"Then we'll wait." Morgan pulled out her phone and typed something quickly. "The car will pick you up when you're ready. Just send a message to this number." She handed Serafina a card—plain white, nothing but a phone number printed on it. "Don't take too long. The training schedule is already set."
Serafina took the card and slipped it into her pocket. "I'll be there. Just not until I've seen her."
"Family first," Morgan said. There was something in her voice—not mockery, not impatience. Something that sounded almost like understanding. "I can respect that."
Serafina stood, slinging her bag over her shoulder, the weight of ten thousand dollars pressing against her hip.
"I'll do the training," she said. "That's all I'm agreeing to."
Morgan rose as well, extending her hand. "That's all I'm asking. For now."
Serafina looked at the offered hand for a moment, then took it. Morgan's grip was firm, confident, the handshake of someone who had already won and knew it.
Maybe she had.
Serafina turned and walked toward the door. She didn't look back at the frosted glass, didn't let herself think about what was waiting behind it.
One step at a time.
She pushed through the door and walked out into the corridor, the silence swallowing her footsteps as she made her way back to the elevator.
The doors opened. She stepped inside. Pressed the button for the lobby.
As the elevator began to descend, she leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
What the hell did I just agree to?
The elevator hummed around her, carrying her back down to a world that had no idea what existed just four floors above.
CHAPTER 11
Morgan's people had arranged a hotel room for her—the Ritz-Carlton in downtown LA, the kind of place Serafina had only ever seen from the outside. The lobby was all marble and soft lighting, the staff polished and discreet, the room itself larger than her burned apartment had been.
She barely noticed any of it.
The bed was king-sized, dressed in crisp white linens that probably cost more than her monthly rent. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view of the city sprawling out beneath her—glittering lights, endless traffic, millions of lives unfolding in patterns she would never know. The room was quiet, insulated from the noise below, the kind of silence that money could buy.
She sat on the edge of the bed, still in her clothes, staring at the wall without seeing it. The ten thousand dollars sat in her bag on the floor. The white card with the phone number sat on the nightstand.
Sleep wouldn't come.
Her mind kept circling back to the same impossible loop. The frosted glass going clear. The massive figure behind it—armored, inhuman, those red eyes glowing in the dim light. Theslender blue-skinned attendants standing motionless behind him. Morgan's calm voice explaining rituals and hunts and choices.
They hadn't even told her what kind of alien she was supposed to hunt.
That came next, as part of the training. Morgan had been clear about that—and clear that Serafina could still back out at any time. No pressure. No consequences. Just walk away.
It should have been reassuring. Instead, it felt like a door left deliberately open, daring her to step through.
What if this is all some kind of hoax?
Her brain kept trying to reject it, to file it away as an elaborate scam, a fever dream, a breakdown brought on by stress and grief and too many sleepless nights. Reality didn't work this way. Aliens didn't stand in office buildings in Los Angeles. Women didn't get recruited to hunt alien warriors in exchange for their sister's medical bills.
But the aliens she saw were real. There was no doubt about that. No makeup, no costumes, no special effects could create what she'd seen behind that glass. She knew it in her bones the same way she knew when a suspect was guilty, the same way she knew when a crime scene held secrets the evidence hadn't revealed yet.
And the information she'd searched on her phone since leaving that building... it was all there. Alien contact. Distant planets. Trading stations. Alien life scattered across the galaxy and beyond. She'd seen the photographs, the footage, the official reports from governments that had spent years denying any of it existed. It was real. All of it.
She'd just never paid attention before.
