BASTIAN
bait and switch /bat and swiCH/: noun
1: substituting inferior product after advertising prime.
2: when the escape hatch was always a trap, and hope was just the lure.
The address on Solis’s card leads me to a beige office park in the middle of nowhere. Before the economy gutted it, it probably housed insurance adjusters, chiropractors, telemarketing firms, a million anonymous nobodies. Now, it’s just blank windows and weeds pushing through the parking lot cracks.
I park and sit, scanning the perimeter out of old habit. The training Aleksei drilled into me doesn’t switch off just because I’m trying to be one of the good guys now. Everything looks right to my eye, though. A few vehicles dot the lot, including a white Honda Civic with government plates that screams “FBI” so loud it might as well have a neon sign.
No black sedans, though. That’s a good thing.
My phone vibrates. I check it and find a text from Eliana.
ELIANA HUNTER
That’s it. Nothing more. I allow myself a small smile, pocket the phone, and step out of the car.
My footsteps crunch on gravel and broken glass as I cross the lot. The front door of the building is unlocked. I pull it open just wide enough to slip through.
Inside, the building is dim and dusty, the air thick with the smell of mold and old carpet. My eyes adjust slowly, picking out shapes—abandoned desks, overturned chairs, a water cooler lying on its side.
“Solis?” I call out.
No response.
My hand drifts toward the gun I tucked in my waistband before leaving the safe house. Every nerve is firing warnings I don’t want to hear.
It’s fine, you paranoid freak. Just get in, tell them what they want, and get back to your woman.
I round a corner…
… and stop in my tracks.
I found Solis.
The issue is, he’s dead.
Agent Jordan Solis is slumped against a concrete pillar, his throat cut so savagely that his head hangs at an impossible angle. His eyes are still open, staring at nothing, and his shirtfront isdrenched in blood. The beagle from our first meeting is nowhere to be seen. Small mercy, that.
A few feet away, a woman in a gray pantsuit suit—the federal prosecutor he mentioned, I assume—lies facedown in a spreading lake of blood. Her back is riddled with stab wounds, so many that her jacket looks like wet confetti.
Whoever killed these people didn’t just want them dead.
He wanted themdisplayed.
My hand closes around the gun at my back, but I already know it won’t matter. If Aleksei wanted me dead on arrival, I’d be bleeding out next to Solis.
No. He wants something else. It doesn’t take long to figure out what that something might be.
Sirens.
Multiple sirens, distant but converging fast, growing louder by the second. The wail cuts through the abandoned building like a knife through a federal agent’s jugular. Through the filthy windows, I watch as police cruisers and SWAT trucks flood the parking lot. One, two, five, eight—they keep coming, a swarm of flashing lights painting the beige walls red and blue. Officers spill out with serious weapons already drawn, taking positions behind their doors, shouting commands I can’t decipher through the glass.
I don’t know whether Solis was in on the trap from the beginning or if Aleksei caught wind of this meeting after the fact and arranged it to ensnare me, but it doesn’t matter anymore. My brother has choreographed a ballet, and I danced everygoddamn step. All of it was bait, and I swallowed it whole because I let myself believe in happy endings.
Because I let myselfhope.
