Chapter 2.

I let the question sit a second longer than I need to, just to make him wonder if I'll answer at all.

"The only other person in this room who looks half as bored as I feel." I say.

"So which one are you?" he asks, watching me over the rim of his glass. "Actress, singer, or something more interesting than either?"

"Real estate. Client dinner ran long, and someone owed me a favor with an extra invite." I keep my voice light, rehearsed enough to sound unrehearsed. "You?"

"Family business." He says it simply, like it explains everything and nothing at once.

I file the deflection away, when a voice cuts through the noise behind me, bright with recognition, wrong in every way that matters.

"Alice? Alice… you've got some fucking nerve showing your face here."

The name lands like a gunshot in a silent room.

I turn, and my stomach drops through the marble floor. I know that face. Two years ago, under a different name, I put him away for fraud. He's staring at me now like he's still deciding whether to make a scene or make me pay for it.

Rafael's brow furrows beside me. "Alice?"

"I think you have me confused with someone else." I keep my voice even, betting my composure against his certainty.

But the man is already stepping closer, already sure, already saying my old name a second time, louder.

"You've mistaken me for someone else. I don't know you."

For a moment, doubt flickers across his face. Then it hardens.

"Alice! I remember what you did to me. Don't fucking lie."

Across the room, Adriano's head turns toward the noise, his pale eyes finding me through the crowd with a focus that has nothing bored left in it.

Rafael steps between us, his body angled to block him from me entirely.

"That's enough." His voice is low, quiet, final. Not a suggestion.

His eyes flick once toward the men by the bar, and two of them are already moving, hauling the man out a side door. Nobody around us even turns to look, except Adriano, who watches the whole thing happen from a distance, unmoving, unreadable.

Only once he's gone does Rafael turn back to me. He doesn't ask if I'm alright. He asks the only thing that matters to a man like him.

"Who is Alice?"

"I've never heard that name before tonight." My voice shakes despite everything I tell it not to.

"People don't scream a stranger's name across a ballroom." He watches me with that same efficient sweep Adriano had earlier, deciding whether I'm worth the trouble of burning down. "You handled it well."

"He was drunk. Él me confundió con otra persona." I keep my chin level, daring him to push further.

Something shifts in Rafael's expression. "You speak Spanish."

"A little." I don't elaborate.

"I don't think you're going to tell me the truth tonight."

I glance toward the exit. "I should head home. It's been a long night."

"You're leaving already?"

"I've had enough excitement for one evening." I force a laugh that comes out thinner than I mean it to.

He studies me, then lets it go, though I don't believe for a second that he's actually letting it go. "I'll have someone see you to your car."

"That's not necessary." I give him a quick smile. "I've gotten myself out of worse than this."

"Wait." Rafael's voice stops me before I can turn. "I didn't get your name."

I don't give it to him.

By the time he looks up again, I'm already gone, certain I've gotten away clean, or at least, that's what I let myself believe in that moment.

I don't remember the drive back to base. Just the taste of my own pulse in my throat and the ghost of that man's voice saying my name like a countdown.

Isa is waiting when I walk in.

"Talk," she says.

"A mark from the Delgado case recognized me. Called me Alice, twice, loud enough for half the room to hear." I peel off my earrings like they're evidence against me. "I laughed it off. I don't know if it worked."

"It worked." Isa's voice doesn't change, but something in her shoulders eases half an inch. "Rafael had the man removed himself. Adriano clocked it from across the room but didn't move."

Relief hits so fast it makes me dizzy.

"That doesn't fix the problem," I say. "He knows my face. He knows my cover name. I won't have Rafael standing next to me next time."

"He won't get the chance."

Something in how she says it makes my stomach turn. "Isa. What did you do."

"We pulled his file the second the call came in." She slides a tablet across the table. His face, older, heavier, a rap sheet stretching back further than I remembered. "Turns out he never actually stopped. Wire fraud, this time targeting elderly victims. We had enough to make an arrest tonight instead of next year."

"You had him arrested. Tonight."

"I had a problem removed before it became a bigger one." She says it so plainly, like she's discussing weather instead of a man's freedom.

I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that she'd hear as anything other than weakness.

Jake finds me twenty minutes later in the break room, staring at cold coffee I have no intention of drinking. He just sits across from me and waits.

"I froze," I admit finally. "For half a second, I actually froze."

"You didn't freeze. You recovered in under three seconds and got yourself out clean." He nudges my cup toward me.

"We had another asset in that room tonight, planted on the guest list without telling you. Isa needed to see how you'd hold without having a backup.” A beat. "You held. You're allowed to be human, Selene. Even undercover.”

"Being human is how I end up dead."

He doesn't argue that, because we both know it's true.

The apartment is dark, just the hallway light Daniel always leaves on for me. 

He's already asleep by the time I slip into bed beside him, one arm thrown over my side of the mattress. I lie there and watch him breathe for longer than I should, running the shape of his face in the dark like I'm trying to memorize it against something I can't name yet.

I think about months. No comms and a name that isn't mine. How easily I might become one of FDOCS pieces on a board too.

I don't wake him. I just watch him a while longer before I let my eyes close.

—

By the next morning, the fear has curdled into something more useful, focus. Isa calls me back in with Jake already at the table, a fresh folder between them.

"Rafael didn't reach out to you last night," she says. "Left the ball early, no follow-up since. A man like that doesn't stay quiet unless he's uninterested."

"So we let him make the next move."

"No." Isa taps a photograph, an address, some boutique jewelry storefront on Worth Avenue. "We make sure his next move happens exactly where we want it.”