“You went digging.” Her fingers bit into the couch cushion.
“Yes.”
She turned her head and fixed him with the stare she whipped out when she wanted to make people flinch.
Sinner didn’t.
Her knuckles began to ache from her tight grip on the cushion. “Why?”
In true Caius “Sinner” Sinclair style, he didn’t look away.
“I was trying to help you find your mom. I know how much you miss her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
She issued a scoffing sound, soft and low but burning with fury. “Project Lazarus isn’t a thing you just stumble across. It’s buried on purpose.”
“I know.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You said we have it in common. How?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted, angling his body toward her. He was positioning himself in the same way men trained in interrogation tactics would when they wanted to get answers without spooking their source.
Her jaw began to ache from clenching her teeth so hard.
“Tell me your story, Opal. How did it start?”
Her laugh came out sharp and humorless. “Nice try.”
His chest inflated to an impossible size. He held it for two counts before expelling the air out through his nose. “It’s not a trick.”
“Yes, it is,” she shot back. “It’s atactic. You pretend you have common ground so people feel safe filling in the gaps.” She threw out an example. “You start with something shared—same city, same program, same bad childhood—so people fill in the rest for you. It’s Rapport 101.”
He grunted. “You’re not wrong.”
She pushed to her feet and paced to the other side of the room, arms folded. “Then you already know I’m not telling you anything.”
He studied her for a long beat, brown eyes steady on her for too long. At last, he nodded once. “Okay.”
Rarely did people surprise her. She was just about as jaded as life could make her. She steeled her expression, but inside, she was falling apart.
He braced his forearms on his thighs. The thick sinew strained as he curled his fingers into fists. The ropes of muscle flexed around the veins snaking up each arm.
When he spoke again, his voice was much quieter. “I’ll go first.”
Her pulse skipped.
He looked her straight in the eyes. “My dad was a mafia informant.”
Goose bumps skipped up her arms, working up her nape and prickling her scalp.
“We were put into WitSec when I was a kid. Moved around, names changed. Our lives erased.” A new tendon popped up in his jaw, bunching and releasing, bunching and releasing. “We ended up in Chicago to keep him alive. Keep us all alive.”
She held her breath, not daring to interrupt, her mind moving at the speed of light.
“Back when I went into the program, details slipped through the cracks. I didn’t have a birth certificate with my new name. Which meant—”
