it had already made up some of the fabric of who he was. Perhaps the most important part.

“Well, I’m definitely protecting her,” Ethan said.

Matthias smiled. “You’ve made that clear from day one, going all Rambo in Hawaii.”

“Just doing my job,” Ethan said.

“That wasn’t your job at the time,” Matthias said.

“It is now.”

Matthias grinned as he picked up the previously dropped screwdriver. “So, like I said, let’s get to work.”

Ethan jokingly saluted him, and then turned toward the wide door of the barn. On his way out, he tried as best he could to hide the bounce in his step. But he’d never been gladder to get back to work.

* * *

The girls were somewhere upstairs. He could hear them up above, their quiet footsteps. The odd creak of a floorboard. Ethan moved to the foot of the stairs, where he tried picking up some of the words. But he only got tones, the vague melodies of their voices muffled by a closed door. He waited there until it made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. He’d rather just walk straight up and knock on her door. Announce himself. See her. He would rather it be simple, like a vacation. A fun adventure in the countryside.

Kalani probably would prefer to have the whole thing over and done with. Or to have it never even start in the first place. But he couldn’t think too much about that. He focused instead on Lea, the real barrier. The real door that threatened to muffle everything. Had it not been for recent talk in the barn about her, Ethan would have probably been knocking already.

He stepped back around the foyer corner when the door opened. Someone’s footsteps spilled out. He listened to the strides, having no idea whose legs they belonged to.

The sound of another door at the end of the upstairs hallway, this one closing.

Who was the source of all this?

Matthias must have already done a full comprehensive sweep of the premises. He had to have searched every square foot of every room. They had to have been alone here with the sisters.

With the idea of random Blackwoods operatives having infiltrated the safe house and prowling around upstairs, Ethan began moving to the first step, and then scaling up even more quickly, his heart beating fast, mostly for Kalani. Mostly with excitement. Mostly.

At the top, he curled close against the wall, creeping around a corner slowly, making certain the hall was empty. At the end, a door. The bathroom, if he recalled correctly. Light glowed across the bottom. At the end of the hall in the other direction was another closed door. Perhaps bathroom and bedroom. Ethan found his way into the only other room—the only empty room—the guest bedroom where Tucker had been staying.

It was dark inside, but Ethan found the edge of the bed by the light of the hall. He sat there, listening to the sounds of the house around him: an unusual quiet except for the crickets and frog songs seeping through the open window.

The bed had been made, and made well. Military-tight and orderly, it must have been Tucker’s work. When his eyes grew accustomed to the light, Ethan saw a stack of bags leaning up against a table leg. The bags looked masculine and heavy duty, something a former soldier might lug around for a month in foreign territory. From D.C. to West Virginia, perhaps. Had Matthias searched them yet?

Ethan stood from the bed and crossed through the darkness over to the desk, sitting and rotating on the leather office chair with a quiet squeak as he leaned over to switch on the work lamp. Clean white light filled the room and flashed against several reflective badges stitched to the side of the bags. Before he could read them, he heard someone standing in the doorway. Someone sighing there. He pushed the chair backward and looked up to his visitor, expecting one of the girls, but prepared for anything.

Kalani smiled back at him. “You weren’t trying to listen in on us, were you?”

“What?” The question made no sense to him. He was more concerned with studying her beauty in the low light. Her tiny little frame barely filled the door frame. She leaned her hips back against it.

“Huh?” she said.

Ethan was lucky back in Hawaii, seeing a lot of skin. Her beautiful, tanned skin. West Virginia offered her very little reason for bikinis, and Ethan was a little resentful of that. But still, standing there fully clothed in the doorway, it was her figure that caught his attention. The soft round of hip pressing against the door frame . . . Maybe he’d spent too much time away.

“If she sees you here,” Kalani said, “she’s going to flip. Lea. She’s on the warpath.”

“Why?” He laughed and then tried stopping and quieting himself. “Why, what did I do?”

“She’s just sick of it all.” Kalani pushed off the wall, walked deeper into the room, the desk light glowing up more of her smile. Her smile widened as she approached. She sat on the bed, where he’d just come from. “She’s sick of you DARC guys, creeping around, investigating . . .”

“Well, technically, I’m not a DARC guy.”

“No?”

“Technically, no.”

“I don’t think she cares about technicalities.”

“Jackson does.”

“So, what were you doing? Just sitting here in the dark?”

“There’s a lamp on,” Ethan said.

“Sitting here with a lamp, then. Just sitting here?

He nodded. “Just sitting here. What are you doing?”

“I was about to take a shower.” She smiled, then looked away.

“That reminds me . . .”

“No,” she said, “you’ll have to wait your turn.”

“That’s not what I was getting at.”

“What does it remind you of, then?”

“Lani,” he said, feeling all the humor of the moment melting away to an almost desperate sincerity. “I missed the hell out of you.”

“Me too. The hell out of you.”

“Come here,” he said, stretching his arm across the gap. There were a few feet between the office chair and the bed, and he wanted it bridged. Quickly. “Come over here.” He watched her lift herself off the bed with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, the work light momentarily reflecting in them. She grabbed his hand, and then his arm, and then it was the warm weight of her body on his lap. Her softness, sitting on him. His arms wrapped. Their breathing, big and in and out and him squeezing her tighter, but still keeping his mouth away. He looked at the side of her neck, wanting it. But the sound of her giggle surprised him, and knocked a bit of the serious lusting out of him. She giggled and squirmed a little in his lap, and he forgot all about her neck. The weight of her felt so good.

“Shh,” Kalani said, standing and stepping back when the bathroom door opened. Then it was Lea’s turn to look into the room with a skeptical glare. “Hi, Lea,” Kalani said.

Lea, wrapped in a towel and with one curled over the top of her head, was still frowning.

Ethan said “Hi,” too, though he knew he probably shouldn’t have. But he just kept smiling after, everything fine and dandy in his world—especially after his brief snuggle with Kalani. In contrast, everything was stormy in Lea’s world. She smiled, but it was fake and filled with something Ethan could only identify as rage. “Good shower? How’s the pressure in this house?”

“Pressure?” she said, cocking her head to the side. “It’s getting a bit much.”

“I know.” He felt pressure, too. All kinds of pressure. Though he preferred the soft aching pressure of Kalani’s body against his crotch. He almost laughed when he thought of that, laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. At Lea.

Kalani took several steps toward her sister, positioning herself between her and Ethan. He was a little thankful, watching how she handled her sister. Watching both of them disappearing back into the hall after one last devilish smile from Kalani.

He would have to continue that later, picking up from where they left off. On his lap.

Alone, Ethan ran his fingers through his hair, hand wiping down his face. He took a deep breath and tried to remind himself just where he was, and why he was. West Virginia. A supposed safe house.

He was also in the old room of a disappeared Tucker. A possible kidnapped and endangered Tucker. He looked around it again, scanning the bare walls and then circling back to the desk. And then down to the bags.