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Ian shuttled Marisela and Frankie through hallways and up stairs until they stopped outside the chapel, or so Marisela guessed from the cross on the door. Frankie shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and offered it to her; she accepted appreciatively. The torn and tattered state of her dress hadn’t mattered much until she was inches from entering a house of God. Or at least, His tiny sublet apartment.
    Ian leaned in close, his voice a whisper. “Craig Bennett’s wife is inside.”
    “Where’s her husband?” Frankie asked.
    Ian glanced at his watch. “More than likely, still in surgery. I posted Max at the operating room door. In case our assassin tries to finish the job.”
    Marisela shifted her weight, her eyes locked on the cross on the door. It had no corpus, no body of Jesus, but the symbol was still powerful. Funny how Catholic school imprints on the brain, even when she’d spent the majority of her time there with the nuns in detention. She could stare down murderers and go hand-to-hand with a trained assassin, but put a crucifix in front of her when she was still lamenting the fact that she hadn’t shot the killer and she quaked.
    She cleared her throat, trying to push away the thought that if she’d simply killed the shooter when she had a chance, their client’s husband wouldn’t still be in danger. Commandments were fine and everything, but where did justice come in?
    Marisela wiped a smear of blood off her chin. “So we’ve been hired to provide protection for the congressman?”
    “Partly, yes. He has private security, but they did little good tonight. Max is now the lead agent on that assignment.”
    “Was there any reason to think the congressman would be a target at the party?” Frankie inquired.
    “The shooter said revenge,” Marisela injected, though she’d just recounted her brief conversation with the shooter to both of them minutes before.
    “Revenge for what? And besides, we don’t know if she was lying, trying to throw us off.” Ian shook his head. “Until we have more proof, we must assume that Bennett wasn’t a target any more than the other politicians in attendance. But the congressman’s wife asked us to investigate further. Her name is Denise. She’s extremely distraught,” he said, directing the tidbit of information at Marisela.
    Her mouth dropped open in shock. “I can be nice.”
    “That’s not been my experience,” Ian contested.
    “I wonder why,” she shot back. Ian Blake had been nothing more than a high-class bully since the first time they’d met, and with the exception of a few brief acts of compassion on his part, neither one of them had tried very hard to hide their antagonism. The only thing Marisela succeeded in masking was her innate and, frankly, damned annoying attraction to the guy.
    Ian opened the chapel door gingerly, then led his agents inside. Marisela shook off the chill and focused on the woman sitting hunched over in the front pew, a rosary dangling from her fingers. A police officer guarded the door on the inside and a man wearing a tuxedo sat beside her, his arm around her shoulder.
    “Mrs. Bennett?” Ian said softly.
    Frankie and Marisela hung a few steps behind.
    The woman looked up. Her wavy caramel hair, streaked with wisps of blond, hung limp over cheeks that had been washed of makeup by rivulets of tears. Her eyes, a soft green, were surrounded by skin at once bruised and puffy from the kind of crying a woman did when her world was ripped out from under her feet.
    “Mr. Blake?” The woman held out her hand, which quivered until Ian took it firmly in his. “The doctors are hopeful. The bullet missed a major artery in his neck, but did serious damage to his windpipe. He’ll be on a respirator…when,”—she forced the word out—” when he wakes up. I don’t understand how someone could…”
    She dissolved into tears again and Marisela looked away. She didn’t blame the woman for losing it, but she didn’t exactly like