She was running him. He was running her. She figured it out first. He planned on that.

Darya Melnik is very good at her job. Three years with the FSB in Moscow have made her precise, controlled, and impossible to surprise. When she is assigned to get close to Alexei Sorokin, a journalist suspected of passing intelligence to Ukrainian sources, she approaches it the way she approaches everything. Methodically. Without sentiment.

Then November becomes December. December becomes January. And somewhere in the space between surveillance and something she cannot name, Darya finds herself not filing the report.

She knows what he is. She chooses him anyway.

What she does not know is that the choice was always the mission.

A five chapter spy romance set between Moscow and Kyiv, The Double is a story about the specific cost of loving someone who was sent to find your weakest point. Explicit. Devastating. The question at the end is whose.