ULAU MEDA, INDONESIA

JUNE 24, 2005

PRESENT DAY

Jules could tell that the waiting was driving Max crazy.

Crazier, that is, than usual.

Truth was, his former boss was seriously hurting. Jules had been around long enough to recognize burnout when he saw it. Of course, true to form, Max Bhagat didn’t burn out quietly.

No, he was going down with full fireworks.

The fact that he’d gone twelve rounds with Grady Morant was one of those wildly waving red flags.

Even Max himself had noticed it. I almost lost it, he’d admitted to Jules.

Dude. Ya think?

And that almost was seriously in dispute.

That, plus the refusal to sleep, the hundred-mile stare, the complete transformation from a well-dressed FBI team leader to this ripe-smelling terrorist look-alike... True, the jeans and sneaks were Jules’ contribution. But the GQ almost-beard and seriously grungy hat hair were all Max.

And yes, over the past few days their access to soap and water had been nonexistent, while their exposure to stifling heat had been unavoidable. But yikes.

Getting from Jakarta to the eastern part of Indonesia had been a hellish series of hops from island to island via plane. And all legs of the journey had taken far longer than any of them had hoped. The very last segment, a boat ride in the darkness from Kupang to this remote island in the middle of nowhere, had been particularly unbelievable.

Then, of course, there’d been the hike up the mountain through the jungle—also in the pitch blackness of night—to this CIA surveillance post which just so happened to be right in Emilio Testa’s neighborhood.

It was a modest corner apartment with windows looking out onto a central open square—which had, from the looks of it, been a marketplace during more prosperous times.

Apparently, back in the 1970s, Meda Island had been quite the tourist spot. It had had plenty of tony resorts as well as vacation houses—luxurious second homes to wealthy Europeans who had lots of frequent-flyer miles to kill. But Meda’s proximity to East Timor’s civil unrest—going on for decades now—brought new meaning to the travel bureau’s promise of a unique, unforgettable vacation, and the richie rich peoples had stopped coming.

The less well-to-do folks who moved in to all those deserted elegant homes didn’t have a problem with East Timor’s violence going on virtually in their backyard. They were the types whose businesses weren’t quite kosher—who not only thrived in the area’s new lawlessness, but ramped it up to a whole new level.

This CIA apartment that they were currently occupying had been set up about a year ago to perform surveillance on a local baddie believed to have al Qaeda ties.

He was just one of the happy, friendly people in Mr. Testa’s neighborhood, living two houses down from Mr. T himself.

Coincidence, much? God only knew. Although if Testa did have terrorist ties, it would make it that much easier for Jules to say yes after they captured him, when Max asked if he could throttle him.

Right now, however, all throttling was on hold. Max may have been seething with impatience, but Jules was glad for this necessary down time. And grateful that they had a home base that included a roof.

“Why don’t you take a break, too?” Jules asked Max, sitting next to him, in front of the window. They’d confirmed that Testa’s house, where Gina and Molly were being held, had no backdoor or even rear or side windows. Nestled up against the mountainside at the other end of that open square, there was only one way in or out—through the front.

If this was the right apartment. If Jules’s CIA contact, a man with the sole moniker of Benny, had gotten his info about Emilio Testa right.

Benny had missed their rendezvous at the dock in Jakarta, which was a giant pain in Jules’s ass because the agent was supposed to provide them with a CIA smorgasbord of techno-toys. Listening devices. Infrared goggles. A variety of microphones and minicams.

And Benny hadn’t answered his cell phone, so they’d boarded the seaplane sans equipment.

Which had sparked another argument between the members of his illustrious, nonofficial, 50 percent criminal, 50 percent psycho dream team.

Max now glanced back into the dimness of the CIA apartment, to where Jones was stretched out on the couch.

Mr. Most Wanted had already spent several hours wandering the neighborhood, getting to know the lay of the land.

“I don’t think I could sleep,” Max admitted to Jules. “I took a nap on the flight to Kupang...”

“For about forty minutes,” Jules pointed out. “And FYI, that was hours ago.”

Max just shook his head. “I just can’t...”

He looked out the window at the walls of that building across the dusty open market square, and Jules knew that Max would have sold his soul to the devil for X-ray vision, for just a glimpse of Gina, alive and unharmed.

The windows were all mirrored, otherwise Max would have been over there, climbing the side of the building like Spiderman, trying to look inside.

Please God, let Gina and Molly still be alive.

“Maybe you should just lie down and at least try to—” Rest, he was going to say, again, but Max cut him off.

“No.”

Instead of getting him to relax, Jules had incited that jumping muscle in the jaw thing. Damn it. “Sweetie, you’re killing me.”

He didn’t know how to help. If Max were anyone else, Jules would sit with him for a while, looking out at the night, and then start to talk. About nothing too heavy at first. Warming up to get into the hard stuff.

Although, maybe, if he tried that now, the man would either open up—Ha, ha, ha! Riotous laughter. Like that would ever happen—or he’d stand up and move outside of talking range, which would put him away from the window with nothing to look at, at which point he might close his eyes for a while.

It was certainly worth a try.

Of course there were other possibilities. Max could put Jules into a chokehold until he passed out.

So okay. Start talking. Although why bother with inconsequential chitchat, designed to make Max relax? And weren’t those words—Max and relax—two that had never before been used together in a sentence?

It wasn’t going to happen, so it made sense to just jump right in.

Although, what was the best way to tell a friend that the choices he’d made were among the stupidest of all time, and that he was, in short, a complete dumbfuck?

Max was not oblivious to Jules’s internal hemming and hawing. “If you have something you need to say, for the love of God, just say it. Don’t sit there making all those weird noises.”

What? “What noises? I’m not making weird noises.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “You are.”

“Like what? Like...?” He held out his hands, inviting Max to demonstrate.

“Like...” Max sighed heavily. “Like...” He made a tsking sound with his tongue.

Jules laughed. “Those aren’t weird noises. Weird noises are like, whup-whup-whup-whup”—he imitated sounds from a Three Stooges movie—“or Vrrrrrr.”

“Sometimes I really have to work to remind myself that you’re one of the Bureau’s best agents,” Max said. “You have something to say to me, Cassidy, say it. Or shut the fuck up.”

“All right,” Jules said. “I will.” He took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Okay, see, I, well, I love you. Very, very much, and...” Where to go from here...?

Except, his plain-spoken words earned him not just a glance but Max’s sudden full and complete attention. Which was a little alarming.

But it was the genuine concern in Max’s eyes that truly caught Jules off-guard.

Max actually thought... Jules laughed his surprise. “Oh! No, not like that. I meant it, you know, in a totally platonic, non-gay way.”

Jules saw comprehension and relief on Max’s face. The man was tired if he was letting such basic emotions show.

“Sorry.” Max even smiled. “I just...” He let out a burst of air. “I mean, talk about making things even more complicated...”

It was amazing. Max hadn’t recoiled in horror at the idea. His concern had been for Jules, about potentially hurting his tender feelings. And even now, he wasn’t trying to turn it all into a bad joke.

And he claimed they weren’t friends.

Jules felt his throat tighten. “You can’t know,” he told his friend quietly, “how much I appreciate your acceptance and respect.”

“My father was born in India,” Max told him, “in 1930. His mother was white—American. His father was not just Indian, but lower caste. The intolerance he experienced both there and later, even in America, made him a... very bitter, very hard, very, very unhappy man.” He glanced at Jules again. “I know personality plays into it, and maybe you’re just stronger than he was, but... People get knocked down all the time. They can either stay there, wallow in it, or... Do what you’ve done—what you do. So yeah. I respect you more than you know.”

Holy shit.

Weeping was probably a bad idea, so Jules grabbed onto the alternative. He made a joke. “I wasn’t aware that you even had a father. I mean, rumors going around the office have you arriving via flying saucer—”

“I would prefer not to listen to aimless chatter all night long,” Max interrupted him. “So if you’ve made your point...?”

Ouch.

“Okay,” Jules said. “I’m so not going to wallow in that. Because I do have a point. See, I said what I said because I thought I’d take the talk-to-an-eight-year-old approach with you. You know, tell you how much I love you and how great you are in part one of the speech—”

“Speech.” Max echoed.

“Because part two is heavily loaded with the silent-but-implied ‘you are such a freaking idiot.’ ”

“Ah, Christ,” Max muttered.

“So, I love you,” Jules said again, “in a totally buddy-movie way, and I just want to say that I also really love working for you, and I hope to God you’ll come back so I can work for you again. See, I love the fact that you’re my leader not because you were appointed by some suit, but because you earned every square inch of that gorgeous corner office. I love you because you’re not just smart, you’re open-minded—you’re willing to talk to people who have a different point of view, and when they speak, you’re willing to listen. Like right now, for instance. You’re listening, right?”

“No.”

“Liar.” Jules kept going. “You know, the fact that so many people would sell their grandmother to become a part of your team is not an accident. Sir, you’re beyond special—and your little speech to me before just clinched it. You scare us to death because we’re afraid we won’t be able to live up to your high standards. But your back is so strong, you always somehow manage to carry us with you even when we falter.

“Some people don’t see that; they don’t really get you—all they know is they would charge into hell without hesitation if you gave the order to go. But see, what I know is that you’d be right there, out in front—they’d have to run to keep up with you. You never flinch. You never hesitate. You never rest.”

Max’s unflinching gaze never left that house.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Jules asked him quietly, “if you let yourself peel that giant S off your shirt and take a nap? If you let yourself spend an hour, an evening, screw it, a whole weekend doing nothing more than breathing and taking enjoyment from living in the moment? What’s going to happen, Max, if—after this is over—you give yourself permission to actually enjoy Gina’s company? To sit with her arms around you and let yourself be happy. You don’t have to be happy forever—just for that short amount of time.”

Max didn’t say anything.

So Jules went on. “And then maybe you could let yourself be happy again the next weekend. Not too happy,” he added quickly. “We wouldn’t want that. But just happy in a small way, because this amazing woman is part of your life, because she makes you smile and probably fucks like a dream and yeah—see? You are listening. Don’t kill me, I was just making sure you hadn’t checked out.”

Max was giving him that look. “Are you done?”

“Oh, sweetie, we have nowhere to go and hours til dawn. I’m just getting started.”

Shit, Max said with his body language. But he didn’t stand up and walk away. He just sat there.

Across the street, nothing moved. And then it still didn’t move. But once again, Max was back to watching it not move.

Jules let the silence go for an entire minute and a half. “Just in case I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, “I believe with all my heart that you deserve—completely—whatever happiness you can grab. I don’t know what damage your father did to you but—”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Max interrupted. “You know, what you said. Just go home from work and...”

Holy shit, Max was actually talking. About this. Or at least he had been talking. Jules waited for more, but Max just shook his head.

“You know what happens when you work your ass off?” Jules finally asked, and then answered the question for him. “There’s no ass there the next time. So then you have to work off some other vital body part. You have to give yourself time to regrow, recharge. When was the last time you took a vacation? Was it nineteen ninety-one or ninety-two?”

“You know damn well that I took a really long vacation just—”

“No, sir, you did not. Hospitalization and recovery from a near-fatal gunshot wound is not a vacation,” Jules blasted him. “Didn’t you spend any of that time in ICU considering exactly why you made that stupid mistake that resulted in a bullet in your chest? Might it have been severe fatigue caused by asslessness, caused by working said ass off too many 24/7’s in a row?”

Max sighed. Then nodded. “I know I fucked up. No doubt about that.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately.” He glanced over to where Jones was pretending to sleep, arm up and over his eyes. “I’ve been playing God too often, too. I don’t know, maybe I’m starting to believe my own spin, and it’s coming back to bite me.”

“Not in the ass,” Jules said.

Max smiled but it quickly faded. “Yeah, I think it’s got me by the throat.” He rubbed his forehead as Jules sat and watched him.

“It’s always in my head,” Max continued quietly. Almost too quietly for Jules to hear. “All the things I need to do. Everything I’m not doing. I can’t leave it behind, like files on my desk, and just go home without it.” He glanced at Jules and there was serious pain in his eyes. “How could I ever expect someone like Gina to put up with that?”

Whoa.

Okay. They weren’t just talking now, they were talking.

“How did you expect Alyssa to put up with it?” Jules countered. “You asked her to marry you.”

Silence. It stretched on, and Jules was just about to bitchslap himself for bringing up Alyssa Locke—his friend and former FBI partner and obvious sore spot—when Max spoke.

“She used to put in even longer hours at work than I did,” he said. “There were times she made me feel like a slacker.”

Jules could relate. Whenever he’d gone in to work, no matter how early, Alyssa was already there. “For a while, I thought she was saving rent by living in her office.” He laughed. Then stopped. “All kidding aside, you know that she was using work as a distraction, right? I mean, now that she works in the civilian sector—which she loves doing, by the way—she actually takes vacation days. Weekends. She and Sam just bought a new house—a total fixer-upper. They’re going to do all the work themselves.”

“That’s...” Max laughed. “How would Sam put it? Un-fucking-believable.”

“She’s really happy,” Jules said.

Max nodded. “I’m glad. She made the right choice—by not marrying me.”

“Because... you didn’t really love her?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” Max said. “Does love make you feel like you might need serious medication? Like you’re going to explode because you both want this girl and you want to protect her—and it’s got to be one or the other and you can’t do either and it twists your gut into a knot and makes you act like a freaking crazy man and then everyone loses? Shit.”

Jules pretended to think about that, his finger on his cheek. “Hmmm. I’m going to take that as a no,” he said. “That you didn’t really love Alyssa, because when you say girl, you’re usually talking about Gina, and sweetie, hello, the Gina I know is one hundred percent woman. You need to start your metamorphosis into a real human boy by making yourself a little less nuts, okay? Please stop calling her something she’s not.”

Max gave him a look that was frosty. “So all I have to do is stop calling Gina a girl, and everything will be fine. Just like that, we live happily ever after.”

“You’re not going to be happy until you give yourself permission to be happy,” Jules argued, “until you accept the fact that you cannot save the lives of everyone in the entire world. People die, Max. Every single day. You can’t save them all, but you can save some of them. Unless you kill yourself working too hard. Then you end up saving... let’s see, do the math, carry the no one... The number I come up with is zero.”

“What if one of the people I want to save is Gina? What if I want something... I don’t know, better for her—damn it, that’s not the right word—”

But Jules had already jumped on it. “Better than what?” He made a thoroughly disgusted noise. “Better than sharing her life with a man who’s, in his own words, ‘freaking crazy’ about her? A man who’s earned the respect and admiration of every single person he’s ever worked with—including three different U.S. presidents? A man who manages to be sexy even when he smells bad? Max, come on, how much better do you need to be? IMO, you need some serious, serious therapy.”

“No,” Max said. “Not... I meant different. Less... I don’t know, hard. Less...” He closed his eyes. Exhaled. “I imagine the future and I see myself hurting her. And... God, I see her hurting me. It’s unavoidable. But I can’t stay away from her. I’m going to go in there—” he gestured to the still-silent house across the square “—and I’m going to get her out, and I’m going to bring her home and I’m never going to let her go. Until I have to. Until the inevitable heartbreak.”

Okay. Jules sat in silence for a good long time. “Well,” he finally said. “Way to go, Mr. Romantic. And they lived pathetically and disgruntledly not-so-forever after.”

The muscle was jumping again in Max’s jaw. “Let’s just stop talking about this, all right? It’s not helping.”

Jules let the quiet of the night weave its way around them for three whole minutes this time.

“You know, I spent years,” he finally broke the silence, because damn it, maybe it would help if Max heard this, “in this really... toxic relationship with a man named Adam who just... He kept ripping my heart out of my chest and... No. I kept letting him rip my heart out. I just kept taking him back.

“Thing is, I got to the point where I knew he was going to hurt me again. I mean, I did learn, you know. I just didn’t learn. And I made the same mistake over and over, because there was this undaunted part of me, this voice in my head that just didn’t accept the reality—like, ‘This time, it’ll be different. This time, he’ll really love me the way I want to be loved.’

“Eventually I reached this point where I had to silence that eternally optimistic, six-year-old, there-is-a-Santa part of me. I had to lock it away, and I did. And once I did, I could walk away from Adam. Screw it, I found out I could walk away from... anyone, if I needed to. Which didn’t mean I didn’t grieve the loss of that relationship, because shit, it sucked, and I did.”

Jules was silent for a moment, thinking about those movie billboards, those pictures on the sides of all those buses, everywhere he went. But then he said, “Except, one day, when I woke up, I realized I was grieving more for the loss of my inner child. I didn’t like the person I was becoming without that happy little voice—too grim, you know?” Too much like Max. He didn’t say it, but he knew Max got the message.

“So I spent some serious time thinking about what my six-year-old self really wanted,” Jules continued quietly. “And I discovered that it wasn’t Adam in particular. It wasn’t Robin, either—this other... Never mind. That’s not...” He shook his head. “What I’m saying is that I realized I didn’t want Adam—I wanted my ideal of Adam. What I wanted was someone like the Adam that I’d imagined. I wanted someone to love who would love me in return, according to my definition of love and respect.”

Max sighed. “Do you ever just sit? Quietly? Without talking?”

“You want me to shut up before I even get to the actual point of the story?” Jules asked.

“Oh, there’s a point? In that case—”

“Screw you. Sir.”

“—carry on.”

“The point is,” Jules said, “that I was able to take that clamoring, make some adjustments, and set my inner six-year-old free again.”

Max obviously didn’t get it.

“Instead of turning myself into some dark, grim, unhappy person,” Jules explained, “with no sense of hope—oh, say, like your father—I changed the message. It’s still a bonafide six-year-old war cry: Some day my prince will come. Which has certain problems, I know. I mean, hello. Looking for perfection much?

“Anyway. I’m a work in progress. But I’m telling you this because I know that somewhere inside of you, in some long-forgotten spider hole, is your inner hopeful child. You need to find him, sweetie. And you need to let him come back out to play. You don’t need to spend a lot of time psycho-analyzing what it was—your father?—that made you lock up that Santa-believing part of you, if you don’t want to. Although, it couldn’t hurt. I’m a big fan of self-reflection and self-knowledge. But even if you don’t, you can still give that part of you a new message: ‘I’m allowed to be happy. I’m allowed to let Gina love me.’ And maybe then, after we kick down those doors tomorrow, you can take her home without all that inevitable doom bullshit.”

Max nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Except... I think Gina’s pregnant.”

What?

“No, she couldn’t be,” Jules said. “She wasn’t seeing anyone. I mean, aside from the crush it sounded like she had on Leslie—Jones—when she first met him, and you so don’t want to hear about that... Seriously though, I got a letter from her, just a month ago. She would’ve told me. And you know I would’ve told you.”

“Yeah, apparently she was,” Max told him. “A Kenyan. Paul Jimmo. He was killed a few months ago, in a fight over water rights.”

“No,” Jules said, relieved. “You’re wrong. She mentioned him in one of her letters. He owned a farm about a hundred miles north of the camp. Where he lived with his wife and kids. Sweetie, he was married.”

Max stared at him.

“Apparently, he asked Gina to be his second wife,” Jules told him. “For a while it was kind of a running joke between them, because, well, Gina. Not exactly the co-wife type. And even if she liked him... Which she did at first, but then he started to get a little too persistent, which freaked her out... But even if, God, even if she loved him, which she didn’t, she wouldn’t have messed with a married man. Not Gina. You know that as well as I do.”

The look on Max’s face, as he took in that news, was terrible.

And Jules knew what he was thinking. If Gina hadn’t been seeing someone...

“How do you know she’s pregnant?” Jules asked.

Max took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it. Handed it to him.

It was actually two pieces of paper. Some kind of letter and what looked like a receipt. Jules quickly read them both. “Did you call—”

“Yeah,” Max said. “They wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t have time to go through the right channels. I don’t even know Germany’s privacy laws—if there are even channels to go through.”

“This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.”

He didn’t sound convinced.

“Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She is pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but...” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but, Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort.

It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer.

Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth.

“So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.”

It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion—across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there.

And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.

When Molly came out of the bathroom, Gina was taking apart the metal bed-frame, unfastening the nuts and bolts with her bare fingers.

“We’ll only have one chance for this,” she said, handing Molly an ungainly length of metal, complete with bed leg and little wheel on the end. It was L-shaped the long way, designed to hold the bed’s box spring, which made it hard to grip comfortably. “We have to be ready for ’em. You should definitely put your clothes on. They’re still damp, but we have to be prepared to run.”

“These people have guns,” Molly pointed out. She tried to hold the piece of metal up like a baseball bat, over her shoulder, ready to swing. It was heavy, but was it really heavy enough to knock a grown man unconscious?

“Gun, singular,” Gina said.

“We don’t know that.” The mattress was leaning up against the wall, so Molly pulled out one of the pair of chairs that were tucked under a small table, over in the corner.

“Last time Emilio came in here, his gun was nowhere in sight. You know, he may not have ammunition,” Gina, who had never had the not-very-fun experience of being shot by a gun, informed her. “He never fired his weapon, even when we were being shot at.”

“Or he might have lots and lots of ammunition.” Molly sank down into the chair, still wobbly-legged. Truth was, he’d only need two bullets to end three lives.

“But maybe not.” Gina was determined. “If he doesn’t, it’s only our fear holding us here.”

“That and the angry little man in the hall with the crowbar,” Molly reminded her.

Gina hesitated. “You thought he was angry?”

“Either that or badly constipated.” While she was showering—carefully, and only small portions of herself at a time, thanks to that biopsy—Gina had filled her in on both the world events and the more local newsflash that the mysterious “they” who wanted Grady Morant had kidnapped Emilio’s wife, creating a full-fledged chain of pain.

“Get dressed,” Gina ordered her again, definitely one-track. “Seriously, Mol, get your sneakers on, too. As soon as you’re ready, I’m going to open that door. For all we know, Crowbar Guy isn’t even out there anymore. If he is...” She hefted her own length of metal, complete with castor.

“I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” Molly told her as she pulled on her damp pants. “I’m still really dizzy. And queasy. And bashing people over the head isn’t really my thing.”

“You should have something to eat.” Gina started for the cans of food.

Oh, urp. “No, actually, please, I shouldn’t,” Molly said.

“We better take it with us,” Gina decided. She took one of the pillowcases off the bed, loaded the canned goods inside. “I know you don’t like the idea of hurting anyone, but the alternatives—”

“I know what the alternatives are,” Molly told her friend as she tied the laces to her sneakers. Jones—dead. Or worse. The two of them, including her baby—dead. Or worse. “And I’ll bash if I have to. You better believe it. What I meant was I’m probably not very good at it.” She sat down again. “You still haven’t convinced me, though, that we stand a prayer of a chance against that gun.”

“Shhh!” Gina said, holding up her hand.

There were voices in the hallway. Oh, Lord.

“We should run for the garage—it was straight down the hall, to the left,” Gina instructed her, moving closer to the door, metal bed frame segment held up over her head, in prime bashing position.

Oh, Lord.

“Honey, please can’t we try something else first?” Molly said as quickly as possible, moving to back her up, but not quite sure where to stand. The idea was to bash the person coming through that door, not Gina. And, likewise, not get bashed by Gina in return. “Like, pretending to be really sick? Pretending one of us needs to go to the hospital? Maybe Emilio’ll—”

“He’s not just going to let us go,” Gina said. “You’re crazy if you think—”

“We should talk to him at least,” Molly said.

“Shhh,” Gina said again.

What was that noise out in the hall? It sounded like some kind of animal or...

A very young child?

The door opened and a little boy—he couldn’t have been more than two years old—stood teetering on the threshold.

“Don’t!” Molly shouted at Gina.

But Gina was not about to hit a toddler. In fact, she stepped in front of Molly, ready to block her blow.

Emilio appeared then. He took one look at them—Molly still had that piece of metal raised over her head—and scooped the child into his arms.

Although it was hard to tell if his goal was to protect the boy or use him as a shield.

“I see you’ve been busy,” he said to them in his charming accent. “May I introduce to you my grandson, Danjuma? I thank you both most humbly for not hurting him.”