"What?"
"No more freelancing. No more leaving the safehouse without mypermission." His eyes were hard, fixed on mine. "If you have a problem, you come to me. You tell me. You don't handle it yourself. Promise me."
"You can't just order me around like that."
"I'm not ordering you. I'm asking."
"You're definitely ordering." I crossed my arms, and I could feel that newly emerged version of me rising to the surface—the one that had spent years being repressed and quiet. "And it doesn't work that way anymore. I'm not the girl who sits quietly and lets things happen to her family."
"Kimmy—"
"No." I held up a hand. "I need you to listen to me. Valmont is going to come after my entire family if we don't stop him. My sisters, their partners, their kids. I'm not going to sit in this safe house and pretend that's okay." I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides once. "I know you're trying to protect me, and I get that. But we don't have the time. You told me that yourself."
"That's not happening. I'm not getting you into this mess."
"My life has been a mess for three years now. I don't care that it's not how your Bureau does things, but if I can get inside the club, this will end before more people get hurt."
He was quiet and I could see the war playing out behind his eyes—the protocol battling with something else. Something that looked a lot like care.
"You're hungover," he finally said.
"Irrelevant. My point still stands."
"This is dangerous."
"I'm aware." I tilted my head slightly. "But it's happening with or without you at this point now that I know your plan. And we both know it's safer if it happens with you."
I watched him process that, watched him realize he was cornered. The man who lived the rules of an organization that considered emotions irrelevant probably hated it. The other part of him—the part that felt sorry for those who'd already suffered from Valmont's power—seemed to be considering it.
"If you do this," he said slowly, "you follow every instruction. Exactly. No improvisation, no creative problem-solving, no going rogue."
"I can work with that."
"I'm not done." He stepped closer and his voice dropped lower. "If things go sideways, you run. No heroics. You run."
"Okay."
"Then we have a deal."
41 seven
No clue why I allowed Kimmy to manipulate me into agreeing.
Perhaps, I was still in a daze after that kiss.
My brain screamed that I was an idiot for letting her be part of the operation, but my gut knew the truth—she'd do it alone anyway, and that terrified me more. So having some kind of control over the situation was better than being blind to what she was doing altogether.
As I entered the safe house after my last-minute errands, Kimmy was standing by the mirror. She was backlit by the evening neon pouring through the glass, already in the dress.
It was the one we'd picked out online together—cheap spandex the color of arterial blood, chosen because she needed to stand out. The fabric clung to her with such indecent desperation that it made my head spin. It made other parts of my body throb too.
I hadn't expected her to change into it until the last minute, but there she was, already testing her balance in the high heels.
She was a stranger in the mirror.
It should have looked ridiculous. But it didn't.
The black wig sat tight on her skull, parted to one side, synthetic strands gleaming. The heavy makeup turned her face into geometry—sharp cheekbones, a lip line that could cut glass, eyes dark as tar. She was almost unrecognizable.
