Archive of Our Own

It’s summer in London, and a cooling breeze blows through the city. At a particular office on Aldersgate, the breeze steals in through the windows to greet the building’s inhabitants. On the ground floor, it rattles a collection of empty Red Bull cans and is ignored by the room’s inhabitant, who is engrossed by the screen in front of him. On the upper floors, it’s more welcome, greeted with a flick of blouse to invite it onto too-warm skin, or a wave as a hand raises to lift hair off the back of a neck. On the topmost floor, the smaller office is now back to what seems like its natural state—tidy, ordered and somewhat calmer than it had been in recent months. The breeze joins a small desk fan positioned by the window to help catch it, though it is propelled gently enough to not disrupt the pile of documents the room’s inhabitant is working through. In the larger office, the windows are closed and the air is still. At least, until the room’s occupant creates some wind of his own.

“Oof, Christ,” says Jackson Lamb, rising from his desk to open the window, at which point the breeze, as if as eager to escape his odour as anyone else, departs into the London air.

Lamb lights a cigarette to cover the smell, or else to get his bowels moving properly. As he smokes, he watches the people move around on the street below like so many chess pieces, then becomes aware of a sound a little closer to his ear—three sets of footsteps followed by two female voices.

“You need to go in there. Put your big boy pants on and go explain what you’ve found.”

“You might as well do it yourself. If you don’t, I’ll kick your arse through the door.”

Lamb ashes his cigarette out the window and leans on the sill, curious which of their fellow reprobates Guy and Dander have bullied up the stairs. A few moments later, Ho appears in the doorway as if held at gunpoint.

Which might have been true, except that Lamb had made sure none of his joes were in possession of anything more dangerous than a sharpened pencil in light of recent events.

Ho is tinkering with the keys of his laptop, face illuminated by blue and red light. He looks like some sort of demented, out-of-season Christmas ornament.

“People tell me I could keel over and die at any moment,” Lamb says. “Some days I think that would be preferable to waiting on you lot.”

Ho holds up a finger. “Can’t rush genius,” he says, without looking up.

“Oh,” murmurs Lamb, but whatever scathing comment he might have been about to conjure up, he doesn’t get to, because Ho’s laptop makes a disappointed beep and he joins the conversation.

“Just like I thought. We’re dealing with an evil super-genius.”

“Do tell,” Lamb says, stepping away from the window to grind out his cigarette butt in the ashtray on his desk. “Can’t wait.”

Half an hour later—a stretch that involves Lamb summoning Guy and Dander to help translate Ho’s particular brand of self-important Geek—and Lamb thinks he’s got his head around it.

“So you’re telling me that there’s some bloke on this… forum thingy.”

“For incels,” Dander interjects, not for the first time; “men who can’t get a f—”

“You’ve made that point,” Lamb says. “Don’t think any of us are surprised about the depths Ho will sink to. But you’ve got some bloke who says he works for MI-5 and he’s planning on killing all the women in the service, starting with ‘those alpha-bitches Taverner and Flyte’, and you didn’t think it was a credible threat?”

Ho rolls a shoulder. “Thought he might just be blowing off steam. He’s got a point, you know. All these diversity hires.”

Guy beats Dander in responding to that. “Roddy, you’re literally Chinese. Were you a diversity hire? Or does that only apply to women.”

Ho sneers. “They hired me because I’m good. Too good. Which is what makes me think this might be legit.”

“Oh, it’s that, is it?” interjects Lamb, before either Guy or Dander can jump to violence. “Not the named agents? Christ, it’s like playschool in here.”

But Guy has learned to speak Ho a beat faster than Lamb. “What does him being legit have to do with you?”

Ho scowls at his laptop. Its screen has turned black, now, but the red and blue lights in the keyboard are still active, making it look even more pathetically like a toy with the stickers of cartoon women on the keys. “I can’t figure out who he is,” he admits, reluctantly. “He’s protected his identity so well that even I’m having trouble cracking it.”

Lamb asks, “Is there a timeline for these plans of his?”

“Tomorrow,” Ho says. “He started sharing his manifesto this morning. He must be ready to go.”

“Right,” Lamb says. “I'll fire up the clown car, then. You keep working on identifying him and I'll round up Holmes and Watson and head to the Park."

"What about us, boss?" Guy asks. Lamb thinks it curious that she didn't identify herself as either Holmes or Watson, but he supposes the clue was in the 'round up'.

"Hm, you two do count as women, don't you? Listen, we’re probably safe from any murderous rampages here—" he sees them flinch at that "—but I’m not taking any chances. You two can secure Flyte. Meet her at a safe house. Wait, scratch that—Ho, find me some empty properties. You can figure out a way to lure Flyte away without spooking anyone, can’t you? Tell her you have a crime to confess to, or something." He gestures at Dander while speaking to Guy: "If you take her within 50 metres of a nightclub, you won’t even need to make one up.”

Guy is already moving, but Dander takes an extra second. “What about Taverner?” she asks.

But Lamb is ahead of her. He calls, “Standish!”

Diana Taverner is a busy woman, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t take the time to appreciate life. It’s summer, the air is fresh, and she’s just been for a mid-morning session at the gym, so she’s feeling that particular blend of energised by the endorphins and freshly showered to wash away the sweat. She knows she impressed at this morning’s COBRA meeting - yet another that Whelan hadn't wanted to attend (today was his wedding anniversary, apparently) - and she’s run several successful operations in the last few months—enough to put that Harkness/Cartwright debacle firmly in the rear-view mirror. Not even a text from Lamb requesting a meet at their replacement canal-side bench is enough to sour her mood.

She approaches the black SUV in which her security detail waits to ferry her back to the Park. The driver’s side window slides down as she steps close.

“Everything all right, Ma’am?”

“Perfect,” she says. “I’ve decided to walk. Fancy some fish and chips.”

With that, she leaves her security detail behind. They know what ‘fish and chips’ means. She doesn’t give away her exact meeting spots, but ‘down by the canals’ is implied, as is ‘meeting a contact’.

Diana heads for Little Venice. Halfway there, her phone buzzes again. Fishing it out of her pocket, she glances at the screen.

Lamb again. ‘Change of plan,’ it says. In the next moment, a feminine hand is taking her phone from her, and she looks up into the face of Catherine Standish.

“I’ll be needing this for now,” Catherine says, powering the phone down.

“What,” Diana begins, but Catherine’s arm is around her back, touching her elbow, steering her along the street.

“I need you to come with me,” she says. “I’ll explain soon enough.”

Diana doesn’t like this, not one bit, but she—she would hesitate to say she trusts Lamb, but she certainly trusts his instincts, and Catherine Standish is the least threatening kidnapper of all time.

“You’d better,” she replies, and they walk for a few hundred metres before Catherine steers them down a set of stairs to a basement flat, which she lets them into without fuss.

Inside is not a typical safe house, but it doesn’t look lived-in, either. It has whitewashed walls, but there is art on them—a picture of a lighthouse and a bluebell meadow. There’s some well-stocked bookshelves and an actual CD rack. There’s a green-and-cream striped rug.

“What is this place?” Diana asks.

“Airbnb,” Catherine answers. “We couldn’t trust our safe houses, not when we aren’t sure what’s compromised.”

Diana moves further into the living area and sets her bag down on the coffee table. “I think you need to tell me what the hell’s going on.”

"There's an unidentified man on a dark web forum threatening to murder all the women in the service. He's named you and Flyte as targets, and he seems to be getting ready to go, so Lamb thought it prudent to get you two to secure locations as discreetly as possible. We'll have to lie low for a while and let them figure it out." Catherine goes on to detail some of the messages Ho found on the forum, and Diana listens with growing horror at both the plot they’ve uncovered and the ramifications for her—what do they mean, she’ll have to sit this one out?

“I have to get back to the Park,” she says. Picking up her bag, she makes a move for the door, but suddenly finds Catherine right in her way. She’s blocking the hallway, and the move is so assertive and unexpected that Diana nearly collides with her, stops short close enough to become suddenly aware of the scent of her perfume—a cool floral—close enough to feel pierced through by those calm blue eyes.

“I’m sorry, Diana,” Catherine says, clearly enunciating her name—marking them as equals here, not Second Desk and subordinate—“it’s too dangerous for me to let you do that.”

There’s a moment of silent tension in which Diana considers very seriously whether she wants to push past Catherine, wants to pit their physical strength against each other. She’d been carrying weights on a treadmill an hour ago, she’s fairly sure she could prevail if needed.

As if sensing Diana’s calculation, Catherine continues. “Also, Lamb warned me this might happen, so I’ve deadbolted the doors.” She smiles sweetly.

You’ve got the key on you somewhere, Diana thinks, but really, that’s beneath her. Besides, Catherine Standish is an intellectual lightweight. It shouldn’t be too difficult to outplay her.

“What now, then?” Diana asks, setting her bag back down on the table.

“Now, we wait,” Catherine replies. “Can I make you tea?”

Diana allows Catherine to wait on her. In the absence of her phone, she browses the CD library while the kettle boils. Selecting a smooth jazz album—a suitably discomfiting choice under the circumstances, she thinks—she fiddles with the CD player and puts it on low, then settles onto the couch, surveying the room and letting herself feel out the space. She isn’t used to this much privacy—her glass-walled office forces her to act with an expectation of being observed—but she is aware of the psychological effects of different spaces. Although cosier—and with light slanting in the high windows from the street above—this place has more of the feel of a basement cell. This too is a place Diana is comfortable in, though always as the interrogator rather than the captive. But who says the one with the key is the jailer? They’re both equally as trapped here.

Catherine re-enters the room carrying two mugs, one blue and one tan stoneware. She lays the stoneware mug on the coffee table in front of Diana, then reveals an unopened pack of chocolate fingers pinned beneath her elbow.

“There we are,” she says. “We’ve enough provisions for a few days. I made sure a grocery delivery arrived here before we did.” Setting her own mug down, she opens and extends the packet of biscuits in Diana’s direction. “There’s even a bottle of whiskey in there, courtesy of Jackson, though I’d appreciate it if you didn’t start on that quite this early.”

Diana takes a chocolate finger from the pack. “So,” she says, before Catherine has the chance to sit down, “you’re back at Slough House. What happened to resigning?”

It throws her, the jump from polite small talk to personal question. Diana can see it in the suddenly careful moves Catherine makes as she settles onto the adjacent couch, lowering herself slowly, eyes on the mug in her hand.

When she’s settled, she responds. “Well, Jackson dragged his feet on signing off on my paperwork, and then Cartwright roped me back in. Almost like they planned it.” She takes a sip of her tea.

Diana picks up her own mug. “Did you miss it? I think I’d go spare without anything for my brain to do, though I suppose life at Slough House is halfway out the door anyway.”

Catherine doesn’t rise to that. “I have my own interests,” she says. “Though I’ll admit it was somewhat gratifying that they only managed two months without me.”

“Ah, yes, River’s gambit,” she says. She’s been briefed. “That was a big responsibility, the grandfather. You did lose him for a while, didn’t you?”

Catherine glances at her sideways. “I did,” she admits, “but I found him again. I didn’t have to let a terrorist go because he knew where the bodies were buried.”

Diana lets her head fall back, smiles, glances at Catherine down her nose. She wants to play, does she? Diana does enjoy it when they don’t just fold immediately.

“That’s hardly at my feet, is it? Actually, I think you could lay far more of it on that dotty old man you protected. All of those cold bodies had some serious carnage attached.”

Catherine’s mouth twists. “I find it hard to blame someone for the instinct to protect their child.”

“That’s because you’re soft,” Diana says. “Can’t see the big picture.”

“Oh,” Catherine murmurs. “Is that what it is? I suppose the enlightened thing to do is to get people killed to score a few political points. How short-sighted of me.” She takes another sip of her tea.

Diana’s fingers are warm. “How many bodies do you think you’re responsible for?” she asks. “Over the years, I mean. How many secrets did you spill with the gin? Gin? Was it gin?”

Catherine shakes her head, smiling wryly. “Jackson’s beaten you to that one a hundred times over, and what he’s missed I’ve flagellated myself with plenty. I’m not ashamed to say that I drank whatever I could get my hands on, and I can’t know the extent of the damage I did. But what about you? Do you keep them like butterflies in a cabinet?”

“Keep what?” Diana asks.

“All the people impaled on the spike of your ambition.”

Diana feels that one right in her gut, laughs and crosses her legs. She’s underestimated Catherine Standish as a sparring partner. Suddenly she feels warm in this basement flat, can’t help but admire that Catherine hasn’t even batted an eyelid, let alone broken a sweat.

Catherine sets her mug aside and rises. She seems to have spotted something on the bookshelf, moves to retrieve it. When she turns back, Diana can see that it has a footprint on the cover.

“I’ve learned a lot, this last year,” Catherine says. “When I was kidnapped by Sean Donovan and the Dunn siblings, they asked me about the location of a particular file. I may have sent those boys to their deaths completely sober, but not before they told me about their source, high up in MI-5, very concerned about the way Tearney was running things.”

“I was,” Diana says, quiet, feeling the heat coiled in her and uncurling from the couch cushions to slink across the room, laying her fingers on the spine of the book to tilt its cover toward her for a closer look. The footprint is rendered in smudged grey ash and the title—The Arsonist’s Guide to Diplomacy—seems rather fitting, given that nothing lights a fire in Diana like a good debriefing. “Admittedly, I was less concerned with her methods than I was with the position she occupied, but…”

“Why aren’t you in it, then?” Catherine asks. It’s a simple question, pointed, posed as a challenge, and Diana looks up and meets Catherine’s gaze. It’s curious, frank and measured, and Diana finds herself almost unable to form a thought while caught in it. She knows, from looking in the mirror, that her eyes are roughly the same colour, but there’s something compelling about the way Catherine Standish uses hers. Diana doubts anyone has ever described her as appearing ‘measured’ before. ‘Calculating’, certainly, but…

She finds an answer. “First Desks don’t tend to keep their heads when the situation gets hot. You of all people should know that.”

There’s a flicker of something, Diana sees, not just in Catherine’s eyes but in her throat as well, a quiver in the skin as her pulse quickens. This time, Diana notices not just the smell of her, but also the flush creeping up her throat. The blouse she’s wearing is gauzy, buttoned to the collar but sheer up close, and Diana knows she’s found Catherine’s tender spot by the way she’s controlled her breathing, a deliberate slow inhalation that lifts her whole torso. It’s an impressive view, actually. The prim buttoned-up costuming isn’t enough to disguise the sensuality of her; she’s got a lovely pair of breasts that would easily outshine Diana’s, if such things were a competition.

But she’s making a tiny noise in her throat, now, which draws Diana’s attention back to her face.

“Is it not worth the risk, then?” Catherine asks. “Are you just going to be Second Desk forever?”

The question seems innocent, but it’s insinuating, the tyranny of ‘just’. It makes Diana want to assert herself, so she pinches her fingers around the spine of the book Catherine is holding and pulls it gently from her grip.

“Why not?” she asks, placing the book back onto the shelf. “Everyone’s heard of the power behind the throne. The queen is the most powerful piece, and all that.” She straightens her back, then, pulls herself up. She is a little taller than Catherine, and suddenly wants her to feel it.

Catherine doesn’t react, just cants her chin slightly to maintain eye contact. “She’s not essential, though. Not indispensable. The king can make decisions without her, and there’s nothing she can do about it.”

Diana feels her fingers curl, flexes them deliberately. “Except stage a coup,” she says. “Do you think that’s what David Cartwright and Jackson Lamb were doing, when they murdered Charles Partner?”

It falls from her mouth like a blow. Diana leans in, looming, waiting for it to land. Catherine remains expressionless for another long moment, a moment in which Diana can hear her own blood pounding in her ears. Then that little smile forms on Catherine’s mouth again, and she shakes her head.

“No,” she replies. “But I do think that’s what we’re doing, and I think you’ve got to find a different bombshell. That one was only powerful the first time you told me.”

”Why on earth would I want that?”

Smarting. That’s what Diana was after the Hassan Ahmed operation. Red-cheeked, thoroughly spanked by both Lamb and Tearney.

Catherine Standish’s response to her ‘you could be back at the Park tomorrow’ lived on in her head for weeks. It was the soundtrack to every tedious meeting, every walking-on-eggshells politically sensitive conversation behind one closed door or another. It even followed her in her relaxation time, on the table with her gym’s masseuse, rumbling around her head in the hour she spent behind her eyelids that was supposed to be free of thought.

She couldn’t relate. Even in the most minutiae-focused meetings or conversations that felt like a tightrope over a tank full of sharks, Diana wouldn’t have it any other way. Working at the Park made her feel alive in a way nothing else could, and the fact that Catherine Standish could opt out—whether in earnest belief or denial—made her seem like an alien species to Diana. It was the sort of difference that drew Diana in—always had; even as a child she’d calculated the implied odds of every situation and regarded others as opponents in the poker game of her life. It was probably what made her good at her job. And when she couldn’t shake that particular conversation—that kind of attitude made Catherine seem like a calling station, the kind of weak player everyone wanted in their game—she knew she had to scratch the itch; unscratched itches being, in her life, the kinds of things that ended in arranging the kidnapping of a Muslim boy by the far right just to see what she might gain from that sort of gamble.

“Diana,” Catherine answered when she called her, sober but quite late, half-naked lying in her sheets.

“Would you really turn down working back at the Park?” Diana asked by way of a greeting.

“It’s 11pm, Diana.”

“I know. I’m surprised you picked up.”

“Is this a social call? Are we on a ‘social call’ basis?”

“No,” said Diana, “but I’d still like to know. You’re unfathomable.”

“Really?” Catherine asked. “I would have thought it was fairly obvious. I fell into a bottle while I worked that job, then the man who helped me out of it took his own life on my watch. At least now, I can’t fail anyone who hasn’t already failed themself.”

“You take responsibility for…” Diana began, but Catherine cut her off.

“For a lot of things, yes. Though I can see how that would be a difficult concept for you.”

“Touché.”

“I’m going to bed now, Diana.”

“Would you like company?”

“We could have crossed paths twenty years ago,” Diana said when her invitation was accepted (not the first call, not even the fifth, but eventually, like every hardworking woman who had a classified job she had to sacrifice her life to, her resolve weakened when she got lonely).

“We could have,” Catherine agreed, “but I don’t think we’d be here if we had.” ‘Here’ was Diana’s flat, recently arrived in her bedroom but still circling each other, still working out what this was. Convenience? Opposites attracting? An experiment?

“Why not?” Diana asked of the statement, though she did quite like the figure she cut now, and Catherine’s silver hair, so it was possible she agreed.

“When I was drinking, I was messy. I only slept with desperate men. There’d be none of this,” Catherine said, fingering a silky pillowcase. “Not even anything I could remember, really. Now I have much higher standards.” She looked Diana up and down and Diana felt it, leaned back against her dresser and curled her hands around its edges.

“Do you,” she murmured.

“Yes. I pride myself on my precise attention to detail, and appreciate others who do the same.”

Diana felt a smile twist up her mouth. “Your work must be an exercise in frustration, then.”

“I don’t know,” Catherine replied. “Jackson Lamb doesn’t pay much attention to himself, but he doesn’t miss much about the world around him.”

“Nor do I,” Diana said, pushing herself off the dresser and moving toward Catherine. “Precision; I see that.” It was there in her perfectly put-together appearance, from the cardigan whose blue matched the flowers on her dress to the flawlessly pinned back hair. It said something different to what Diana telegraphed with her own style—cool and elegant, don’t try me—but it was no less deliberate. “You want everyone to know that, don’t you? That you’re no longer messy. I wonder, how well do you take being pulled apart?” When she’d closed the distance between them, Diana reached up and unfastened the clasp in Catherine’s hair, leaving her just slightly mussed.

“I don’t know, really,” Catherine said. “You’ll have to tell me after you’ve tried.”

So Diana did. There was an art in dismantling someone, she thought, whether in the interrogation cell or the bedroom, and Diana was a virtuoso. First, strip them of all their accoutrements. In an interrogation, that would be one’s dignity and sense of safety, but here it was the armour of primly buttoned clothing. Diana divested Catherine of cardigan and stockings and dress, and found an honest-to-god petticoat underneath the latter.

“Very demure,” Diana quipped, voice ringing with amusement.

“It reduces the static cling,” Catherine told her. “I don’t want my backside on full display.”

“Of course you don’t,” Diana replied, but that didn’t stop her from creating some cling of her own.

Second step: give a little, but only on your terms.

Diana had Catherine up against the bed end by then, down to her bra and the aforementioned petticoat. It had become apparent with the removal of the dress that Catherine was voluptuous, so Diana delighted in the opportunity to remove her lace-edged bra and release her generous breasts. For a moment, Diana let her hang there, pink nipples pebbling in the cool air, then she reached up, cupped and stroked, then pinched hard enough to make Catherine gasp.

“You’re a blusher,” Diana noted, admiring the pink bloom emerging on Catherine’s chest and cheeks.

“Yes,” Catherine replied, with nothing more to hide behind.

Which led Diana to Step Three: push them to the limits of their endurance by any fitting means.

Diana lowered her head to worship those breasts, sucking one nipple while she pinched the other. Catherine began to make noises, then, somewhere between moans and whimpers. Diana dropped to her knees.

The petticoat she left on, enjoying the prim look of it and the act of rucking it up, which she did to get beneath. The move exposed pale thighs, almost blue in this light. Diana reached around to Catherine’s backside to pull her forward, within reach of Diana’s mouth. Catherine’s thighs were warm, smooth, and they flushed up beautifully when Diana bit them.

“Oh God,” Catherine whispered, and Diana pulled her knickers off.

What followed was most definitely an act of provocation. She wasn’t a torturer—she’d always preferred leaving the more unpleasant parts of interrogation to others—but she had her methods. She tongued Catherine’s slit and listened to her whimper, sucked on her and heard it turn to moans. When she covered Catherine’s cunt with her mouth she felt like a devourer, nudging her nose alongside her clitoris and pushing her tongue inside, eating her up, gorging herself.

Catherine responded beautifully, singing like a bird, hips pressing themselves against Diana’s mouth, pushing her head back in their fervour. Diana gloried in it, reaching up to cup Catherine’s backside and hold her fast, humming her questions, urging her on.

Catherine answered Diana’s working over in a dozen different ways, with her flushed skin and her trembling thighs, her hand falling into Diana’s hair and giving a shaky tug. Diana felt fingernails scrape her scalp and she pressed her thighs together, heady with power and desire and the kind of focus that meant she sometimes forgot to breathe.

How well do you take being pulled apart? Diana asked again, and this time Catherine answered with a fist in her hair and a strangled cry, with her back arching and her thighs convulsing, leaving Diana with a mouth full of salt and a feeling of gluttonous triumph.

Leaning back, Diana gazed up at what she had wrought, at Catherine pink-cheeked and hair-shaken, breathing heavily.

Once she’d gathered herself, Catherine spoke. “So, how did I do? Did I come apart to your liking?” Untangling her fingers from Diana’s hair, she smoothed its strands around her chin.

Diana enjoyed the lingering taste of Catherine’s salt on her tongue. “You were magnificent,” she said, licking her lips.

“Good.” After a moment, Catherine offered Diana her hand. Diana took it, rising, though her legs were heavier than she’d thought they would be. She suddenly felt flushed and needy herself, and there Catherine was, eyes all sparkling clarity. She wasted no time in divesting Diana of her clothes. Diana let her, watching her hands as they unbuttoned Diana’s blouse, cocking her hip so her skirt could be unzipped. She was stripped to her underwear in moments, then Catherine urged her down onto the bed to reach around her back and unclasp her bra.

“Of course,” Catherine said once Diana was bare, once she’d shed her own remnants and was standing facing Diana, “I didn’t really think coming apart was going to be difficult because wanting people to know I’m no longer messy isn’t really a concern of mine.”

“What?” Diana asked, skin prickling from the cool air and the sudden feeling of exposure that settled on her.

Catherine smiled, trailing a finger over Diana’s shoulder. “You misread me,” she said. “I’m not trying to get people to notice how together I am now; what they think on that is neither here nor there to me.” She leaned forward until her mouth was right against Diana’s ear, whispering into it. “Actually, I’m happiest when people don’t notice me at all.” She brought her other hand up to cup Diana’s cheek. “Or when they dismiss me.” She tilted Diana’s head back until their eyes met, until Diana was watching their gleeful sparkle. “When they underestimate me.”

Then Catherine kissed her. It was long and lingering and intimate, not something Diana had offered at the start of this encounter, nor something she usually offered people at all. Sexual encounters were to her very often exchanges of power or matters of convenience; kissing usually felt too affectionate. Diana liked her mouth to look soft and drop vicious words; she was unprepared for Catherine’s assertive declaration of tenderness.

“What,” she whispered again, as Catherine’s fingers came to land on her collarbone.

“Let me,” Catherine said, and urged Diana back onto the bed.

Diana did, and found that her knickers were gone a moment later, that Catherine was on top of her a moment after that. She didn’t kiss her again—seemed to sense that she had breached some sort of boundary and didn’t need to dismantle it completely—but she used her mouth in other ways, sucking at Diana’s throat and down to her nipples, teasing and tonguing them firm. Her hand slid up the inside of Diana’s thigh, covered her cunt, feeling out the shape and the slick of her. Diana could hear herself murmuring as Catherine touched her, low rumbling groans that she felt inside her head, behind her flickering eyelashes and through her bitten lip. She could get used to this kind of attention, she thought, this sort of gentle worship. Maybe softness was worthwhile.

Then Catherine shifted above her, replacing her hand with her knee and pressing it into Diana’s cunt. “Look at me,” she whispered, and Diana’s eyes flew open.

Catherine looked fierce and determined—beautiful, really—with her hair falling around her face and a smile on her mouth. “Want you here,” she said, “not away behind your eyelids. Stay with me.” It wasn’t a request. Then she pushed forward, weight on the bed but friction and pressure all on Diana, and Diana groaned, melting into it.

It felt good to surrender. Her shoulders loosened as Catherine rocked forward, as Diana felt her wet smear Catherine’s thigh and her breath shift from sharp to deep.

“Yes,” she whispered as they found a rhythm, Catherine pressing forward so Diana felt both the friction of her thigh and the slide of their breasts against each other. Catherine’s body felt hot and her eyes were intense; she ground her knee into the covers, making a rolling motion with her thigh, and Diana’s hips rose to meet her, hungry, grasping for attention.

Catherine gave it to her, reaching down to grip her thigh and pull her closer, finding Diana’s wrist with the other hand and pinning it to the bed. Together, they rocked and swayed, but Diana had very little control like this, was very much the one being conquered.

Things became a little hazy, blurred and starry at the edges. Diana’s back arched and her breath gusted from her, she could feel her blood beating hot against the inside of her veins. Over and over, Catherine bared down on her, grinding into her, roughly pushing her further.

“Look at me,” she whispered again. Commanded, and Diana couldn’t do anything else, pinned by the wrist and the heat rising in her. They made eye contact and Diana felt skewered by it, by those eyes too clever by half, far more clever than Diana had noticed before now.

You misread me, she’d said, and Diana knew it for truth, knew even as her mind spun away from her that this woman was capable of anything but somehow chose to be present and generous and good.

It was too much for her. Diana writhed, arching, shaking, struggling against Catherine’s grip but finding her implacable, finding that she demanded vulnerability as the price for release.

“Fuck,” Diana choked, and then she was there, quaking, trying to curl in on herself but held fast by Catherine’s grip and gaze, writhing on her, falling apart.

Afterwards, they were quiet. Catherine collapsed on top of Diana and they lay there for a time in silence, too exhausted to move. Catherine’s hair had fallen over Diana’s face and she couldn’t even muster the energy to brush it away, instead just lying there beneath its shield as her heart rate slowed and her body cooled.

Diana’s body was spent, depleted. She felt exposed when Catherine eventually rolled off her and settled beside her on her back. At length, she said, “Your flat is very you,” clearly looking around the room again now that she wasn’t so singularly focused. “Minimalist but expensive. Very chic.”

“I try,” Diana said, rolling onto her side and tucking her knees up a little. “Even if I don’t actually spend a whole lot of time here.” She studied Catherine’s face in profile, thinking about how strange it was to go back to a kind of small talk. How banal.

“Hm,” Catherine murmured. “That is the way, isn’t it? Take the time to make our places nice but then spend most of our lives at work. I bet men don’t have that problem.”

Diana felt a smile creep onto her face, remembering the conversation that had led them here. “Now who’s talking about a circle of sisterhood?”

Catherine snorted. “I don’t think that’s quite what this is.”

“No,” Diana agreed, pushing herself up to sit and swinging her legs off the bed. Rising, she crossed the room to retrieve her silk robe from the back of the bedroom door. When she slipped it on, its cool was welcome against her still-sensitised skin. She felt a little bit more in control when clothed, too. “You know, I don’t really do that. Don’t really do comfortable, either.” She remembered Catherine’s eyes, the knowingness of them, of her. Making vulnerability the action required for an orgasm wasn’t quite the expectation Diana had had for this night.

She found her slippers and pushed her feet into them. “I think you need to know what I was going to tell you, back then. Charles Partner’s death wasn’t a suicide, you know. It was an Op. David Cartwright had Jackson Lamb carry it out.”

There. Now she'd crippled the deck.

But then her opponent offered her another round.

Diana never expected that Catherine Standish would want to talk to her again, but here was her number flashing up on Diana’s phone. After an entire day of coordinating between city bureaucrats and I'll have to run that up the ladder security personnel, and then a phone call from Home fucking Secretary Peter fucking Judd demanding that she play his obedient lapdog, it was quite a welcome surprise. She could use a chance to blow off some steam.

“Catherine,” she purred down the phone. “I didn’t expect to be hearing from you.”

“You can save the niceties,” Catherine said, “I need the opinion of a ruthless bitch.”

Diana blinked, then laughed. “You found one. What’s this about?”

“A conversation I just had with a Russian. Both he and Lamb think I’m out of my depth, but I’m not sure I'm willing to give up.”

Diana glanced at her watch. “I’m about twenty minutes from home. Meet me there. I do hope you’re wearing something I can unbutton.”

They were on Diana’s couch this time, and her fingers were sticky.

“Lamb’s right,” Diana said, “you are too soft. Too empathetic. But that does make you good at reading people, and you can use their assumptions about you to your advantage.”

“What do you suggest?” Catherine asked, still pink in the cheeks, flapping the open buttons of her dress to create a breeze for herself.

“Well,” Diana considered. “What did you notice about him? What did he give away?”

Catherine cocked her head to the side. “He wanted me to drink,” she said. “He was playing chess and fishing for stories.”

“Make him a wager, then," Diana said, "but be ready. You’re going to have to be prepared to be a ruthless bitch yourself, win or lose.”

"How do you mean?" Catherine asked. She reached for Diana's hand, which lay loosely curled on the couch with its fingers still glistening, lifted it to examine the wet she'd left behind.

"Well," Diana said, then faltered as Catherine opened her mouth and sucked one of Diana's fingers into it, blinking at Diana as she did so. "Well," Diana repeated, trying to keep her train of thought, "if you lose, he'll want a drink or a story out of you, which I'm assuming you won't be willing to give, and if you win…"

"If I win?" Catherine murmured, releasing one finger to go for the other, and Diana squeezed her thighs together hard.

"He'll… well, he'll inevitably screw you over, so you'll need a trump card more powerful than winning fair and square."

"A trump card," Catherine said, laying Diana's hand back down and sliding her own beneath Diana's skirt. "We are talking about chess, here, but I'll take your metaphor." She played her hand across Diana's knees, then slipped between them, sliding her fingers up the inside of Diana's thigh to trace the edge of her knickers with a thumb. "If we're secretly playing cards, I'll have to know when to play this trump card, won't I?" She slipped her other hand beneath Diana's skirt as well, reaching for her waistband, waiting for Diana's assistance to wriggle her knickers off her. "If I played it too early, I'd leave myself completely at someone else's mercy, wouldn't I?"

Her hands had stopped moving. It took Diana a moment to realise what she'd just said, what conversation they were having, and when she did, she looked up into eyes clear and implacable, more than a little amused.

"You know," Catherine said, removing her hands from beneath Diana's skirt, "being a ruthless bitch doesn't come naturally to me. But I could get used to it with practice." Catching Diana's wrist again, she draped it across her lap, then began to re-button her dress as she rose. "Your hand will finish the job, I think."

Diana watched her leave, furious but possibly even more turned on than she had been before. Her hand definitely did finish the job.

Spider Webb was an odious, self-important little man, but he had his uses.

They met at a spot overlooking the river, with plenty of background noise and no CCTV.

"You're looking fabulous, Ma'am, if I may say so," he said.

"And you're looking considerably less close to death than you were when I last saw you." When she'd delivered him an offer of employment from Chieftan, she did not need to remind him.

"Fighting fit," he replied, leaning on the bridge railing like he thought he was in a photo shoot. "What did you want to discuss?"

"I want to make sure that the fallout from this tiger team operation doesn't tarnish the reputation of the entire service," she said, "just suggests a serious need for a review of our security protocols."

Webb pointed at her in a way that looked suspiciously like he was making a finger gun. "Worry not, Lady Di," he said, then shrunk under her withering glare.

"Don't make me have you killed, Webb. A lot of taxpayer money went into keeping you alive."

His heels clicked together as he brought himself under control. "Of course," he said, then gave the answer that she'd known was inevitable, but was important that he thought was his own idea. "We'll be using Slough House," he said. "River Cartwright, to be specific. The biggest fuck-up there."

"The biggest hero complex there," Diana corrected. They both knew he wasn't actually a fuck-up, that he might even pull the assignment off. "Who are you kidnapping for leverage?"

Spider pursed his lips, tapped his fingers on the railing. "I'm thinking Guy. Attractive, that tragic loss last year; River's probably got a thing for her."

"Except your crew might get more than they bargained for," Diana said. "Guy does know how to fight."

"Hm," Spider responded, looking thoughtful. "Who do you suggest?"

Diana's eyebrow quirked. "Try Standish."

The number that rang her was unknown, but Diana knew the whole story the minute she heard Catherine's voice. "You're sending a car," she said, then gave a location.

It was a few hours before Diana could get away, and when she did she went to Catherine's place. Her tail wasn’t precisely between her legs, but she did feel some tickle of guilt for what had happened.

She hoped her knock sounded appropriately remorseful.

When Catherine answered, she opened the door without a word. Diana entered into a tidy living room, found Catherine in her dressing gown, hair loose and drying on her shoulders.

She was drinking a cup of tea. Elsewhere in the world, early birds would be waking up in this pre-dawn morning, but clearly, neither Catherine nor Diana had had any sleep.

Catherine seemed to gird herself with the tea before speaking: "You may be the most despicable person I have ever known."

It stung like a whip, as it was meant to. "I didn't order the facility liquidated," she said; a feeble defence at best. "I didn't send anyone after you. All of that was Tearney’s doing."

Catherine did not accept it. "But you knew it was a possibility, didn't you? You knew Donovan didn't want the Grey Books, and once he got into that facility he was going to deviate from the script. You knew Tearney might take drastic action—she already had, in Istanbul. And yet you sent them to kidnap me. What was that? Pragmatism? Or punishment?"

Diana rolled a shoulder. “Or a bit of flirting,” she offered.

That threw her. “What?” Catherine asked.

“A few long-distance chess moves,” she said. “I figured Donovan would tell you about his friend high up in MI-5. I figured you’d work out who that was.” She moved further into Catherine’s living room, set her bag down on the coffee table. “I was making a play for First Desk. You seemed keen to play with the high rollers the last time we saw each other. I thought you might find it exciting.” She circled, approaching Catherine slowly—slowly enough for her to move away if she wanted to. When she didn’t, Diana closed the distance between them, reached up and touched Catherine’s collarbone where the dressing gown created a V. “I hoped you’d feel my fingers from far away.”

Colour had risen in Catherine’s cheeks. Her breath had quickened, though Diana had yet to work out what sort of arousal it was—was she about to get slapped or snogged, or, god forbid, cried on?

Catherine didn’t seem to have worked it out either, though. “People died, Diana,” she said. “I sent them to their deaths.”

Diana made a face. “I think you’ll find that they would have gone in there regardless. You gave them a fighting chance to get out alive. Doesn’t that make you feel powerful?”

“No,” Catherine replied, “it’s awful. You’re the one with the power kink, not me.”

“If you say so,” Diana quipped, but didn’t push it.

“I’ve quit the service,” Catherine said, abruptly changing the subject.

“What?” Diana asked. “Why?”

She pursed her lips. “Jackson still wouldn’t tell me about what he did to Charles. He was keen to tell me why it happened, though, smear his name to stop me asking questions. You didn’t tell me Charles was selling secrets.” That last came out half accusation and half desperate question, as if she were hopeful Diana would deny it. As if she thought the service just killed their own for absolutely no reason.

“You didn’t really give me the chance,” Diana said, “the way you ran out of there.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Catherine said, with a flash of irritation. “I wasn’t quite ready for that as a topic of post-coital conversation.”

“When should I have told you?” Diana asked. “Before I put my tongue in you?”

Belatedly, Diana realised she was goading. She realised it when she felt the fire between her legs, then when Catherine slapped her across the face. Cheek stinging, Diana caught her wrist, but Catherine wasn't done.

“You’re cruel,” she hissed. “A twisted, fucked up thorn of a person. You make me—”

“—Horny?” Diana cut in for her. “Not so sickeningly good all the time? Not so perpetually bored?”

“We’re people, Diana, not pieces on a chess board. You—”

Diana kissed her. Maybe to shut her up, maybe to prove to herself that she wasn’t a complete monster incapable of human connection. Catherine kissed back, and it was electric, a tangle of energies both attracting and repelling, entirely unable to let each other go.

“I hate you,” Catherine whispered after, right against her mouth.

“No you don’t,” Diana whispered back. “You just see your shortcomings when you look at me. I know because I see the same thing when I look at you.”

Then she reached for the sash that held Catherine’s robe closed and pulled it open.

Later, when they’d taken their fill of each other, Diana found that she wasn’t inclined to lash out and run off. Instead, in a curtained but slowly brightening room, she said:

“I’m not completely despicable, you know. I do actually care when members of the service get killed, and I regret when I’ve had a hand in it.”

Catherine’s eyes were sharp even in the gloom. “Prove it, then. Do some penance. When Tearney gets ousted, don’t put your hand up.”

It was a grim sort of irony, the shoot-to-kill order Whelan had put out on River Cartwright. She’d done what Catherine had demanded, kept her name out of the running and let them ship Whelan in from across the river, then Cartwright had very nearly died because of her order.

Diana was glad he hadn’t, though she was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t some sort of cat with nine lives.

After telling Lamb she’d rather die than fraternise with him, she paused on the landing where Catherine was still cleaning up the debris from the gunfight. Catherine looked up at her, wordless, but clearly haunted.

“Don’t worry,” Diana reassured her, “no one gets to use the slow horses as pawns and get away with it, except me.”

“Are you sure we’re ready?” Diana asked.

“I’m sure,” Catherine said. “I’ve been working on Roddy for months. He genuinely believes I just want a secure computer setup for my nephew, but that he’s worked out that my nephew is into some serious dark web activity, so he’s been secretly installing all this encryption that even he can’t hack.”

“And you seriously prefer working with these people to coming back to the Park?”

“We’ve had this conversation.”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean you’re right.”

“Just log in. Make sure he hasn’t changed his password since yesterday.”

“He hasn’t.”

“All right. Pull the trigger, then?”

“I will warn you. Complete blackout after we do, and I take ops very seriously. We treat it like it’s real. Even when we’re alone.”

“Oh, please. Don’t pretend that being nasty and obstructive to each other will do anything but get you off.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t want to do it for exactly that reason.”

At MI-5’s offices in Regent’s Park, there is no natural breeze. There are whispers, though, rushing down glass-walled corridors like so much smoke. Where’s Taverner? Where’s Flyte? And why are there slow horses in the building? Then women start to go for lunch and don’t come back, but the whispers continue, because of course men are gossips too, just maybe a little less likely to catch on that their space has suddenly become oddly single-gendered.

Roddy Ho is in his element, commanding an army of IT specialists way less cool than him, working hard to trace this elusive genius who’s articulated such a clear threat.

Across the city, Shirley Dander and Louisa Guy are hanging out in an empty office building with Emma Flyte. They’ve opened a window to let in the breeze, they’re playing Cards Against Humanity, and they may or may not have imbibed a few beers.

Eventually, the source of the forum posts are traced to a very specific computer in a very specific office. As he arrives from his anniversary lunch, Claude Whelan has no idea of the tornado he’s about to walk into.

When he takes off the back of the computer to inspect its hardware, Roddy Ho notices a sticker on the inside of the casing. It’s an anime girl, big-eyed and busty. It looks a lot like the ones he puts in computers he tricks out.

Huh, weird, he thinks. I guess great minds really do think alike.

If there was a draft inside the Park, it might have been heard whistling through Roddy Ho’s ears.

The morning’s breeze has continued through London throughout the day, collecting leaves, smells both sweet and rank, stirring pigeons and fag ends alike. It blows along the canals, down along the streets surrounding Little Venice, and finds its way in through the ground floor windows of a basement flat being used, at that moment in time, as an Airbnb.

By the time it gets there, though, the women inside are not paying attention to it at all.