“Nervous.” I shrug. “But yeah.”
“Hey…” She turns to me. “You’re going to be great. Just be yourself. Well…maybe not the part of yourself that cries at dog commercials or stress-cleans the fridge at one in the morning. But the rest of you? Total catch.”
“I knew I never should’ve told you the one time I did that.”
She quirks a brow.
“Okay, maybe it was more than once.”
She laughs as we get out, climbing the stone steps before entering a brightly lit room that gives off cabin vibes. It’s quite homey.
A woman in a pale blue suit jacket looks up at us from her laptop and smiles. “Hi there. May I help you?”
“My name is Sloane. I’m here to see Greer for a job interview.”
She types something, then reaches for the phone. “Sure, I will let Ms. Whitlock know. Please have a seat.”
I glance around the space: wood floors, a eucalyptus tree tucked into the corner, paintings of horses lining the walls. It’s calm, but I feel nothing of the sort. My hands tighten around the strap of my purse as I take a seat, Mandy dropping down beside me.
“Relax,” she whispers. “You’re gonna be fine. This is no big deal.”
But it is. She has no idea the kind of mess I’m trying to crawl out of.
My foot starts bouncing as the minutes drag, my eyes catching on the large black clock across the room, watching every second tick by. Mandy scrolls on her phone while I try not to make myself even more nervous, so I start thinking about my boy. What he’s doing right now. If he misses me. If he’s asking where I am.
Camille only lets me talk to him once a week, so the second I’m done here, I’m calling him. I just need to hear his voice.
The door down the hall opens, and a woman steps out.
“That’s her,” Mandy whispers.
My eyes follow Greer as she struts past us toward another room, long brown curls bouncing down her back, the kind of edge around her that warns people off before they ever get too close. She moves like everything in this world belongs to her.
She’s the kind of beautiful that looks effortless, but there’s something hard beneath it that makes my skin tighten. I’ve only ever seen her from a distance and heard about her reputation, and from the look in her eyes, she more than lives up to it. She seems like the type of woman who could end a man with one hand and never smudge her lipstick. I’ve met women like her before.
Jess was like that. The first time I saw her kill someone, I was fifteen. We were on a job at a local pawn shop, and when it didn’t go as well as they had hoped, she killed the witness.
I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that. I was going to leave as soon as it happened, but you don’t leave a gang once you’re in it. Not when you’ve seen what you’ve seen and know what they can do to you if you try.
Eli taught me that. He taught me a lot of things, like how to crack safes until I became better than him—so good, they started calling me Ghosthands. It definitely wasn’t the type of talent I wanted to discover I had, but by sixteen, I was their it girl, and Barrett treated me like his golden prize.
Right up until I became a problem.
Eli was Barrett’s prodigy, the second-in-command. The one who acted like your friend until you weren’t useful. I didn’t know that back then. I was young and wanted so badly to belong, and Eli knew it too.
Images flash behind my eyes.
Eli with a bullet in his leg. Two others dead. Cops hauling some of the crew away while everything fell apart.
I got out. I don’t even know how, just that I ran and didn’t stop until my lungs burned. Samuel, my neighbor, found me after. The same man who later set me, Milo, and Camille up with new identities, whose house we’re renting now.
If it hadn’t been for him, I’d be dead. I still don’t know how he found me. He always felt bad for me, for the way I grew up,and once I got involved with Barrett, he tried to warn me. I just didn’t listen.
It didn’t matter at that point, though. All that mattered was that I was out, and I’d wanted out for so long it almost didn’t feel real.
But Samuel told me Barrett wanted me found. He blamed me when all of it went down. Someone had been talking to the police, and he’d decided it was me. But I never would have done that. Never. I had a son, and Barrett knew it. I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to put Milo in the crosshairs.
The door Greer walked into opens and she returns back to the one she came out of. I clear my throat, the past snapping shut as the secretary peers over from her desk.
