Elena Marchetti lived in a modest apartment in The Hague, a city of diplomats and bureaucrats where no one asked too many questions. She had a daughter named Sofia, age nine, who took ballet lessons on Thursdays and fed the ducks in the park on Sundays. She had a husband who didn't know about the brand on her left hand, hidden beneath gloves she never removed in his presence. She had been feeding Aldric Vane information for six years, and she hadn't slept a full night in any of them.
I learned all of this from the file Khalid had compiled, and from the three days of surveillance that preceded our approach. Elena Marchetti was a woman stretched to her breaking point. That made her dangerous. It also made her exactly the kind of operative we needed.
"Are you sure about this?" Dante asked,
