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Jacob?” She reached toward him to rub the buttery-soft material of his sweater. “Very nice and…very expensive .”
    "Skyla, you know the rule. The director’s office hours have not started yet.” Curtis brushed off her hand, effectively dismissing her threat as if she were a harmless insect, before he walked back to his desk.
    She narrowed her eyes at him, like a lioness tracking her prey before pouncing at any moment. No time to waste. Skyla mentally weighed how much damage she could inflict on him without getting herself into serious trouble with the director.
    Normally, Skyla would’ve made some sarcastic, clever comment as a retort to his arrogance, but she also saw the small red bar lit up on top of the director’s office door. It didn’t happen often, so something important must be going on behind the door. Nevertheless, she knew in her bones something far worse was happening in the past—something that would unravel the world as they knew it in the present. And for some unexplainable reason, she knew she was the key to this impending disaster. The thought of that made her heart race and her palms clammy. It was almost as if she was having one of the many black nightmares she had when she was a teenager, except she was wide awake.
    “Curtis, this is urgent. Let me see the director or—do you remember the dart games we had at Pigs ’n Whistle last week? If I’m a dead shot with the darts, imagine what I can do with knives.” She’d pulled two knives from her utility belt, and they were already flipping in her hands as she smiled at him smugly.
    She was pleased to see Curtis’s back stiffen a little even though his expression and tone of voice remained placid.
    He turned to her, and his turquoise-blue gaze flashed with irritation. “No can do. You can threaten me all you want, Skyla Gray, but the president and the Homeland Security director have just called in for Laura unexpectedly. Whatever urgent matter you have, you just have to wait because apparently the big boys have something more urgent going on. And interrupting them is out of the question.” He was already turning back to his computer before finishing his sentence. “Take a seat. I’ll let Laura know you’re here as soon as the call is over.”
    Skyla mentally counted to ten, her fingers itching to throw the knives at his sweater sleeves, pinning him to the desk. Instead, she huffed out, “Fine.”
    The sitting area of the director’s office was decorated with clean lines and a minimalistic sofa—black, rectangular, leather. The walls were painted stark white with only a few photos—the president, the director of Homeland Security, and the famous black-and-white photo of Iwo Jima, with soldiers raising the American flag. The floor was inlaid with antique cherry wood and covered by modern rugs in different geometrical patterns.
    When she sat on one of the sofas, her backside immediately protested. Too firm, too much support. It lacked the comfort of a well-worn, cushy sofa. Groaning inwardly, Skyla focused on clearing her mind so that she wouldn’t be fussing around, futilely looking for a more comfortable position. She steered her mind to isolating any events in her past that might have caused her absolutely irrational reaction to, and out-of-the-blue recognition of, the man inside the bank vault. But nothing. She had no memory of ever coming across the man in the vault. And the most annoying part of this encounter was not her recognition of his voice but her body yielding to him when he trapped her from behind. His iron hold was meant to immobilize and intimidate her, yet her body reacted as if it were a lover’s caress. Not that she had that much experience of lover’s caresses; the only guy she had seriously dated was Knox, when they were in college, and they had never gone past second base. Inside the vault, her agent’s mind was screaming, “Danger!” but her body just softened against her captor’s well-honed body. It