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A strong wind gusts against the windows, snow starting to fall again. I give voice to the thoughts I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a week now.

“What if we stay here?”

She leans up on an elbow, looking at me. “For how long?”

“As long as we want.”

“I love it here,” she says. “But I do want to find Briar and Marcus at some point.”

I lean on my elbow so we’re at eye level, putting my other hand around her hip. “I’m good with that. I guess what I mean is I’m done with the ILF and saving the world, if you don’t already know that. This is what I want. Just taking care of us and the people we love.”

A smile tugs on her lips. “I needed this. I’ve loved every second of it. But would you be mad if I wanted something different?”

A boulder of dread fills my chest. I never even considered that this was temporary for her. That I’m the only one falling deeper and harder in love and feeling no urge to pump the brakes.

“No, of course.” I clear my throat. “I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give me. I hope none of this has been⁠—”

She covers my lips with her fingertips, silencing me. “That’s not what I mean. I want to be with you, too. I meant about saving the world.”

My heart resumes its regular pattern. “I go where you go. So as long as we’re together, we can do anything you want.”

Warmth fills her eyes and she kisses me softly. “Thank you.”

“What do you have in mind?”

She gets into a full sitting position, untangling a blanket to wrap around herself. “I think we should go open that mountain vault in Montana.”

I pull my brows together, wondering if she misunderstood what I told her about the former government’s sealed fortress.

“It’s locked and no one knows the password. There’s only one attempt left before the system shuts down.”

She looks unfazed. “Apollo was a Greek god. The Romans did adopt and rename lots of Greek gods, but not Apollo. He kept his name.”

“Okay ...”

“You said the former president was a history buff. And for the clue ‘thought he could beat Apollo,’ Marsyas is a good guess. He challenged Apollo to a musical contest and got flayed alive when he lost. There’s a famous painting of it. Not one I’d hang up in my living room, if I even had one. But the answer isn’t Marsyas. A real student of history, who knows The Odyssey well, would choose Eurytus.”

I sit up beside her, my pulse racing. She keeps talking, and I hang on every syllable.

“He’s less known than Marsyas, even though Homer included him in The Odyssey. One of my tutors drilled The Odyssey into my brain, and I remember Eurytus because he was an archer. He boasted that he could outshoot Apollo, so Apollo smote him for his arrogance. Then Eurytus’s son, Iphitus, inherited the bow, and he gifted it to Odysseus. It was the one Odysseus used⁠—”

“He thought he could beat Apollo.”

She grins at my interruption. “Yes, he did. And that bow was the one Odysseus used for the contest to take his home back from the suitors in The Odyssey. Someone who knows history would see the meaning in it.”

“Holy shit, Amira.”

Her smile fades. “Caveat—there’s the most widely used spelling of his name, and then there’s the direct transliteration.”

“And we only get one crack. Which one do you think it is?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. It depends on how much of a purist the president was. My gut is telling me it’s the more widely used one, because why would he choose the more obscure one?”

My mind is reeling. If that vault contains what the CIA guy said it does, whoever controls it arguably holds more power than anyone else on the continent.

“Is anyone guarding it?” she asks me.

“No. So few people know where it is that it doesn’t need a guard. It’s impenetrable.”