She had barely made it home from deployment when the family dinner turned into an ambush.

The dining room was a monument to dynastic entitlement. The walls were lined with oil paintings of dead men with long noses and severe jaws—senators, rail barons, and undersecretaries of defense who had made fortunes ensuring that other people’s sons went to war with Vance-manufactured bayonets.

Eleanor Vance sat at the head of the table like a deposed queen holding court in an empty kingdom. At sixty-four, she possessed the kind of beauty that had been preserved through sheer willpower and expensive cruelty. Her gray hair was swept up into a severe chignon, her neck encircled by three strands of South Sea pearls that looked like small, polished eggs.

Her hands, long-fingered and spotted with age, rested flat against the Belgian lace tablecloth.

"You're late, Maya," Eleanor said without looking up from her empty plate.

"The transport was delayed out of Norfolk, Eleanor," Maya said, taking a seat three chairs down on the right. She did not wait to be offered a chair. That was her first tactical error in Eleanor’s eyes, and she made it deliberately. "Good evening."

"In this house, when an invitation specifies seven o'clock, it does not mean seven-forty," Eleanor continued, her voice possessing the thin, dry rasp of parchment being torn. "Your father may have run his household by the ringing of a dinner bell, but Julian was raised with standards. Standards you have spent the last three years systematically eroding."

Carter entered, taking the seat directly opposite Maya. He placed his bourbon down on the polished mahogany with a deliberate *clack* that left a ring of condensation on the finish. He didn't care. Nothing in the house belonged to him yet, but he treated all of it like his personal spoils.

"Leave the girl alone, Mother," Carter said, though his tone was entirely devoid of defense; it was the cruel amusement of a boy watching an ant under a magnifying glass. "She’s had a long journey. Escorting crates of obsolete surveillance gear through the dust must be terribly exhausting."

A maid, pale and shaking, slipped into the room to set down shallow bowls of cold consommé. Her hands trembled so violently against the porcelain that Maya instinctively reached out and steadied the girl’s wrist with two fingers.

"Steady," Maya whispered.

The maid gave her a terrified, grateful glance and fled.

"Disgraceful," Eleanor muttered. "You handle the servants as if they were your enlisted grease-monkeys. You have no sense of decorum. None."

"I have a sense of balance," Maya replied, picking up her silver spoon. "The girl was about to spill soup on a three-hundred-year-old rug. I thought you would appreciate the preservation of property, given how much you value it over people."

Eleanor’s spoon remained untouched. Her eyes, pale gray and dead as frozen slate, fixed upon Maya’s face.

"Where is my son?" Eleanor demanded.

"I haven't seen him yet. Thomas said he was upstairs."

"He is in his childhood bedroom because he cannot walk down the central staircase without a cane," Eleanor spat. The words were venomous, vibrating with an ancient, rancid disappointment. "A Vance. Hobbled. Dragged back from the desert like a broken hound because his wife—his brilliant, tactical wife—couldn't protect her own flank."

Maya stopped her hand halfway to her mouth. The silver spoon remained suspended.

The room grew very cold. Outside, the rain began to beat harder against the tall paned windows, rattling the lead mullions.

"Julian’s convoy was hit by an IED sixteen kilometers outside the district capital," Maya said, her voice dropping into the terrifyingly calm register of an incident report. "He took shrapnel to the femoral artery and his tibia was fractured in three places. He survived because his field dressing held and because the medevac team was airborne within four minutes of the strike. If you want to discuss who failed to protect him, Eleanor, we can have that conversation. But you will not like where the coordinates lead."

Carter laughed—a sharp, barking sound that had no humor in it. "Listen to her. Still talking like an operations officer. You’re home now, Maya. You’re back in the world where people don't take orders from an Ohio nobody with a commission from a state college. Julian’s career is dead. His posting to the Department of the Army staff? Gone. The Pentagon doesn't want cripples in the advisory pool."

"Carter," Eleanor said, but there was no reprimand in it. She was looking at Maya’s throat, where the collar of her uniform met the skin. "She doesn't care about his career. She never did. She saw Julian as a vehicle. A name to put on her security clearance applications. A door into the social registry."

Eleanor rose from her chair.

She did not do it slowly. The movement was sudden, violent, born of weeks of fermented spite and something deeper—something that looked remarkably like terror masquerading as rage.

"You took my firstborn son," Eleanor hissed, stepping around the corner of the table. Her slippers made no sound on the runner. "You took him into your squalid little war. And you brought him back ruined."

Maya did not move. She set her spoon down with absolute precision, placing it parallel to her knife.

"Eleanor," Maya said, warning in her eyes. "Sit down."