That’s all that stands between her voice and me.
Between the mission and the man I used to be.
My thumb hovers.
Then I clear it.
Setting the phone back on the counter, I walk to the window and stand there looking out at a city I don’t know, breathing slowly until the urge passes.
It passes.
It always passes.
That’s both the best and worst thing about being trained for this.
Sam arrives at noon with another agent I don’t know, who’s young and sharp-eyed, the kind of focus that comes from wanting to prove something. He introduces himself as Agent Cole. Ex-military, I’d guess. It’s in the way he moves, sets things down with quiet and deliberate precision, and stands when he’s not doing anything. Some habits don’t leave you. He carries a hard case in one hand and a file in the other and sets both on the table without being asked.
Professional, efficient… good.
I appreciate people who don’t waste words.
Cole opens the hard case and slides a passport across the table toward me. “Marco Reyes.”
I pick it up.
My face looks back at me.
Different name. Different history. Same eyes. Different color.
There’s something deeply strange about looking at your own face in a passport that belongs to someone else entirely. Yourfeatures staring back at you from under a name you’ve never answered to, and knowing that for however long this takes, months, maybe longer, the man in this photograph is more real than you are. Ryan doesn’t exist. Ryan is in a closed casket in a New York cemetery with a Blood Brothers’ patch and a name on a headstone.
Marco Reyes is the one who gets to keep breathing.
I set the passport down, and Cole continues with the background story, cover history, the legend they have built around a man who never existed until they needed him to. Colombian father, American mother. Grew up between two worlds. Knows how to move in both. Criminal record carefully constructed, enough to make him believable, not enough to make him untouchable.
Everything about Marco Reyes is plausible.
That’s the wordtheyuse.
Sam slides the dossier across next. It’s a file thick enough to tell me everything I need to know about the operation and nothing I don’t. Opening it, I work through it methodically, the way I was trained to. Maps. Known associates. Entry points. Clemente’s structure, his network, the gaps in it that the Bureau has been trying to widen for three years.
I don’t rush.
I read everything twice.
And then I turn a page and stop.
Riley.
She’s in a photograph taken from a distance with a long lens and natural light, somewhere that looks like Mexico City. She’s standing outside a building I don’t recognize, dark hair down, sunglasses on, dressed like she belongs exactly where she is.
She looks completely in control. She also looks like a woman playing a game with no safety net, and only I would know the difference.
She’s the woman I once loved. The woman I’d bought a ring for before she found it tucked in the back of a drawer and told me she wasn’t ready. We didn’t end badly. We just ended. And somewhere in the years since, she’d walked back into the Bureau and into the most dangerous operation of her career, completely alone.
I stare at the photograph longer than I should.
Her undercover name is listed beneath it. Her current status. Her last confirmed contact with the Bureau.
