Once we hit the motorway, I scrolled through the phone's memory to the number I wanted, took a deep breath, and hit dial. The line crackled as someone on the other side of the world answered.

"Nate?"

"Emmy?" Surprise was evident in his voice, but also a tinge of something else. Anger? Relief?

"Yeah."

"Thank fuck. Why the hell didn't you answer the phone the other day?"

Yes, anger and relief, both present and correct. In truth, I hadn't expected him to be anything but pissed off. It was his normal demeanour, even when I hadn't done something really, really stupid.

"I was busy. Are you at home?"

Virginia was five hours behind, and any normal person would be in front of the TV at nine in the evening. But, like me, Nate wasn't normal and often slept in the office.

"Busy? Busy? I could see you were busy. What in the devil's name did you need all that equipment for? And no, I'm in the control room. Someone's got to run this company, and it sure as shit hasn't been you."

"Uh, there was a small situation. Actually, there still is. I could use some help."

"What kind of situation? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Someone else is in trouble, and I'm trying to fix things."

"If you're 'fine,' where the fuck have you been for the last three months? You vanished without a trace and left some cryptic fucking note. I've been monitoring hospitals and morgues the world over."

Yep, he definitely had a scowl plastered across his not-so-pretty face.

"I'm sorry. I was messed up."

"That's it? You were messed up? You've put us all through hell, and now you phone one night out of the blue asking for help?"

I stared at the road, barely seeing the way ahead. I deserved his anger, but that didn't make it any easier to take.

"Please, Nate, I'll explain later. I promise. Right now, a girl's been kidnapped, and her life's at stake. Could you put the animosity aside and lend a hand?" I thought of Tia, bound and gagged on the floor. "Please?"

"You know we'll do whatever you need. But, Emmy, we will talk about this later."

Hurrah. That gave me something to look forward to, but I'd deal with it once we'd resolved the Tia situation.

"I need manpower. The girl's been gone thirty-two hours now, and the ransom drop just got botched."

"Got it. Now you've turned your phone on again, I can see where you are. You going to Albany House?"

"That's the plan. I need you to get a team together at the office, and I'll go and brief them. Can you pull in everyone not working on a priority level one case?"

"Everyone? Do you have any damn clue what that'll do to the running of everything else?"

Yes, I was perfectly aware of the havoc it would create with the scheduling of all the other jobs for weeks afterwards.

"Everyone," I confirmed.

Nate gave an exasperated sigh but didn't try to argue. He knew I wouldn't pull a stunt like this lightly.

"Fine." He sounded more like me than he'd ever admit. "I'll make the calls and speak to you when you get back to London. By the way, Nick and Dan flew over to the UK when we spotted you in the house. They'll be waiting for you to arrive."

"That's the best news I've had all day. I'll let you know when I get there."

"You'd better. If you do another runner, I'll hunt you to the ends of the fucking earth."

Aw, at least he still cared.

"I'm back now, and I'm staying back. And Nate, I'm so, so sorry."

"You can grace me with an explanation later. I'll be waiting with bated breath. Now, get off the phone so I can make some calls."

Well, that went about as well as expected. I was definitely on Nate's shit list, but I deserved it. And at least he stayed professional rather than letting his feelings towards me impede the hunt for Tia.

When we arrived at the house, I drove straight into the garage. Luke was still unsteady on his feet as I bundled him into the lift. Usually, I hated the thing and took the stairs, but it did have its uses.

I helped him into the kitchen and found Dan seated at the breakfast bar, a mug of coffee cupped in her hands. Nick was speaking on the phone, staring out of the window, but he hung up when he saw me.

I'd known Nick Goldman since I was eighteen. My husband introduced us. They'd worked together on various black-ops projects until my husband quit his not-so-cushy government job to strike out with Nate instead.

When I'd come onto the scene, Nick had helped to train me, and not just on the job. He'd educated me in the bedroom as well. Things didn't work out between us, but we remained close, and when I was twenty-two, he'd become the fourth shareholder in our security company.

Daniela di Grassi's background was similar to mine. We'd met by accident in not-so-pleasant circumstances and just clicked. She'd moved in with us for a while, and over bottles of wine and cold case files, we discovered she had hidden talents.

Dan could ferret, wheedle, and cajole information out of people better than anyone. Her mind could assemble a jigsaw puzzle of clues into a work of art. Aside from my husband, she was the best investigator we'd ever had.

Along with Nate and his wife, Carmen, and Mack, the office geek, Nick and Dan made up my inner circle. I trusted them with my life.

And neither of them looked happy.

I balanced Luke on a leather and chrome stool then walked over to where Nick and Dan now stood in silence. What should I say? They just stared, seemingly lost for words too. Finally, Dan stepped forward and hugged me tightly.

"Ease up. Can't...breathe."

When she let go, Nick still hadn't moved. He'd turned into a statue, arms folded, brows furrowed.

Dan's eyes were damp as she mumbled, "Where have you been, you stupid bitch? We thought you were dead."

"You think I'm that easy to kill?"

"I s'pose not. Where the fuck have you been, then?"

I jerked my head towards Luke. "Living with him."

She shot him a sideways glance. "Hot. But who is he?"

"Luke. It's a long story, but his sister's missing, and I need your help to find her. They know me as Ash, and neither has a clue what I do for a living. I'd like to keep it that way." Luke groaned from the other side of the kitchen. "Before we do anything else, he needs his head stitched up."

"Want me to do the honours?"

"Please. Your hands are probably steadier than mine right now, plus he can't stand the sight of me."

She gave me a puzzled look. My hands never shook, at least, not before.

"Okay."

"I need to call Nate, see where we are with a team."

Nick followed me into...well, I called it my home office, but it was more than that—it served as a backup control room should anything happen to our primary location in Kings Cross. He still hadn't said a word, which stung, and now he slammed the door behind us.

"What the fuck, Emmy?"

Great. In the last two days, I'd managed to upset almost everyone I cared about.

"I'm sorry."

I was doing a lot of apologising tonight. If this kept up, I might just record a message.

"Sorry? Sorry? Sorry doesn't cut it, babe. You ran off without a word to any of us."

"I left a note."

I tried to defend myself, but half-heartedly because I knew he was right.

"A half-assed note that didn't explain anything, just asked us to stop a fucking murder investigation."

"Did you stop it?" I asked, holding my breath.

"Yes."

I inhaled again. "Then it did its job."

"That's it? That's all you're gonna say?"

"Nicky, can we do this later?" Say, sometime next century? "Finding Tia's the most important thing here."

"Fine."

He echoed Nate's comment from earlier, and as a woman, I understood what that meant. I had two grumpy, monosyllabic men to deal with.

I settled myself into a seat and Nick grudgingly took the one beside me. Nate soon appeared on the wall of screens in front of us.

At forty-one, Nate was a couple of years older than my husband, and his dark brown hair had grown too long again. Carmen would be nagging him to cut it, no doubt. His tan skin spoke of his Cuban heritage, and on a normal day, women the world over would kill for his complexion. Not today, though. Today, worry lines marred his forehead. The last few months had taken their toll on him too.

He could see me as well, and his first words weren't exactly sympathetic.

"What the hell, Emmy? Have you seen yourself in a mirror recently? You look like a librarian on crack, and your hair's full of twigs."

"Nice to see you too, Nate."

I ditched the glasses I'd put back on out of habit.

"Your team's being assembled." He was all business. "I've assigned Nye as team leader, and he's in the office already. You've got nine more people on their way in and another thirty-seven on standby for the morning."

The monitor chimed and Nye, one of the supervisors in the London-based investigations team, popped up beside Nate.

"Evening, Emmy. Glad to have you back. Bloody hell, what happened to your hair?"

At least one person was happy to see me, but was my hair really that bad? I toggled a few buttons so I could see what they did. Eek! I looked like I'd been in a fight with a hedge trimmer and come out the loser.

I explained the situation with Tia, going over the chain of events since the evening before last. "I'll send over the photos of the tyre print. Get someone on tracing the van right away, would you?"

"Tom's looking up the registration as we speak." Tom was the control room supervisor, drafted in to help.

I'd liberated Luke's phone from his pocket without him noticing, and now I forwarded the text messages he'd received. There were three in total: the initial one with the photo of Tia, the ransom demand, and directions to the drop site. The first was sent from Tia's phone, and each of the others came from a different number. Burner phones, most likely, but we'd try to trace them anyway.

As I'd suspected, the ransom was for £250,000, but it also requested a copy of the source code for Luke's latest piece of business security software. That explained the low cash demand. The software was in final testing right now, and worth a fortune in the right hands. A competitor or someone wanting to maliciously exploit the vulnerabilities it prevented would kill for it.

I discussed strategy with Nye, and we assigned teams to the phones, the van, and the tyre track. Another team would go out to canvas for witnesses first thing in the morning, and the remaining staff were to comb through Luke's life for possible links. The demand for the source code meant I'd all but discounted Tia being taken by an infatuated admirer or someone connected with me.

"Check a guy called Henry Forster. He lives in Lower Foxford or somewhere near it. I'm fairly certain he's too stupid to have done this, but he and Luke don't see eye to eye," I told Nye.

"I'm planning to look at everyone in the village, but I'll start with him."

"How can I help?" I asked. Nye raised an eyebrow, because I didn't normally get involved at that level. "Tia's important to me. I'll do whatever's needed to get her back."

"Could you ask around your network? If we get any leads that need chasing down, I'll call you."

After Nye signed off, Nate folded his arms. "Are you going to grace us with an explanation yet?"

I sighed. "When Dan's here, and Mack too. I'm not going through it three times."

It would be painful enough once.

"In that case, I'll go and track down Mack."

While he did that, I trudged back to the kitchen to see how Dan was doing. She had Luke laid out on the white marble breakfast bar where the lighting was good, his feet hanging off over the end. His cut looked better now she'd cleaned it up, and she'd almost finished stitching the edges together.

"Nearly done," she said. "I don't think the scar will be too noticeable."

"Does she know what she's doing?" Luke mumbled.

It was a bit late now if she didn't. "She took a sewing class in college."

He groaned and tried to get up. I shoved him down again.

"I was kidding, okay? Dan's a trained medic. She's stitched up more people than most doctors. I'd trust her far more than some junior in the ER who's only awake because his veins are circulating more caffeine than blood."

When Dan had finished her neat row of sutures, I led Luke upstairs to one of the spare bedrooms and helped him out of his bloodstained clothes.

"What happened in the woods?" I asked him as he sat on the edge of the bed.

He rubbed his temples, remembering too late about the stitches. "Ouch, fuck. I can't remember."

"Nothing?"

"It's all fuzz. There was a guy, I think. Then you came."

"You said earlier that he spoke to you?"

"I don't know. He might have."

"Get some rest. You might recall more in the morning."

"What about Tia? I need to look for her."

"You're in no state to do that right now. Leave it to the professionals."

"But..."

"Lie down. Sleep. I'll talk to you when you wake up."

His blue eyes were already closing and his arguments ceased, soon followed by soft breathing as he drifted off. Once I was satisfied he wouldn't do anything stupid, like try to get out of bed, I headed back to the others.

Nick had made coffee for everyone. Mack appeared on screen next to Nate, and she didn't look any cheerier than he did. Marvellous.

Mack was Mackenzie Fox, a flame-haired former CIA agent who'd been with us for almost a decade. She was a year older than me and certainly saner. I took a seat and leaned back, trying to separate the story I was about to tell from the emotions underlying it. My voice flat, I rehashed the chain of events from the funeral onwards.

When I'd finished, Dan rolled her chair next to mine and hugged me.

"You stupid bint, you didn't have to run away. We'd have been all right."

I looked up at the others.

Nick's face was blank, and Mack rose to her feet. "I've got work to do."

I watched her back as she walked off.

Then Nate took his turn to make me feel worse. "I thought we'd taught you better than to run away from your problems. Our problems. We're supposed to be a team. What happened to the real Emmy? The stubborn bitch who faced up to her enemies and never flinched?"

"I don't know what happened, okay? My head was fucked, and I couldn't think straight. I still can't think straight. Nothing makes sense. I didn't want to risk you guys getting hurt, not when I'd already lost my husband. I'm sorrier than I can put into words. Now I've come to my senses, I realise how stupid I was."

"Promise you won't do anything that dumb again, yeah?"

He seemed to have come round, just a little. The band circling my chest loosened infinitesimally.

"I promise. No more running."

"So, what are you planning to do with the murder investigation now?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? You're going to let them get away with it?"

Uh oh. He was back to angry again.

"For the moment. My head's not completely back in the game yet. Going all out to find who was behind it won't bring the dead back to life, but it may make us lose more. We can't let a need for revenge blind us so we fail to factor in the possible cost."

"Well, at least that sounds more like the old Emmy. The one who looked at everything objectively."

The old me. Who was that girl, and would I ever find her again? The one who never lost her head. The one who weighed up all the options before selecting the one that would give the most advantageous result, no matter how difficult it may be, or how strange the choice might seem to others. The one who was a dispassionate, cold-hearted bitch.

Tonight, I channelled her. "That's my decision."

Nate leaned back in his chair, face dark as a storm cloud on a winter's day. "We'll respect it." Without a doubt, those words were hard for him to say. "But you should know everyone hopes you'll change your mind."

With that parting shot, Nate signed off for the night, saying he'd find Mack and get her to contact the UK team directly to assist. He didn't need to tell me how upset she was—I'd seen that for myself.

Time to get some sleep, or at least, to lie down and stare at the ceiling. Dan gripped my hand as we walked upstairs while Nick stomped off in front. Hopefully, he'd feel more charitable towards me in the morning.

I yawned as I headed towards my bedroom, which was far from everyone else's. Part of me wanted to stay up and do something, but Nye had it under control. I was back in a team now. Enough people were working overnight already, and I'd be more use after a few hours' rest.

I'd get up first thing to sharpen my claws.