I rounded into the office and caught a glimpse of the man’s safe mounted low in the glossy floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. The thought of cracking it flirted with my focus, trying to lure me away from the job I had to do. The chance it held what I needed—the thing I’d spent ten years searching for—was impossible, as was the case with every home safe I saw. I might find a Rolex in there, some heirloom jewelry, maybe a gun—helpful things, but not what I needed. But still, every locked door signalingkeep outmade me wonder.
I shook off the thought and continued around to the desk. I jumped, but not at my ghostly reflection hovering in the black windows. A loud crack rang through the phone, and Wallace sucked in a breath. I couldn’t place the sound. A breaking branch? Something clattering onto concrete? Something … worse?
“Get the job done and get to the airport,” he demanded.
The dark edge in his voice put a skip in my step. I hurried back to the bedroom and crawled up onto the bed. The man still wore what he’d worn to dinner too, minus his shoes and the tie I’d seductively unwound from his neck as I pulled him into his bedroom. He lay flat on his back, one arm curled above his head and gentle snores coming from his parted lips. I had kissed his lips once, and it had been a good kiss as far as deceitful kisses went. He had already swallowed the pill at thatpoint, and the kiss would be the last thing he remembered before waking to the authorities pounding on his door later that morning.
A pang of regret snapped through me that on the rare occasions I got a kiss, it was never real. There’d been a few between-job hookups, sure, but nothing lasting because that was impossible for me. I tried not to dwell on it as I pressed the sleeping man’s index finger into the pad on his laptop. The lock screen dissolved into the password prompt, and I tapped in the code I had recovered with some covert spying.
Alas, access.
I pulled a flash drive from my clutch on the nightstand and shoved it into the laptop.
The man grumbled in his sleep, and I froze, my hands splayed across the keyboard. I knew he was knocked out, but perhaps he could sense his secrets being extracted like gold from a digital mine. I felt a moment of pity for him, then took one glance around the ostentatious room: the sleek flat-screen TV, the marble-top furniture, the original art—all things he’d procured by stealing other people’s money—and changed my mind.
“Got it,” I told Wallace and shut the laptop with a soft click.
I stood from the bed and searched for my shoes. The night that had led to drugging the man in his own home began with a five-star dinner, in heels and a dress he would want to peel off of me, and if Wallace wanted me to get to the airport on time, I hoped he had stashed a change of clothes at the drop because an extra pit stop was not in the cards. No way was I flying across the country in stilettos and a cocktail dress, though it wouldn’t have been the most inconvenient thing I had done in the name of staying out of prison.
“Good girl,” Wallace said, and I gnashed my teeth at the phrase.
He had been saying it like I was a trained poodle since I was a teenager, back when I first became his pawn. I hated it, andhe knew I hated it. And we both knew it served as a reminder of who was in charge.
I left the laptop on the bed. It would be a dead giveaway something was off when the man woke to his computer in my place, but it didn’t matter. I would be in the wind. A ghost. A sweet memory turning sour as the gravity of what I had done to him took hold.
With a final look at him, I tiptoed from the room. I sighed. “See you in California, I guess,” I told Wallace.
A long pause filled the line. The wind kept whistling until a car door sharply cut it off. Wallace’s voice came back with the rounded resonance of someone speaking inside a small space. He took a deep, wavering breath. “Don’t miss your flight, Erin.”
He hung up, and I froze by the hideous vase in the entryway. I stared at my phone, shocked by what I had just heard.
No one had called me by my real name in ten years.
CHAPTER2
Wallace had in fact left a change of clothes at the drop, and by the time I landed in California, my gratitude for the yoga pants, hoodie, and sneakers was overwhelming. My head ached; my body craved sleep. Or caffeine. Whichever I could get my hands on first.
The DSA didn’t fly anyone first class unless the covert occasion called for it. I had spent the past six hours wedged in a middle seat, head bobbing between a guy with a man bun who smelled like patchouli and a woman who somehow managed to read a book with her whole body. She sighed, gasped, jerked in surprise, bent the poor spine until it broke, and laughed out loud more than once. Great to know it was such a good book, but did it need to be read at the crack of dawn on a cross-country flight beside someone who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a decade?
No. No, it did not.
The full-body read-a-thon paired with the patchouli-scented hippie who had to be returning to his yurt in the weed-growing California redwoods left me in a spectacularly foul mood.
You pulled out all the stops for this one, I planned to tell Wallace as soon as I saw him.
I did my best. It was last minute, he would say and maybemean it but probably not because he would have flown in on something chartered. Or maybe he had already been here when he called me last night, I couldn’t say.
I also intended to ask him the reason for the last-minute move, and fully expected him to grumble something about urgency and DSA priority, which I knew was less the reason and more a reminder, again, that I was at his mercy.
That day ten years ago when my father had gotten arrested by the FBI and I, his accomplice, had been intercepted by an agency so off-the-books no one knew about it, I had no idea what I was walking into. I had fled the hotel room where our job had gone terribly wrong and ended up on a stormy street in the pouring rain with blood on my adolescent hands and a gun pointed at me. I may well have made a deal with the devil. Desperate and completely alone, I’d handed over my life to the government rather than follow my father to prison.
Sometimes, I wondered if prison would have been the better option.
No one even knew the DSA existed. I certainly hadn’t until working for it became my life. The Directorate of Secret Affairs was the interstitial tissue between organizations the likes of the FBI and CIA but with fewer rules and more secrets. It filled gaps the others couldn’t. Sidestepped funding pipelines and operated invisibly other than to those in the know. I was more in the know than I ever wanted to be but still often in the dark. Wallace doled out only the necessary information to me, which was why I had to trust he knew what was going on when he told me what to do.
I usually got a break between jobs. A spell of reprieve to get out of Dodge after whatever hammer I’d been helping to lower dropped. I’d ditch the disguise—wigs, contacts, whatever wardrobe fit the role I’d been playing—and go back to being me, Erin, whoever that was. Wallace would set me up in a small apartment or house with some flat-box furniture and theoccasional bloodstain under the rug from whatever DSA purpose it had previously served, but never for long enough to feel like home.
I hadn’t had one of those since my mother died when I was twelve.
