The thing about classified intelligence is that it's never where you think it is. You don't find it in the encrypted files. You don't dig it out of some bunker under Langley. No, the real secrets live in the margins, the static, the discarded drafts of policy memos. They live in the way a defense contractor's lawyer pauses for half a second before saying "no comment." They live in the sigh a double agent exhales before he remembers he's not supposed to have a conscience.

And sometimes, just sometimes, they live in the heat of a woman's breath as she murmurs in a language she's pretending not to know.

She was French, but not really. More like a dream of French, a cinematic hallucination of Paris rendered in shadows and silk. Her real name was something unpronounceable in five languages, but I called her Camille, because something about her smelled like a film noir with a red filter and a bad ending.

We met at a symposium on post-quantum cryptography in Zürich, which is exactly the kind of place spies go to tell lies that are technically true. She wore glasses — not because she needed them, but because men love the aesthetic of intelligence. The lenses were non-prescription, probably custom-etched to filter out retinal scans.

I sat next to her, exhaled a slow cloud of something synthetic and mentholated, and leaned in just enough to let the weight of my shoulder whisper a promise.

"Professor," she purred, as if the word itself was an invitation.

I smirked. "Technically."

She arched a brow. "Unofficially?"

I shrugged. Uncertainty is an aphrodisiac, and I rationed mine like a controlled substance.

We talked about ciphers and compression rates, about how all intelligence agencies lie but only some of them know they're doing it. She laughed at all the right moments, the way women do when they're evaluating a man's potential for both sin and survival.

She was beautiful, but beauty is just misdirection. The real tell was in her fingers — delicate but deadly, her nails short and unpolished. A woman like that isn't interested in decoration. She's interested in grip strength.

We ended up in my hotel room, because of course we did. The city spread out beneath us, an acoustic constellation of late-night sirens and dog barks. She kissed like someone who knew the value of time and wasn't about to waste it. Her skin tasted like unsolved mysteries. I slid my hands down the small of her back, fingers tracing the ridges of concealed weaponry. The tension between us was a cipher, an encryption key embedded in body heat.

She whispered something against my neck — something soft, something unimportant. A diversion. Her other hand reached for the burner phone on my nightstand.

I let her take it.

She thought she was getting access codes.

What she got was a payload.

A dead man's switch, triggered the second she decrypted the file. A self-replicating worm that would root itself into her agency's servers and whisper sweet nothings to every database in the Five Eyes.

She gasped. Not because she realized the trap, but because my mouth was on her throat and she was human, after all.

I held her there, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, a lesson in mutually assured destruction.

And then I pulled back, just enough to watch her face as she understood.

She smiled.

God help me, so did I.

Because espionage isn't about stealing secrets.

It's about seducing them out of someone else's mouth.

And that night, oh, that night —

I had won.