I swallowed another gulp of water, emptying the glass. “Do what?”
He reached for the glass and set it behind him on the table. He pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Act like this is all normal and not very hard for you.”
I suddenly felt like I was naked. Like he’d been stripping layer after layer from me and finally gotten to the bare skin beneath, where he could see all my scars and secrets. The urge to cry swelled up in my throat, my eyes. I blinked away a wash of moisture and deflected.
“Thanks, but I don’t need a therapist, Bray.”
The look of disappointed hurt on his face immediately made me regret saying it. He stood from the table and turned away.
“I’m sorry!” I blurted, my face hot with embarrassment. I searched for the right words to salvage the situation. So rarely had I been close enough to someone to hurt their feelings, I didn’t know what to do. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I know you’re only trying to help—and thank you, really. It’s just …” My throat tightened again, and I spilled the truth. “No one ever offers to help me, so I’m not used to it.”
He stilled before turning back to me. When he sat on the coffee table again, a wave of relief washed over me. “That’s really sad.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes, wondering if he matched me in lack of interpersonal social skills. “Thanks.”
He blushed and waved his hands. “Sorry, that sounded rude. I didn’t mean to—” He cut himself off and took a breath. He looked up at me. “You know what? Maybe we should just get back to the case.”
A pang of disappointment struck me in the chest, but I agreed. Keeping our relationship professional was in everyone’s best interest.
“Good idea.”
Bray nodded and smoothed his palms over his knees again. “So, what happened back there?”
I knew he wasn’t asking me to report on my conversation with Brittany, although there was valuable information to be shared there. He wanted to know about the man who’d chased me down the alley and nearly broken my leg. I leaned back into the pillows, wishing I could sink into them and disappear along with the day. I didn’t want to speak the words aloud for fear of making it all real.
“Something very, very bad,” I finally said.
He studied me with narrowed eyes. “What does that mean?”
I sat up and adjusted the bag of ice. The chill on my fingertips even through the towel was shocking. Part of me didn’t want to say anything more. Part of me, perhaps the part that had looked in his eyes in the coffeeshop and momentarily imagined we were on a date, wanted to go back to that moment and stay there pretending it was real. The same part of me wanted to go back to the moment we’d just had, where he was sincerely kind to me, sympathetic, and wrap myself in someone else’s care. If I told him the truth, he’d never look at me thesame. It would change everything. I would go from whatever he thought of me now to a true criminal.
But, in the end, that’s who I really was.
I took a big, heavy breath and got straight to the point. “The classified part of my file fills in the gap between my father and I arriving at that hotel room in Houston and me becoming a CI. That guy from the alley was there too.”
Bray slowly nodded with a purse of his lips, making his scar jump. “I figured.”
Only a handful of people knew what happened in that missing space. Two were in prison, one—I thought—died that night, one had died just a few days ago, and the other was me.
I didn’t want to tell Bray for a host of reasons, but I knew on some instinctual level I could trust him. I took a breath and told him a story I’d never shared with another living soul.
CHAPTER14
Ten Years Ago
What I had been doing in that hotel room with my father that night was a long story. Sometimes, I liked to pretend it was just that: a story. Something that happened to someone else and not the reason I’d spent the next decade changing names and hiding. After all, everything I had done with my father, every job, was rooted in fiction.
I’d played the part of a debutant that night. A spoiled rich girl whose daddy had promised her an extravagant birthday gift. One we’d had to fly all the way to Houston to meet a jewel dealer in a private hotel room to obtain.
It had all gone according to plan. Until it hadn’t.
“I was hoping for something bigger,” I’d said, pouting, and playing the part of Ana Prescott when the woman with the jewels presented a dazzling tennis bracelet worth a year’s college tuition. We sat at the dining table in a lavish suite, the pendant lamp hanging above us casting glittering rainbows. I’d been instructed to do whatever it took to make them bring outthe big one.
My father had it on good authority, thanks to the circles he ran in, the dealer had traveled to the jewel expo in town with adiamond of life-changing proportions. He’d arranged a private meeting with them in a hotel room. Little did they know, the briefcase of cash we’d arrived with was completely fake—agoodfake, thanks to my father’s favorite counterfeiter, but still fake. Contrary to pop culture lore, five million dollars is way too heavy to haul around in any kind of case; it would weigh over one hundred pounds if it was made up of hundred-dollar bills. That night, we’d brought a million (fake) dollars as a show of good faith, and my father was going to wire the rest of the money from a bank account that didn’t exist, but we would be long gone before they figured out none of the money was real. The plan was to make a deal for the diamond in the hotel room and then disappear. We’d be in the wind, old identities burned, before they realized. We had another dealer lined up to sell it to in Peru. Javi, a man my father had known for years, was waiting for our call. It was supposed to be our ticket out. The final job to set us free.
They’d laid out their best to impress us that night: necklaces, earrings, rings. But what we were after wasn’t mounted or strung. It was loose and the size of an acorn, if the rumors were to be believed.
“Olena, please,” my father cooed from where he casually leaned back in his leather dining chair beside me. “I want only the best for my princess’s birthday. You only turn eighteen once.” He turned and winked at me. “We didn’t come all this way for trinkets we could buy at home. Impress us.”
