Tears were hovering in those cute baby blue eyes. This was killing him, seeing her like this …

He gently pulled the pillow she was holding on to with one hand and tossed it on the bed. “Yeah, Mike told me … and that you’d written her a letter, and made him swear that he’d give it to her. Are you alright?”

Rian put the bottle down shakily and sat down heavily on the couch. She covered her face with her hands. “We … we… we were supposed to … to … meet in a few days. But since I’m here… ”

Jonah lifted one end of the coffee table that was blocking his way with one hand and swiveled it away from the couch. He sat down on the couch a foot away from Rian, stretched his legs out and extended his arm slightly to massage her nape. “Why are you still out here, anyway, baby girl? Haven’t you done enough for your fellow man? For those precious artifacts that you keep trying to teach things to us about? All that hard work over the last few months really paid off for the good guys last week, as you know.  You’ve rendered your service. You’re already a hero, albeit one that people will never know about.”

Rian was gratified that all careful surveillance work of the team she’d led had resulted in a successful raid a week ago that would turn off the taps of a major funding source of radicalized groups – capturing a massive hoard of stolen artifacts of Antiquity that these groups had hoped to sell through the black market. The special operations team had been grateful, too, that her team’s work helped to eliminate the maze of confusing leads that they’d been chasing down for months, pointless, often dangerous work that had led them to dead-ends, frustrating the special operations team and intelligence teams supporting them to no end. There’d been innumerable raids in places that they’d discovered did not house authentic artifacts at all but fake replicas instead.

But once Rian had established to a hundred percent certainty that they’d tracked down a fabled mother lode of stolen artifacts, she’d made the case to the special ops team and intelligence services that this was it – after two years of chasing dead ends, this was the prize they’d been searching for.