No alarms were triggered.
The morning was free of threats and strategies, encrypted messages requiring urgent action or surveillance reports identifying them as targets, for the first time in months—if not years—. Only the two of them were present, they had long since forgotten what it was like to wake up without making plans for how to get out or looking around their windows for any indications of life.
The farmhouse bedroom was bathed in a warm golden glow from the sunlight as it passed through the hand-sewn linen curtains left by the previous renter. Cream-colored and embellished with delicately stitched flowers, the well-preserved antique cloth evoked a time when people relished life's small pleasures. Light danced in shifting patterns across the terra cotta floor, illuminating the
