GIDEON CHADWICK said goodbye to his last guest and closed the door to his midtown Manhattan apartment with a soft sigh of relief. His days of academia were as far behind him as his days in the military, and sometimes he wasn’t sure which group of people made him the most uncomfortable. While it was true the doctors and lawyers and forensics specialists—who were often both—liked to talk about books and theories and the root of all political problems and had read Pynchon and Goethe, there was almost always a moment in the middle of the flowing conversation when Gideon found it absolutely, positively necessary to leave the room. He’d excuse himself to the bathroom, check his watch, the security feeds on his phone, look to see if his alphabet division of the justice department, the Special Crimes Task Force, had caught any cases, and stare longingly out his third-floor window and down the fire escape as he remembered his covert ops days under Jason Constance when he would have thought nothing about spider-climbing out the window and ghosting into the misty September night. Then he’d remember that he liked these people and had kept in touch with them on purpose after school, and his breathing would grow normal again, and he’d be able to return to the erudite, purposeless discussion of people who had achieved importance—but not enough. Certainly not enough importance to change the world in such a way as to lessen the uphill battle they all fought every day to fix the horrors they saw. Tonight he’d grabbed an extra bottle of wine as he passed through the open-area kitchen and topped everybody’s glass off before he settled himself around the coffee table. No dining table—unlike some of his friends, his apartment was small, with two rooms and a counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and just a big enough living room to put a couch, a love seat, and a stuffed chair. His dinner parties always ended up with somebody, usually himself, on the floor, sitting cross-legged, trying hard not to fall asleep. Of course that was because most of the people from his special ops unit were someplace in the desert in California, hunting serial killers. Dammit, he’d left that unit too soon. Except he liked where he was. Loved the SCTF. He worked with an incredible group of people. He couldn’t make them his life, though, could he? The question was tickling his forebrain as he surveyed his apartment after the guests had left—the comfortable leather couches, the Persian rug he’d had shipped from Fallujah, the hardwood floors he’d buffed up after he’d bought the lease. He’d always been an odd duck—too smart for his peers, too active for academics, too dry for people to get his jokes, secretly laughing at the dark, the macabre, with nobody to smirk with. Suddenly the hackles on his neck lifted like a porcupine’s spines, and he found himself breathing very softly through his nose, scenting the air. Silently, he glided by the table, picking up a cheese knife from the charcuterie board as he passed. Useless fucking thing, he pondered grimly, flipping it from hand to hand. Good thing he’d taken special classes in useless objects and how to make them kill. He paused for a moment, to the side of his bedroom door, still tasting the currents that swept in through the now open window near the fire escape. Worn, well-oiled leather. The hint of an organic bourbon-scented soap, the faint hint of wine from a glass Gideon himself had set on the end table near his bed when he’d excused himself from the room. The wine had been disturbed—and consumed. Gideon’s heart rate, which had never climbed above sixty when he’d thought there was an assailant in his bedroom, suddenly skyrocketed. “God, they were boring,” Joey Carlyle said from his cross-legged perch on Gideon’s bed. “I thought they’d never leave.”