Anastasia’s POV:
Lucas stopped the car twenty feet from them and turned the engine off.
We sat for a moment in the sudden quiet with the headlights still on and the two figures standing in the pool of light ahead of us and I looked at Renata’s smile and felt something move through me that was not fear and was not anger but something older and quieter than both of those things.
Recognition.
I knew that smile. I had seen it in my guest bathroom doorway and across conference room tables and in a hotel lobby corridor and every time I had seen it I had been looking at it from the wrong angle, reading it as confidence or calculation or the particular composure of a woman who was always three steps ahead.
I understood it now.
It was the smile of a woman who had decided that if she was going
