Chapter 1: Ms. Graham
The new head of your protective detail is late, which is how you know it's him before he walks in the door.
Not late late. Four minutes. But your detail has been run for six years by men who arrive nine minutes early and stand in your foyer like coat racks with earpieces, and this one is four minutes behind, and when the knock comes it isn't the official knock, the two-and-two the Secret Service taught you. It's one. Like someone who isn't sure he should be knocking at all.
You open the door yourself. Agent Morrow, behind you, makes a pained noise; you're not supposed to open your own door. You do it anyway.
"Ms. Graham," says Leon S. Kennedy.
You'd thought about this. Of course you had. You're twenty-six, not stupid, and when your father called you on Sunday and said, Ash, I'm putting someone new on you, someone I trust, you knew. You'd spent three days deciding what you'd say. You had it down to two drafts: one cool and gracious, and one that started with the word "you" and ended with something you'd learned from your Krav Maga instructor, who is from Haifa and swears like a sailor.
You don't say either one. You stand in your doorway on a cold February morning in Georgetown with your hair still wet from the shower and look at him.
He's older. That's the first thing. It's been six years since you saw him in person, at the hospital at Walter Reed after they burned the Plaga out of you, when he came by once, stood at the end of your bed for nine minutes and told you you'd done good. His hair is still that ash-blond, still falling across his eyes, but there's grey at the temples now. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that weren't there in Spain. He's wearing a dark suit and an earpiece and the expression of a man walking into a building he expects to explode.
His eyes are the same. Very blue. Fixed on a point about two inches to the left of your face.
"You're late," you say.
"Traffic on M Street."
"There's always traffic on M Street."
"Then I should have planned better." His gaze flicks past you, to Morrow, to the hall, the staircase, the windows. Counting exits. You can see him doing it. "May I come in, ma'am?"
Ma'am.
"Sure," you say, and step back. "Agent Kennedy."
You learn the new rules over the next three days, mostly by breaking them.
Rule one: Leon goes through every door first. You learn this on Tuesday when you try to walk into the Foundation's offices on K Street ahead of him and he puts one hand flat on the door and holds it shut until you step aside, and doesn't say a word, and doesn't look at you.
Rule two: you don't drive yourself. You learn this on Wednesday when you take the keys to your own car off the hook and find him already sitting in the driver's seat.
Rule three: he doesn't use your first name. You learn this on all three days, every time he says Ms. Graham, which is often, in the same even voice, like he's reading it off a card.
"You used to call me Ashley," you say on Thursday, from the back seat of the armored Suburban. You're on your way to a donor lunch at the Hay-Adams, a room full of people who'll want to touch your arm and ask about Spain. You hate donor lunches. You're good at them anyway.
"That was a different assignment."
"It was the same me."
"Not really." He checks the mirror. Changes lanes. "You were a hostage. I was getting you out. Now you're a protectee and I'm running a detail. Different rules."
"So I'm a protectee."
"Yes, ma'am."
You lean forward between the seats until you're close enough to see the tiny scar at the corner of his jaw, white against the stubble. "Agent Kennedy, I spent a week in a castle with you. You carried me across a lake. I watched you fight a man who turned into a giant spider. I've seen you eat a fish raw." You lower your voice. "Morrow's in the passenger seat and Agent Davis is listening on comms, and everybody here knows you once said 'Where's everyone going? Bingo?' to a crowd of possessed farmers. I think we're past ma'am."
Morrow makes a sound like he's swallowed his earpiece.
Leon's eyes meet yours in the rearview mirror. Just for a second. Something moves behind them, something warm and pained and quickly put away.
"Bingo was a good line," he says.
"It was a terrible line."
"It was the best I had at the time." He looks back at the road. "Sit back, please, Ms. Graham. And put your seatbelt on."
The thing nobody tells you about surviving is how much of it is anger.
You were twenty when they took you. Home for a weekend, out jogging on a trail near the house. You woke up in a church in rural Spain with a parasite in your spine and a man in purple robes telling you that you were going to be the Lord's instrument. For a week you were dragged through villages and castles and caves by people with black veins and blank eyes, and you screamed, and you hid, and you were rescued. Over and over. Rescued out of a church, out of a dumpster, out of a cage. Rescued by a man who never once made you feel stupid for needing it, and who walked into your hospital room six months later and called you brave.
You did not feel brave. You felt like a package. So you went home and you learned to shoot. Then you learned to fight. Then you started a foundation for the survivors no one else was helping, the families from Raccoon City and Terragrigia and Harvardville and the tiny villages in Spain no one could find on a map, and you stood up in front of Senate committees and made old men cry, and you stopped, very deliberately, being a thing that needed to be carried.
And you wrote to him.
Not often. Once a year, around the anniversary. Then twice, sometimes. A letter on paper, mailed to the DSO, because you knew he'd hate email. You told him about the foundation. About your shooting scores. About the first time you broke a sparring partner's nose. About your father's second inauguration, how cold it was, how you'd thought about Spain the whole time because the wind smelled like snow. You never asked him for anything. You never said anything you couldn't take back.
He never wrote back. Not once. Six years.
You think about this on Thursday night, at home, in your gym in the basement, while you take your anger out on a heavy bag in a sports bra and leggings near midnight. You hear him come down the stairs. You don't turn around.
"It's late, Ms. Graham."
You hit the bag. Left, right, elbow. "Do you spar, Agent Kennedy?"
"Not with protectees."
"Then I guess you'll just have to stand there and watch." You hit it again, hard enough that the chain rattles. "Or you can tell me why you never answered a single one of my letters. Either is fine."
Silence behind you. A long one.
"I read them," he says.
You stop. You turn. He's standing at the bottom of the stairs with his jacket off and his tie loosened, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he's looking at you. Not two inches to the left. At you. Your bare shoulders and your wet hair and your taped hands. He looks for a long moment, and then he drags his eyes back up to your face with visible effort, and his jaw goes tight.
"All of them?" you ask.
"All of them."
"And you just. What? Read them and put them in a drawer?"
"Something like that."
You cross the mat toward him. He doesn't step back. You stop close enough that you can smell him, gun oil and coffee and something warm underneath, close enough that you have to tip your head back to hold his eyes.
"Then why," you say, very quietly, "didn't you write back?"
He opens his mouth. Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't get to. His earpiece crackles, loud enough that you hear it, Morrow's voice, sharp and fast. Leon's hand goes to his ear. His whole body changes, you watch it happen, the man disappearing and the agent coming up through him like a blade from a sheath.
"Say again." A pause. "Don't touch it. I'm coming up."
"What is it?" you ask.
He's already taking the stairs two at a time. You follow him. He doesn't tell you not to, which tells you how bad it is.
Your front door is open. Morrow is standing on the step with his gun drawn and his flashlight on the door, and on the door, on your glossy black Georgetown front door with its brass knocker, someone has carved a symbol into the paint, deep, fresh, the wood showing pale through the gouges.
You know that symbol. You saw it on banners. You saw it on a ring, on the hand of a man who smiled at you while the thing in your spine moved.
Los Illuminados.
Leon looks at it for exactly two seconds. Then he turns to you, and puts his hand on your arm, the first time he's touched you in six years, and his voice is quiet and absolutely flat.
"Pack a bag," he says. "Two minutes. You're not sleeping here tonight."