“Please take a moment to check your reflection,” he said.
Diana flipped the sun visor on her side and looked in the mirror.
Diana blinked.The woman in the mirror blinked with her. She was middle-aged, and her blond hair, streaked with grey, was pulled into a tight bun away from her full face. The corners of her mouth and her eyes drooped slightly. Sunspots marked her cheeks, barely obscured by a thin layer of makeup. She looked tired.
Diana tilted the visor, trying to get a better view. She had acquired a larger body, dressed in a brown pantsuit.
Diana blinked again, disoriented, and tried a smile. Her reflection mimicked her.
“No worries,” an elegant brunette in the driver seat said. “You can move your face.”
This new woman was in her forties, her makeup expertly applied, a nude lip, razor-precision eyebrows, and that classic top-income-bracket hair, parted in the center and spilling over her shoulders in loose waves. A silk satin shirt, a grey pencil skirt. She couldn’t see the shoes, but they were likely heels. At once generic and familiar, an investment banker, a luxury real estate broker, a female entrepreneur giving an interview to Forbes.
“The illusion will hold until I choose to remove it.”
He didn’t just look different. He sounded different. His movements were different, and yet even in this new body, he was still him. He felt like Augustine.
This was a problem. She didn’t need these kinds of problems.
“What about Lila?”
The brunette nodded at the back. A large jacket lay on the seat, casually discarded.
“It would be best if she waited for us in the car,” Augustine said.
“Won’t the illusion break if we leave?”
“She’s wearing a rune collar that acts as a short-term battery for my enchantment. We won’t be long. I will leave the AC running, and once we are inside, nobody will notice.”
She glanced at the overcast sky through the car window. The weather was seasonably warm for April, with highs in the mid-seventies, but today the temperature dropped to the high sixties, a luxurious cooldown. Lila would be fine with the AC.
A two-story building came into view on their right. It sat in the middle of a large parking lot, bordered by stretches of grass wide enough to be called fields. A line of trees ran behind the building. The nearest business up ahead was at least six hundred feet away or more.
Augustine slowed the Mercedes and guided it into the parking lot. She studied the structure. Two floors of sandy masonry walls with square lines and large windows. The footprint was rectangular, with the upper story slightly smaller, so it sat atop the first like the second tier of a cake. There must have been a balcony surrounding that second floor with a concrete wall acting as railing and a defensive barricade, because she could only see the top portion of the upper windows.
The first floor was large, likely around ten thousand square feet. The sign on the front spelled out “Gorwood and Associates.” It looked like a no-nonsense office built in the late nineties that had been given a fresh coat of cheerfully neutral paint.
“Is this the seedy underbelly?” she asked.
“One part of it.”
“I had expected something more sinister.”
The brunette Augustine gave her a one-shouldered shrug. Diana could’ve sworn her blouse was pure silk. The temptation to check the texture made her fingertips itch.
“What is this really?” she asked him.
“A front for the Hester family. They have two Significants and a single Prime, and they’re hoping to become a House.”
Becoming a House was hellishly expensive. “They’re trying to raise the money?” she guessed.
“By any means necessary. MII stays on the right side of the law. There are contracts that we simply won’t take. The Hesters take everything. Mostly their cases involve theft, some B&E, and getting dirt for blackmail, with an occasional assassination thrown in.”
“Lovely,” she murmured.
“Since there is no dial-a-blackmailer service, people like the Hesters conduct their business through a series of brokers. This is Quinn Hester’s secret office. He acts as the broker for the family, a seller’s agent. I’m posing as Helena Lopez, also a broker, a buyer’s agent.”
“Am I the buyer?”
