She grabbed his hand. “Run.”

Maya first saw Takeda at a charity gala in the Raffles Hotel ballroom. He was in full uniform, his face carved from granite, but his eyes moved differently — soft, almost lost — when a Chinese soprano sang Puccini. Her handler, Chen, whispered, “That’s our window.”

He looked at her — really looked. Then he said, “The mistake is thinking we can choose sides in a war. We can only choose people.”

Those words — I trust you — lodged in her throat like a fishbone.

“Nothing,” she said. Then, louder for Chen to hear: “The tea is cold.”

The kitchen door creaked. Chen’s shadow moved behind the rice-paper screen. Maya’s hand went to her cheongsam seam. Not for the stiletto. For the camellia he had given her — now dried, tucked like a secret.

“Someone who made a mistake,” she said, blood and rain mixing on her collarbone.