"How's Hayden doing?" Tatiana asked as Layla paced the living room of her best friend's palatial mansion on the outskirts of Maryland. It was a far ritzier neighbourhood than the one Layla occupied with her husband. "Is he healing?"

"I wouldn't know." She was no longer permitted to help him change his bandages or apply aany ointments. It had been two months since the... incident that had left him so scarred, and he was slowly regaining the use of all his limbs and appendages. His skin was slowly healing. She hadn't seen him in anything more revealing than boxers and a t-shirt in just as much time. She didn't care who he spent his time with, now that he'd been approved by the doctor to drive again. Her life was centred on keeping the two children inside of her alive.

It was all she had left to care about.

"You two are still on the rocks, huh?" Tatiana flopped down next to Layla and passed her a Diet Coke, their preferred drinks back when they'd been college girls. Layla hadn't touched the stuff in years, but she took a sip now, longing for the days when they'd had no higher purpose or greater stress than their next midterm or passing their classes. Something with a clear-cut benchmark and definition of success.

Nowadays, she wasn't sure what her definition of success would be, except for making it through childbirth. They hadn't even picked out baby names yet, though her pregnancy was six months along now.

Her to-do list was cluttered with other things. On the surface, she might as well have been the neglectful parent she'd accused her husband of being, even if it was because she was busy tracking down her coworker's mysterious activities.

"Sometimes it feels like we'll always be on the rocks." They were a ship that had been made too top-heavy, too loaded down with secrets and lies, to ever make it out of the harbour. Just like the Vasa, that great Viking ship in the Swedish sea, doomed before it ever began because the king had ordered it to be built with too large a mast. "Or maybe we've always been on the rocks."

"Layla," Tatiana said, but her tone was only half admonishing. The other half seemed resigned. "You don't mean that."

"Oh, but I do." She rubbed a hand over her bump absently. "I feel sorry for these kids. Screwed up before they even begin."

"Cheers to that," Tatiana said drily, clinking a glass of sparkling water to Layla's tap. "It's okay. I turned out alright."

"Not all of us do," Layla murmured. Her own parents, while loving, had been distant, separated by the fact that Layla was an accident after ten years, when they'd expected to only have only one daughter. She'd been a hoped-for son, when her parents found out they were having what would likely be their last child. Then, after her birth, she'd been looked at as surplus. It wasn't until Amara's disappearance that her father had ever spoken to her about anything important at all.

"What was that?" Tatiana looked over at her, having been distracted by something or other outside the window.

Was that a flash of lightning?

No, the sky was perfectly blue.

"Nothing." She scanned the window again. What had it been?

A drone.

A camera flash from a drone.

"Tati," Layla said. "Close the curtains, please."

The urgency in her tone must have commanded speed, because Tatiana scrambled for a remote that immediately turned the curtains from sheer drapes to blackout curtains and tinted the windows to a dark charcoal.

"What's up?" Tatiana said quietly. Like she, too, knew that they were being surveyed.

"I believe we have a stalker." Layla felt goosebumps rise on her arms. "I can only guess who."

Amara.

"Well, I can't guess," Tatiana muttered.

Layla took a deep breath. "My sister."

#

"Feeling better?" Vihaan Bakshi's voice reached his ears when Hayden walked into the cafe to get a fix of his usual coffee order. The man was sitting in a crisply pressed suit at a table by the door, his gaze sharp and alert as though on the lookout for... well, Hayden wasn't sure what.

He might have jumped out of his skin if he hadn't known the man would be here. Perturbed by the constant surveillance in his house, he'd become far more eager to spy on others. Others, such as his wife's coworker. Vihaan Bakshi. The man whose suspicious behaviours were far too many and far too criminal for his liking. He'd kept a careful log of Vihaan's activities.

"You've heard of my injuries, I presume." Hayden considered briefly that Vihaan might have been the one to inflict them before he tossed the idea aside. Of course not. Vihaan Bakshi... Well, actually, where had he been on the night of the blackout?

"Your wife told me." Vihaan cleared his throat before he sipped his caffeinated drink. "Take a seat. Drinks are on me."

"In that case, I'll get an Irish coffee." The doctor hadn't cleared him to drive yet, so he had gotten here in a taxi. A cursory glance cast around the room suggested they were in the heart of Washington's elite. Well-heeled men and women in attire fit more for a boardroom than a coffee shop were grabbing their daily dose of caffeine before heading off to their legislation and bills and executive orders to debate, carry out, and pass.

"That's the spirit." Vihaan chuckled at his own joke and got up to place the order at the counter before resuming his seat.

"So, that was a crazy blackout a few months ago, wasn't it?" Hayden said.

"Hmm?" the other man's eyes, which had been fixed on a nearby potted plant, darted over to Hayden's. "Oh, the blackout. Yeah, that was really something else."

"I wonder who was behind it," he said. The words fell out of his lips before he could stop himself.

Vihaan took another sip from his lidded paper cup, the substance hidden by its container, making Hayden wonder what else he was hiding. "You wouldn't happen to have any inside contacts on that, would you? Any FBI sources?"

Though his tone was light, his words were anything but.

"I'm not with the FBI anymore." The admission felt heavier than it should have. "You know that, don't you?"

"I know that you're an international man of mystery." Vihaan's chuckle was darker than it should have been for two acquaintances having coffee.

"You've confused me with James Bond." Fueled by the repartee that was less witty and more barbed than a scorpion's tail, Hayden went on. "Perhaps that title would better apply to you?"

"Not sure you're on the mark, there." Vihaan leaned back in his chair, settling into the nonchalant pose of a hunter watching his prey run directly into its trap.

"Funny, because I don't know any international men of mysteries who don't have multiple identities, fake passports, and numerous foreign currencies in their living quarters."

Vihaan didn't blanch. He didn't let his jaw drop open. He didn't glare or deny the accusations.

But nor did he outright acknowledge them.

"You're far too bold, Song. I should knock you down a peg or two. Although I'd say someone's already done that."

"You know who it is," Hayden snapped.

He had to. He had the sudden conviction that Vihaan Bakshi knew exactly who was behind Hayden's injury, and he wouldn't rest until he discovered the culprit.

"You have no proof of that, do you? Nothing more than the hunches of a man who was discharged from the FBI... a man who recently suffered a traumatic injury that could have affected his mental state... the ramblings of a man who's been locked in his house for months..." Vihaan's twisted smirk distorted his face. He might have been handsome, if it wasn't for the depravity oozing from each pore.

"I'll get something," he said, he vowed. "I'll be back for you, Vihaan."

"Maybe you should be more concerned about your wife," suggested Vihaan calmly. "Or perhaps you're more worried about that little teenage runaway... What's her name? Callie?"

"Carly," he said, because he couldn't help himself, because he was a glutton for pain.

"Carly." Vihaan repeated the name like one would the title of an exotic animal or a flashy sports car. "I wonder how she's doing. Did she give birth yet?"

"I wouldn't know." The people at Rise Up might know, if they were still speaking to him. If they cared for him at all now that he'd been dropped off the face of the earth by his injury, felled by his wounds. "I wouldn't care."

That was a lie. He did care. He didn't know, but he did care.

"Interesting." Vihaan sipped his cup again before opening the lid to drain the dregs. He saw that it wasn't coffee or tea, but in fact clear. Water. Or perhaps vinegar, as that seemed more likely for such a man as Vihaan Bakshi.

He'd thought he had anticipated everything.

But what he hadn't expected was the glass shattering next to his seat.