Free Jigsaw (Black Raven Book 2) by Stella Barcelona

consoled them.
    Fortunately, she didn’t need or want his consolation. Didn’t need him for a thing that mattered, which had been–and always would be–their reality. She’d composed herself fast, turned away from him and to Abe and Charles, and comforted them with a hand on their arms and gentle words. She had braced herself for a phone call to Eric’s wife. Zeus handed her his phone for the call, stepped discreetly away, yet listened as she handled the difficult task with compassion, grace, and dry-eyed dignity.
    By twelve forty-five, she’d retreated to her own room. She hadn’t looked like she was about to break down as she climbed up the stairs. He’d left her at the doorway of her bedroom. He’d asked her whether she was okay, and her one-word reply had been, “Fine.”
    On the emotional side of things, she was a mirror image of him. It was damn plain unsettling to watch her in action.
    “Ragno?” he asked as he scanned secure intel on his iPad. The Boulevard Saint-Germain bomber had blown up with the bomb. Shrapnel had flown for a city block. Bomb mechanism disintegrated. Eighteen confirmed deaths. Many others injured.
    “Yes?” Her crisp, steady voice in his ear greeted him.
    As long as Zeus worked the Dixon-ITT job, Ragno was his. She and the team of Denver-based analysts working on security for the Amicus team would operate in real time with him. Their time zone would be the time zone where he and the team were located. They would process and analyze a steady stream of information deemed necessary to keep Sam and the Amicus team safe. They’d discard the clutter, organize the need-to-know data, and pass it to Zeus. “Can’t fucking believe we started this job by losing one.”
    “If you hadn’t followed your hunch and gotten there earlier than planned, you’d have lost four,” Ragno answered. “One went down, but you saved three.”
    Two minutes later and they’d all have been dead. Ragno was right. He pushed his frustration aside, parking it far away. Personal frustration would only get in the way. “Tomorrow’s proceedings are still a go?”
    “Despite the Boulevard Saint-Germain bombing and Moss’s death, tomorrow’s ITT proceedings have not been cancelled. Media’s showcasing the bombing. There’s an upsurge in internet chatter among various groups, some credible terrorist organizations, some not so credible, targeting the ITT proceedings.” Ragno rattled off some familiar names. Zeus mentally filed them.
    “If Dixon has his way,” Zeus informed her, “we won’t have to worry about this for long. Job’s over if Sam re—”
    “You just can’t call her Samantha, can you?”
    “No.” She’d always be Sam to him. In a move that was out of character for him, and for reasons he hadn’t realized at the time, when he first met her and she introduced herself as Samantha, he had shortened it to Sam. A pet name only he had used, apparently.
    Privately, she was his Sam. Though in reality, not his any longer, and probably never had been. Seven years earlier, her all-American patrician good looks had stolen his breath. With one turn of her head, a glance from eyes that revealed intelligent curiosity, and a quick flash of her natural, easy smile, she’d claimed a large chunk of his heart.
    Not that he knew it at the time. It took him years to understand what had happened, because he wasn’t a man who was used to letting things like feelings filter into his life.
    “Don’t worry, Ragno. I’m fine. I’ll be even better once she resigns.” Except Zeus knew Sam, her ambitions, and the root of them, and he didn’t need new intel from Ragno to tell him those things.
    “You sound hopeful.”
    Hopeful?
    Ragno had a way of hearing things that others didn’t and she knew him better than anyone. Since saying yes to the job, each passing moment tightened an invisible tourniquet on his chest and he didn’t doubt that Ragno knew that, as well. The feeling of impending personal doom