And who can blame her for smiling?
I join the rest of the ballroom in lifting my champagne flute and toasting the happy couple, as the bride’s father announces his daughter’s engagement to Nicholas Randolph Preston III. He is not just a Preston—he is the Preston. The sitting U.S. Senator rumored to have aspirations of reaching the White House one day.
Our gazes meet across the ballroom.
How could I not see this coming a mile away? In the end, life always comes down to timing. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1958, and your world is parties and shopping trips; it’s New Year’s Day, 1959, and it’s soldiers, guns, and death. You meet a man on a balcony, and for a moment you forget yourself, only to be reminded once again how mercurial fate can be.
I drain the glass in one unladylike gulp.
And then I see him—the one I came for—and nothing else matters anymore.
A different sort of awareness hums through my veins as I spy a man in the corner, standing on the fringes of the party, Nicholas Randolph Preston III a ghost of a memory.
This man is short and stout, his hair balding at the top, his nose better suited to a larger face. He wears his tuxedo like it’s strangling him rather than as though he was born to it. Through the research I’ve done, I know he’s invited to these parties for one reason and one reason only: His wife is the darling of the charity circuit, her maiden name whispered with reverence throughout the ballroom. He clearly prefers the comfort of the shadows, every inch of him reinforcing the intelligence I’ve received. He’s a man who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and dirty his hands, who enjoys moving world leaders around like they are pieces on a chessboard, wiping the whole lot of them out with a crushing and fatal blow.
He is the CIA’s man on Latin America. They say he has been suspicious of Fidel from the beginning, even when others in the agency were not. In the growing exile circles in Miami and Palm Beach, people whisper that he has a plan to do something about Cuba, about the situation ravaging my country.
I didn’t come here to dance with a prince on a moonlit balcony, and I lied before, when Nicholas Randolph Preston III—soon-to-be-married U.S. Senator—asked me about freedom. I would savor it for a moment.
And then I’d fight like hell to make sure it was never, ever taken away from me again.
As nice as moonlit dances with princes are, I came here with more important business at hand. I came to meet the man who is going to help me avenge my brother’s death and kill Fidel Castro.