The ring had been on her finger for eleven days when General Victor Kain grabbed her wrist. She had just crossed the stage to receive her commendation, the Arlington reception hall bright with afternoon light and the polished brass of the highest-ranking uniforms in the country. Everything was proceeding exactly as ceremony required.
She extended her hand to the general. He took it. Then his eyes dropped to her index finger, and whatever polished performance he had been maintaining dissolved so completely and so fast that the two men of his security detail each shifted their weight simultaneously, their hands moving to their sides before they had consciously decided to move them.
“Take that off,” Kain said. His voice was a harsh whisper that did not carry to the surrounding guests, but his grip on her wrist did not match the volume. It matched the expression on his face.
“Right now. You should not be wearing that here.”
Lieutenant Ava Cross had been trained to keep her posture and her face neutral in situations of pressure, and she kept them both now, though her heart had accelerated with the sudden alarm of a person who has not yet understood what she has done wrong but can see clearly in someone else’s eyes that it is serious. “Sir,” she said, her voice barely audible over the reception noise.
He did not explain. He pulled her away from the crowd with the purposeful speed of a man doing triage, through a heavy oak door at the far end of the hall, into a small antechamber where the sounds of celebration became a muffled irrelevance and the two of them stood alone under a single window that looked out at nothing significant. He let go of her wrist and ran both hands over his face.
She watched him do it and understood, in the way that trained people understand things through behavior rather than words, that he was not angry. He was frightened. “Where did you get that ring?” he asked.
“My grandfather,” she said. “Arthur Cross.”
Kain looked at her the way people look at things that should not exist. She had not expected it to mean anything.
She had found it in a hidden compartment beneath a loose floorboard under his bed, wrapped in oiled canvas inside a small wooden box, when she drove down to Blackidge alone to clear out the house after the police called her at three forty-two in the morning to tell her he was dead. The ring was made of some dark, unpolished metal that did not catch the light in the way of decorative jewelry. When she examined the inner band she found an insignia she could not identify, and she had spent years of her career learning to identify military insignias.
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