“I’m not sure I did.” She meets my eyes. “But I learned to recognize when I was slipping. Learned to feel the edge before I went over it. That took years, and a lot of fucking therapy I’d never admit to.” A ghost of a smile. “You think you’re broken beyond repair. I thought the same thing. We’re not. We’re just—reconfigured. And undoing that takes time.”
“What I did—” My throat closes around the memory. The bruises forming under my hands. His eyes, terrified, in the window’s reflection.
“Will heal,” she finishes. “The question is whether you’re going to let this destroy everything or use it as the reason to actually get help.”
“I can’t go back.”
“Can’t? Or are you telling yourself you shouldn’t?”
“Both.” I force myself to look at her. “What happens next time? What if I hurt Nina? What if I—” I can’t finish that thought.
“So your plan is to stay gone. Let them sit with what happened while you punish yourself out here.” Tatiana’s voice sharpens. “You know what that does to people who love you? It doesn’t protect them. It just adds a different kind of damage.”
The information lands like another blow to already-damaged ribs.
“I’ll text her,” I say. “Tell her I’m alive.”
“She deserves more than a text and you know it.”
“It’s what I’ve got.” I push myself more upright, ignoring the protests from every part of my body. “You said you were following a lead when you found me. What did you find?”
Tatiana’s eyes narrow. She sees what I’m doing. Reaching for work like a lifeline, pulling myself out of the personal wreckage by grabbing onto something I understand. Something I can control.
She lets me do it anyway.
“The assassination contract,” she says. “It’s active. Assets are in position. Someone specific has accepted the job and they’re already in the city.”
“Do we have a face? A name?”
“Not yet. But my contacts have heard enough chatter to know the timeline is accelerating. Flores compound has already beefed up security. They know something’s coming.” She pauses. “There’s something else. That name that keeps surfacing. Rafael Marcano.”
My attention sharpens despite the pounding in my skull. “What about him?”
“He’s separate from the contract. I’d bet money on that. But he’s circling, and the timing isn’t coincidental.” She frowns slightly. “Something doesn’t add up. The assassin is moving on Vicente and Arturo. Rafael’s moving on... something else. The convergence feels intentional, but I can’t figure out who benefits from both things happening at once.”
“Do you have an image of Rafael?”
She shakes her head. “Everything I have is word of mouth. Reliable, but not exactly actionable.” She leans forward. “I can work on it. I’ve got people who owe me favors, and Rafael’s been making just enough noise that someone’s got to have a photo. But it’ll take a few days.”
A few days. Time I should spend figuring out how to face Wyatt and Nina. How to explain what I became. How to ask for forgiveness I don’t deserve.
Instead I say, “I can help. As Cal, I have access to places Chris Longo can’t go. People who’d never talk to a fed but might remember Amador’s lieutenant.”
She stands, moves toward the door. “I’m going to get coffee. When I come back, you’re going to shower, put on clothes that don’t smell like a distillery, and call Nina.”
“Text.”
“Call.” She pauses with her hand on the doorknob. “Whatever you’re afraid of saying, she’s imagined worse. Trust me on that.”
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with the water-stained ceiling and the wreckage of everything I built.
The shower is barely functional: lukewarm water that stutters from a rusted showerhead. But I stand under it until my fingers prune. Watch the water run pink down the drain from cuts I don’t remember receiving.
In the fogged mirror afterward, I catalog the damage. Black eye swelling shut on the left side. Split lip, crusted with dried blood. Bruises spreading across my ribs like a map of my own stupidity. My knuckles are hamburger, which means I did fight back at some point, even if I don’t remember it.
The face looking back at me isn’t Chris Longo. Isn’t Cal Logan either. Something in between. Something undefined.
I think about Wyatt’s face in that window reflection. The moment I saw recognition hit, when he realized the man on top of him wasn’t me anymore. Just someone else wearing my body like a costume.
