Chapter 1 The Assignment.

The warehouse still smells like blood and gasoline when I peel the wire from behind my ear.

Three hours ago, this place was a cage. Now it's a crime scene, and I'm the reason six armed men are zip tied on concrete instead of counting the ransom they thought they'd already won.

Marcus Ellery, a mid-level trafficker FDOCS has been building a case against for years, is alive. His daughter, Mia, is crying into a blanket by the ambulance, and I don't go to her, because I can't decide yet whether she'll look at me like a friend or a stranger who wore her friend's face for eight months.

"Vasquez." Cassie squeezes my shoulder, grinning. "Only you'd walk out of a hostage extraction looking like you just left brunch."

"Skill," I say, "not luck."

The team laughs. Someone hands me a lukewarm coffee like it's champagne, and for a moment I let them have this, the easy version of me. It never lasts.

My phone buzzes against my ribs. Isa. Now.

The bullpen goes quiet behind me as I walk it off toward her office. That's the thing about FDOCS nobody tells you in training, the silence when Isa Reyes calls you in isn't respect. It's dread wearing a nicer coat.

She doesn't look up when I enter. Isa has never once asked me how I'm doing after an op. She asks what I learned.

"Sit," she says.

I don't.

She slides a file across the desk instead, and I stare at it before I touch it, a habit she trained into me herself. 'Never open blind.' The folder is thin. Thinner than it should be for whatever's about to ruin my week.

"What am I looking at?"

"Open it."

Two photographs. Two men who share a face but nothing else, one in a tailored suit, still enough to be carved from stone; the other mid laugh at some gala, golden and loose limbed.

Underneath, a single word stamped across both files in red: MARCHETTI.

My stomach drops before my brain finishes catching up.

"No," I say.

"I haven't asked you anything yet."

"You don't have to. I know what this is." I set the file down like it might bite me. "Twins running half of Miami's underworld between them, corporate empire on one side, black market on the other, and you want me inside."

"I want you 'married' to it, if that's what it takes." Isa's voice doesn't rise. It never rises. That's what makes it terrifying.

"Rafael Marchetti runs the legitimate face of that empire. Adriano runs everything legitimate can't touch, and it doesn't stop at the city limits. Miami's just where they sleep. Havana moves their money. Colombia moves everything else."

A pause. "Laundering, trafficking, three unsolved federal cases going back a decade, and every one of them ends the same way. Witnesses who stop being witnesses."

"Then send someone else."

"I don't trust anyone else to get close enough without dying for it. You're the only one I'd bet a life on, yours or theirs."

I press my palms flat against the desk to keep them from shaking. "And if it goes south? If one of them finds out what I am?"

"Then we pull you out." A beat, just long enough to feel like a held breath. "If we can reach you in time. You'll be alone in there, Selene. No comms most nights. No backup walking distance away. You survive until we get to you, that's the job description nobody puts on paper."

Isa built that skill in me like she was carving a knife, and now she wants to point it at the two most dangerous men in the state and call it strategy.

"Fine," I hear myself say. "I'm in."

"When does it start?" I ask.

Isa doesn't hesitate. "Tonight."

By evening, the prep room at base has been turned into something between a dressing room and a war office. A rack of gowns waits along one wall, pulled by wardrobe from a life Elena Salazar is supposed to have always lived, and a beauty team moves around me, pinning, painting, transforming me one layer at a time into someone I'm not yet.

Jake leans in the doorway, arms crossed, watching with the same restless energy he brings to running comms on every op FDOCS trusts him with. Tonight there's no earpiece for him to man, no channel to keep open for me. Just this.

"You don't have to pretend with me," he says finally, quiet in a way that isn't like him at all. "I've seen the file."

"I'm not pretending."

"Selene." My name, soft, like he's afraid saying it too loud might break something. "Twin mob bosses. No backup. That's not a mission, that's a suicide note with better shoes."

The stylist fastens the last clasp at my back, and I meet my own eyes in the mirror before I answer, because if I look at Jake too long I might actually admit he's right.

"I'm good at this, Jake."

"I know you are." He pushes off the doorframe, and for once his easy grin doesn't show up to save either of us. "That's what scares me."

I don't have an answer for that. So I smooth the dress, kiss his cheek like it's nothing, and walk out into the dark with him, back toward the file.

"Repeat the cover story back to me," Jake says, adjusting my dress like he's dressing a mannequin instead of a woman about to walk into a den of wolves. "Once more, for luck."

"Elena Salazar. Real estate investor. Old money, new money, doesn't matter, I spend like both." I fix my earring in the mirror.

"Client list is real enough to survive a G****e search," Jake says. "Nobody at that gala will have a reason to look twice. And if they do look twice?”

"Then I give them a reason to look somewhere else."

Isa watches this exchange from the doorway without a trace of warmth on her face. "You have no comms inside," she says. "Full body scan at the door, no exceptions. Once you're through that door, you're on your own until you're out again."

Alone. The word sits heavier than it should.

"Copy that," I say, stepping into the car before they can see how badly I fear what's ahead.

—

Solmar is where Miami comes to be seen, all glass and gold light, chandeliers spilling over a room wide enough to lose an army in. Tonight, it's where I come to disappear.

Security at the door pats me down with clinical precision, runs a wand over every inch of my dress, checks my clutch twice.

Inside, the ballroom is a glittering war zone dressed up as a party.

I catch sight of Adriano once, near the far end of the room, his pale eyes sweeping over the crowd with detached precision. His gaze passes over me for half a second, the same efficient sweep a man might give a room before deciding whether it's worth burning down, before he turns back to a conversation that clearly bores him.

I lose an hour working the room as Elena, laughing at jokes that aren't funny, memorizing faces FDOCS will want later.

And then, near the bar, I find the second Marchetti waiting to be found. Something about him already feels warmer than Adriano.

I make my way to the bar and take the seat beside him, close enough to be noticed, not close enough to seem like I'm trying to be.

"Long night?" I ask, not looking at him directly, giving him the option to ignore me entirely.

"Depende de quién pregunta." A beat, his eyes finally cutting to mine, watching. Then, in English, unhurried: "Depends on who's asking.”