Chapter 1 The earring
It starts with what many would call a bad omen: a cherished gift from the one you love breaking without warning. Bertha has never been the superstitious sort though. She has always assumed such clichés belong only in lousy old films.
And yet, when her earring fell off that day for no apparent reason, her heart did give an ominous throb.
It is a delicate piece of lapis lazuli and gold, shaped like a blue-lotus bell, and commissioned by her Egyptologist husband, Arthur von Normann. The original now stands behind glass in some quiet corner of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, labeled with no more than: New Kingdom, c. 14th century BCE. Lapis lazuli, gold. Findspot: Siwa. Field no. SVA-24/C3/L217. Nothing about her husband’s gloved hands once holding it, or the glint in his gray eyes as he examined it, or his team that had unearthed it, little by little, from the grip of millennial desert clay.
But Arthur told her that, as he brushed the last traces of sand from the piece, all he could think of was how she would look wearing it.
“Couldn’t keep the original, of course, so I had one remade for you.” He brushed her hair aside, then fastened it in her left ear himself, his fingertips warm against her skin. Bertha could almost picture it: Her gray-eyed Egyptologist handing the piece over to the Egyptian antiquities authorities in downtown Cairo, then heading straight to the nearby goldsmith to have another made for her. And because no matching piece had ever been found, she received only one as well—a private tribute to the most beautiful thing his career has ever given him.
Yet—ding. Five days earlier, as Bertha slipped off her lab coat, its gold hook suddenly gave way, and the lapis bell struck the linoleum floor. A chime so small that it should mean nothing, and yet later, in hindsight, it seemed like a warning: the first hairline crack in her world.
Exactly an hour later, the call came from his excavation site. There had been an accident: a newly unearthed chamber collapsed after Arthur entered it.
By the evening of the third day, he was back in Los Angeles after a fifteen-hour flight aboard an air ambulance, drifting in and out under heavy sedation. He had a mild traumatic brain injury—a concussion with a brief loss of consciousness, but no major intracranial injury on the scan. Before leaving Cairo, the last thing Bertha heard from his excavation team was what he said just before losing consciousness.
“Don’t let my wife know. She’ll cry.”
Just that.
Now for two days, she has sat beside his bed with both hands wrapped around one of his, while the monitors hum in mechanical pulses. There is only the sterile hush of the room, so quiet that she has to reach for him again, just to feel his heartbeat for herself.
It is there, beating, just as the monitors insist, yet slow and strained beneath her palm, far too fragile against the frantic beat of her own pulse. His left hand is cold, but still bears that familiar roughness against her skin. Arthur’s hands are lean-boned, elegant in a scholar’s way at first glance, yet never soft; years of grainy wind, sand, and fieldwork have weathered them, and she has always loved their callused warmth against her skin.
Only now, when her whole world has narrowed to this fraught hush, when everything has narrowed to his cold hand in her desperate grip, it feels… painfully real.
Drip, drip, drip. His other hand is hooked up to an IV, the fluid dripping steadily into his vein.
Its sound alone is enough to sting her eyes again. Bertha lowers her gaze and bites her lip to hold them back. One voice inside her whispers: He didn’t want you to cry. Remember? It was the last thing he said before passing out. So don’t.
But another, quieter one is praying, pleading.
Arthur, please. Wake up. As long as you are safe, I can bear whatever comes after.
Drip, drip, drip. The IV bag is running low. Time to get the nurse.
Bertha brushes a silent kiss against his ringed finger before gently releasing his hand and rising to her feet. As she heads for the ward door, her reflection meets her first in the dark glass: pale, black-haired, green eyes shadowed with strain.
She sighs, struck by the ominous thought that she already looks like a woman who has begun to lose him.
Yet outside his ward, the world is loud with curiosity, ravenous for spectacle. A large television drones in the corridor just beyond, catching every eye—patients, nurses, and doctors alike.
On screen is the new President, Reginald Mace, who came out only last week, just before the G20 summit now underway in Los Angeles, becoming America’s first openly gay President.
The footage now shows his first appearance on the summit’s opening day, flanked by two striking, almost twinlike SWAT-X agents: both blond, one a woman in a black suit, dashingly lethal as she opens the car door for the president; the other a man, an androgynous beauty, holding a plain black umbrella over him as he steps from Cadillac One in a silver-gray suit beneath a deluge of flashing cameras. Between them, they have already turned half the internet feral. Even here, the fever runs high: in the talk traded over coffee cups, in the eyes that keep drifting back to the screen, in the X-rays and reports lying half-forgotten in their hands.
Bertha lets out a breath and lowers her red-rimmed gaze. It feels as though three worlds are colliding at the ward door: the hushed one inside his ward, the bustling one in the corridor beyond, and the national drama unfolding across the HD screen. And she stands stranded on the threshold, crushed beneath the weight of all three.
But as she passes the TV, the camera catches both blond agents in black snapping their heads toward her departing figure in perfect unison, as if those identical lethal gazes have found her from either side of the President.
A beat. Then a burst of excited whispers runs down the corridor, and Bertha hears a seasoned nurse tell a newcomer, with the fond pride of someone speaking of her favorite little troublemakers, “Alice Chase and Auston Carter? Yes, those two blond disasters have been here a few times. The whole SWAT-X team comes here when they’re injured.”
Quietly, she thinks: Arthur belongs to that world too. Had he not been lying here, he would have been there among them, joining Alice and Carter. He had booked his flight for this, just before that chamber ceiling came down on him.
Arthur von Normann: Egyptologist. Former CIA. Now attached to SWAT-X special operations. Her husband, unlike her, had always had a way of slipping smoothly between those vast, poles-apart worlds.
Bertha politely stops a nurse in front of the nurses’ station. “Excuse me—my husband’s IV bag is almost empty.”
She could have pressed the call button, but after hours of stifling silence beside his bed, she needs an excuse to take a breath.
Behind her, the new nurse is still curious, pushing a rattling medical cart down the corridor.
“Does Agent Chase really read faces, like they said?”
“Yes. Give it time—you’ll see her charm half a room with it,” says the senior one.
Clatter. The cart rattles on. When Bertha glances back at the HD screen, the image has already shifted to a foreign leader delivering a speech. Alice and Carter are gone.
Clatter. But when Bertha and the nurse return to Room 420, she finds it in chaos: an overturned trolley, metal instruments strewn across the floor, monitors shrieking in alarm.
“Arthur!”
Her heart jolts. She rushes through the door, almost colliding with a nurse in scrubs backing away toward the door. Behind her, the other nurse she brought back gasps in panic.
“Sir—please calm down! Let Doc Lenny go!”
And then she sees him: the gray-eyed man standing barefoot in the middle of the room, still in his hospital gown, white bandages wrapped around his head. Yet his body is coiled in a grappler’s stance, his right arm wrenching a pale-faced doctor into a vicious joint lock. Blood runs down the back of his hand where he has torn out the IV line.
Arthur is awake. But when his eyes snap to her, she freezes on the spot. They are all hard, lethal edge, killing her relief in an instant like a drawn blade.
“Back off!” His voice comes out rough, unsteady, yet no less deadly for it.
“Arthur—”
Before thought can catch up, Bertha runs to him. Before she can even finish his name, his left hand clamps around her throat in a trained grip.
Behind them, the room erupts in screams as the door flies open with a thud as the two nurses bolt for help. Bertha’s back strikes the wall. Yet before she even registers the pressure on her throat, she stares into his eyes and, for the first time, finds none of the smiling warmth she has always known there. The molten gray hardens to flint. No recognition. Only the alertness and red-edged panic of a stranger, sharpened raw by pain.
“Arthur… you’re bleeding…”
She can barely speak. Her throat burns now; the words come out broken and strained, little more than a breath. Somehow, she can feel his wedding ring too, icy against the blaze in her throat, as her hands close instinctively around his left wrist. Oddly, for one suspended moment, all she can think of is his hand.
Arthur is… afraid.
“It’s all… right… Arthur, you… are safe,” she whispers under his grip, barely audible beneath the shrilling monitors. At her words, his gaze flickers, in a flash of confused shock, stark, almost naked.
Then something in his face changes. Not recognition, no. But in the next second, his fingers suddenly slacken, and he lets go as if burned, backing away a few steps, his eyes still fixed on her. The gray in them is bloodshot, wild with the panicked look of a man who has just woken to blood on his hands in a room of gore, even though it is her he has pinned to the wall, his hand locked around her throat.
The doctor wrenches free at last, catching himself against the overturned trolley before backing toward the door, his face still tight with pain.
“Security!” he shouts hoarsely as he staggers into the corridor. “Now!”
“Room 420! We have a situation here!”
Outside, urgent voices erupt, chaos spreading through the corridor as the two nurses from before come running back with help. Yet inside, the man who has just overpowered a doctor in his prime with one injured arm can only stare at her now, dazed, disoriented, his chest still heaving.
“You’re in a hospital, Arthur.”
A cough still catches in her throat, turning her voice hoarse. But Bertha goes straight for his right hand, pressing her thumb hard over the wound to stop the bleeding.
“It’s all right,” she tries to soothe him, her eyes already scanning around the room for gauze. “You’re safe. Do you want some water?”
“Who… are you?”
That is all he manages with a parched throat, his hand still caught between both of hers.
For a moment, everything goes utterly still. The color drains from her face, and she can only look at him. He is utterly bewildered now. Yet the moment he meets her gaze, he seems to regret the question at once. He stiffens, panic-stricken, as though some vital mechanism inside him has misfired, just before the pain registers.
Bertha hears something inside her drop. Not loudly, nor theatrical. Just the aching urge to throw herself into his arms and kiss his gray eyes, and the joy of his waking, suddenly seeming…silly. Stupid. Her pulse turns cold with it, freezing her to the bone.
As long as you are safe, I can bear whatever comes after.
The wish she made only a moment ago returns to her somehow, echoing. So this is the whatever, she thinks. This is the bargain.
Something falls, solid and small, like the chime of her broken earring. Bertha hears herself swallow. After a long, strained beat, it seems to take all her strength just to lift her right hand between them and show him her wedding ring.
“Arthur… I’m your wife.”
She hears her own voice, a hollow calmness; her hands tremble, just a little. For a moment, she feels almost light-headed.
But in the next heartbeat, it is he who sways, sharply, as if the floor has shifted beneath him. He stumbles backward and drops onto the edge of the bed. As the force drains from him, his body seems at last to remember the surgery, the blood loss, the pain.
“Arthur!”
Panic jolts through her, as she rushes forward. His eyes remain fixed on her, shaken, stricken, almost horrified, his left hand still half-raised, as if to touch her face, or to close around her neck again. Right when—bang. The door to Room 420 flies open as nurses and security rush in between them, voices colliding, hands reaching all at once. In an instant she is torn from him, the surge of bodies leaving them stranded like two islands in floodwater.
“Ma’am, how is your neck? Are you hurt?” “She’s bruising already.” “Sir, stay still!”
“No—don’t hurt him! Please, he didn’t mean it!”
Amid the commotion, Bertha hears herself scream as she struggles against the hands holding her back. “Careful—his head!”
Click. The ward door shuts, as outside, the corridor screen has cut back to the twinlike blond agents again. The woman lifts a black-gloved hand to her earpiece and issues an order before turning and catching the camera with her flint-hard blue gaze. For one strange instant, it feels as though she is watching a messy little melodrama playing out beyond the ward door’s dusky glass—the distressed wife and her violent husband.
Snap. The door to Room 420 opens again, admitting yet another nurse with a tray of sedatives into the already crowded room. It takes a while for this little melodrama to settle, and when it finally does, around Arthur von Normann cluster doctors, nurses, and security, like a military court. And the accused now looks wrong-footed, almost like a wolfdog with its ears pinned back.
Arthur now sits rigid against the pillows, all strained alertness and pain-edged nerves. His throat is still flaming raw, his head feeling as if someone has slammed it against a wall. A white-hot headache burns behind his eyes as a doctor—older than the first “Doc Lenny”—shines a penlight straight into them.
“Don’t move, sir. Keep looking at me.”
And this wolfdog stays nervously still, instead of biting his head off. Partly because some absurd instinct keeps telling him that the slightest furrow of his brow now will send the doctor backing off and bring all four guards crashing down on him; partly because of that small, stiff hand still clasped in his left.
“Good. Pupils are reacting,” the doctor says, finally removing the penlight.
Arthur steals another glance at the owner of the hand in his, only to find that the woman who claims to be his wife has bowed her head, her gaze lowered to the bed. Yet her right hand still holds his left in a loose grip, and he can feel the edge of her ring against his own. Somehow, it feels steady, a small coolness in the aching haze of his mind.
Her hand has been there ever since the wretched pupil check. He had winced when that blade of light cut into his eyes; then her hand came and stayed through it.
“Arthur. They won’t hurt you. It’s all right.”
She murmurs without looking at him, almost to the sheets she has been staring at ever since she fell silent. That was after she finally convinced the staff he was not dangerous, a while ago. Her hand is soft, but cold; her other hand remains clenched around the pillow’s edge, knuckles white.
His gaze keeps drifting back to her, lingering on the marks on her slender neck, now slowly reddening. It feels worse somehow even than the pounding in his head: the realization that he hurt her, and that she must be afraid of him now.
She cannot bear to look at me anymore. And she has every right to.
…Yet she still holds my hand. Still shields me anyway. The thought surfaces through the clouding pain of his head.
His eyes drop to his own ring again. He had already found a chance to inspect it covertly, without her noticing, of course. It is an enameled gold band, its winged pattern ancient, matching hers. Not old, but worn by time: scratches across the enamel, the inside smoothed by use, the circle itself slightly misshapen. Beneath it, he had found a pale line on his finger, perfectly tracing the band.
Thinking is no easy thing against the throbbing protest of his head, but when he turns the ring around slightly, it feels smooth. Familiar.
He thinks it must be his. It fits right.
His eyes keep straying to her ring, too, now and then in quick, guilty glances. The same design, the same Egyptian motif—but it looks far less worn, barely marked at all. No lighter band shows clearly against her pale skin. And yet, in her distress, her thumb keeps touching it, turning it a little, worrying at it as a private little habit.
He doesn’t know, of course, that Bertha, as a toxicologist, is used to taking off her ring before lab work and keeping it in her lab-coat pocket. He only thinks: If this were staged, they would have had two identical rings, not a pair marked by wear in such different ways.
So after a long, painful while, he arrives at the sort of conclusion Arthur von Normann, the brain of SWAT-X, would once have reached at a glance: it’s her ring.
So she is… his wife.
Everything in her keeps insisting on it, too. The way she said his name. The way she reached for his bleeding hand right after it had nearly choked her. That worried look in her eyes that almost seared him, even with his hand still on her neck. But that was before he asked that stupid question, and killed that look.
She loves him, in a way that cannot be faked.
…And he had put his hand around her throat, and frightened her.
The realization lands like a weight lodged in his chest, a thorn pressed into a raw nerve. Or perhaps like a skipped heartbeat, each time he looks at her and finds her gaze turning away.
Should never have hurt her. Or perhaps, never asked that stupid question. He had seen the way something in her eyes, something he could not name, had gone dim, banked down to embers.
He sighs, the sound rough and croaking. A beat later, a glass of water appears in her hand. She offers it to him without a word, her head still lowered, her shoulders drawn tight.
She has mistaken his distress for thirst, of all things. But Arthur still accepts the glass, taking a few quiet, fraught sips before setting it down. He wants to touch her shoulder, just lightly, to ease that stiffness. But the memory of his hand around her throat stops him cold.
…She’s already rigid with fear. He cannot scare her again.
Machines are beeping on all sides, joining in a thin, disturbing chorus. A blur of faces and shadows drifts in and out of his vision. Behind his eyes, the headache keeps building, drowning everything.
But he forces himself to keep still and cooperate, only tightening his fingers around her hand—just a little. He feels the sudden stiffness in hers, but she doesn’t pull away.
“Sir, can you tell me your full name?”
The older doctor has moved on to questions now.
“Arthur.”
His brow furrows again as his gaze flicks, uncertainly, to Bertha. She had called him that, hadn’t she?
No nod, no look. Still nothing, only her damp, downcast lashes and an ice-cold hand in his, held but barely felt. After a strained pause, he adds, hesitantly, “von… Normann.”
…It sounds right. Familiar.
He looks down again. Her hand feels right in his, soft and small enough to fit within his grasp, their rings nestled comfortably beside each other between their fingers. Then, suddenly, his heart stops for a beat.
A teardrop slips free and falls onto the enameled wing of her ring.
“I need a moment, s–sorry.” She rises with a hurried apology, her hand slipping from his as she turns toward the door without looking back, almost fleeing, her voice tight with restraint.
Almost on instinct, his left hand reaches after her, only to close on empty air. Another wave of pain flares behind his eyes; yet through the fog of headache, the drone of voices, and the hum of monitors, he can still hear his own heart.
It says: OUCH.
Click. The ward door flings open and shuts again right before his eyes, the tinted glass throwing his doleful reflection back at him. And if anyone here could read his face now, they would say he looked like a kicked puppy.
And the one who could actually read his face is Alice Chase, in the Convention Center right now, only blocks away.
Click. The heavy oak doors of the conference room seal shut behind her, locking the day’s diplomacy and oversized bargains safely inside. Alice sighs, pulls the earpiece free, and flicks it down beside her on the marble step.
Off camera, the besuited blonde is all languid arrogance and fatal charm, an obsidian-and-gold Egyptian cat-goddess pendant hanging from a thin gold chain over her chest. A few steps ahead, her counterpart and near-doppelgänger, Auston Carter, glances back at her, one gloved hand lifting to brush a stray strand of hair away with absent, almost indecent elegance.
“I’ll cover it. Take your break.”
The next second, a pack of gum comes flying at her face as he turns away. Alice catches it one-handed, snorts, and tears it open. He even got the right kind.
Pop. A huge pink bubble blooms—an obnoxious little middle finger to twelve straight hours on duty, five days running, babysitting world leaders through the G20 summit.
Alice drops onto the marble steps, closing her blue eyes for a moment, her fingers worrying at her obsidian cat pendant. Then she takes her phone out of her pocket and stares at the name glowing on the screen: Bertha darling.
Snap. The bubble bursts, petulant and loud, followed by a few lazy chews as she lets the cloying artificial sweetness clear the fog from her mind. She should call. See how Priest is doing.
But if he’s still unconscious, Bertha will only end up sad and crying again. Tsk. That jerk does nothing but break Bertha’s heart, make her cry, and pick the worst possible week to nearly die. Alice has been running on far too little sleep lately, which makes the urge to punch him in the face a lot less manageable.
She pops another piece of gum into her mouth and slips the phone back into her pocket.
When he wakes up, I’ll break his jaw for you.
She sighs. Terrible emotional first aid. Worst comfort line ever. So—not today.
“Chase and Carter.”
“Checkpoint C just flagged an unscheduled vehicle. Put eyes on it.”
Orders crackle through the earpiece beside her hand. Almost at the same moment, a junior aide slips through the narrow opening of the door and beckons her over. “Agent Chase—the President wants you back in.”
Tsk. There goes the break.
“Yes, boss,” Alice drawls, slipping her earpiece back in.
“Yes, boss.” Across the terrace, Carter turns from his patrol route with the same answer in perfect sync, only cooler. She looks up and meets his amused gold-green eyes.
With a lazy nod, Alice spits the gum into the wrapper and rises to her feet.
Thup. A flick of her wrist sends it into the trash can, as she slips through the narrow gap in the door.
Of course priest had to pick this exact moment to crack open his skull—the only useful part of him. Signature timing.
