Page 95 of Till Death Do Us Part

Elaine leaned over the table. “You can’t plan to die in there.”

Petra chuckled. “We’ve gotta die somewhere.”

“No,” Elaine said. “We can’t accept any suicide missions. We need to prioritize everybody coming out alive. Even if it means we fail for now. If we come out of it alive, it means we can try again another time.”

“We don’t have time to wait and see,” Vera said, and Jenna spoke softly.

“You at least have as much time as it takes for you two to heal from your injuries. You’re not storming an abandoned warehouse right now, let alone the Blackbird headquarters.”

Vera pushed out a sigh, slumping back in her seat. There was something more than usual driving her to this kind of fervor. I wondered what Quayle had said to her.

“Then we’ll try to figure out the weaknesses of the building in the meantime,” Vera conceded finally. “And get the distributed attack planned out. Together with Yulia.” She gave me a strange look, almost a smile. “I guess we’re counting on you, Mikhailovna.”

“Don’t get used to it, Wolf.”

Chapter 46

glenn

I chuckled.

“No, no,” I said. “No need to worry. It’s almost quaint. I’d never known you could fail before, Quayle.”

He folded his hands on the desk, not saying anything, just staring straight ahead. I turned back to my poster board, pinned with references and documents—and at the center of it all, Elaine Whitner.

Ah, Elaine. It had been foolish of me to overlook her from the beginning. More than Vera, Yulia, any of them… this was Elaine’s work.

And she would make an excellent Blackbird once we’d finished our work with her. She was a bleeding heart, from the sounds of things. Extorting her would be easy once we had her in our clutches.

And she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. It would be quite agreeable to spend some time with her. Everybody had a price, and it wouldn’t be hard to find Elaine’s.

“It was for the best,” I said finally. “We’ve fully contained the information leak about the Whitecliff operation. And given Vera’s and Elaine’s bond now… it would be a shame to let that go to waste. I nearly made a foolish error by having them all killed.” I clasped my hands together. “Forget Vera, Petra, Jenna, and even Yulia. Forget all of them. We get Elaine, alive, at any cost.”

“Yes, sir.” He stood up. “Do we proceed with the planned lever?”

I chuckled. “Oh, yes. Elaine Whitner is already on a string. All we need to do is pull it.”

I looked back at the poster board, following the line from Elaine off to our key variable. Elaine’s weakness… and our easy path to victory.

Her mother.

Chapter 47

elaine

Over the coming days, Vera settled down, slowly allowed herself to relax. Jenna and I were constantly at her side, looking after her as she recovered, and the raw, bleeding wounds of it—not just the bullet wound, but the one Quayle had left in her heart—slowly began to heal.

She smiled again in places, the light coming back into her eyes. When we were all gathered together for a meal and Petra was reporting the results of a scouting excursion while she was shoveling food off the plate into her mouth, throwing it over herself in the process, and Caitlyn had to shove her and remind her Elaine set out utensils for a reason, Vera laughed again, and my heart softened hearing the sound.

Yulia would make her wry, sarcastic remarks, and Vera would return them just the same way, but it was clear things had changed between them—even with the loaded tension, there was an undercurrent of intense respect.

They even played together at points. There were a few string instruments in the music room, and Yulia played the violin while Vera was on the piano. And even though the two of them were different in so many ways, in those moments, when Caitlyn and I sat in the music room together listening, it felt like they were two halves of a greater whole.

We made sure to get out of the manor, too, just to keep alert of our surroundings, but also to keep us feeling fresh. We would squeeze in a little outing together while we went as well. One time we went shopping, which mainly involved Vera dressing me up in the most beautiful dresses I never could have imagined seeing myself in, but I was spoiled to realize I couldn’t protest because… well, it made Vera happy.

Yulia made fun of her for it—taking time out of mission tasks to go play dress-up with her wife—but all that meant was that Petra was able to make fun of Yulia when she caught her sneakily trying to sample some different perfumes.

Another time we went to the concert hall, where the elevator was out and Petra shocked and horrified the attendants by carrying Caitlyn and her chair up the stairs while chiding them about accessibility. The show was beautiful, Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, but the finer details of it were lost on me compared to Vera, who heaved heavy breaths in the final movement, deeply moved by the swelling brass.