Chapter 6.

As I hear the locks click shut, every instinct I own goes cold and clear at once.

I clock the door handles, useless. The windows, sealed. The driver's eyes in the rearview mirror, unreadable. I run the math on how fast I could get my elbow through glass if it came to that, how many seconds I'd have before anyone outside heard it happen.

"Miss?" Marcus glances back, brow furrowed, more confused than menacing. "You alright?”

"The doors just locked."

"Automatic. Kicks in over twenty miles an hour." He says it like he's explaining something obvious to a child, not a woman who nearly went through a window over it. "Mr. Marchetti's insistent about it. Something about a friend of his years back."

I don't ask which friend. I don't trust my voice enough to try.

"Right," I say instead. "Of course."

My pulse doesn't believe him the way my brain does. It takes three full minutes of watching normal Miami traffic slide past the window, streetlights, a couple arguing on a corner, a dog walker, before my hands stop feeling like they belong to someone else.

"Actually," I say, before we get any closer to wherever this car thinks I live, "you can drop me here. There's a restaurant on the corner, I'm meeting someone."

"I can't, miss." His knuckles tighten on the wheel. "Mr. Marchetti said door to door. If he finds out—"

"He won't." I let the words land flat, final. "Pull over."

He hesitates, clearly more afraid of Rafael than of me, then eases toward the curb. The locks release with a soft click that still makes my stomach drop.

"Have a good night, miss," he says, voice tight.

"You too."

…..

My phone is dead. Completely dead. I make it to the restaurant and approach one of the waiters, asking if I can borrow a charger. He plugs it in, and I wait impatiently as the battery crawls back to life.

The moment my phone powers on, it reconnects. Jake's message comes through almost immediately, blunt and fast.

“That car isn't on our radar. We don't have eyes on Marcus. You're flying blind in there.”

I type back: “False alarm. Auto-lock. I'm fine.”

His reply comes almost instantly. "You nearly burned your only lifeline on a car door, Selene.”

He's right, and that's the part that actually scares me, not the locks, not Marcus, but how close I came to spending the one flare I have on nothing. I don't answer.

A black FDOCS sedan pulls up. I climb in, crack the window, and let the night air do what it can for the tremor still living somewhere behind my ribs.

Isa is waiting by the time I arrive, Jake beside her, both of them wearing the particular stillness of people who've spent the last hour imagining the worst.

"Talk," Isa says.

I give her everything. The brooch, the bid, Adriano rising off that platform mid-auction like something had finally interested him enough to move. The way he said my name before I'd given it to him. The exchange in Spanish between the brothers that I understood every word of and pretended not to.

Isa's expression doesn't change until I mention that last part.

"I didn't know you were that fluent in Spanish."

"Enough."

"Did they know that?"

"Not really."

Something shifts behind her eyes, calculation sliding into place. "Then that's the crack we needed. Adriano runs the side of that empire that doesn't officially exist, weapons, trafficking, men who disappear when they stop being useful. He's harder to read than his brother. Harder to predict. If he's curious about you, that's not romance, Selene. That's a man deciding whether you're worth keeping close or worth eliminating."

"I'm aware."

"Are you." It isn't really a question. "Because tonight you nearly compromised yourself over an automatic door lock."

I don't have a defense for that, so I don't offer one.

Isa lets the silence sit before she continues. "The car situation changes things. You're in active, ongoing contact with both Marchettis now. Coming back here every night isn't sustainable, it's a pattern, and patterns get people followed."

"So what, I don't come back at all?"

"You don't." She says it plainly, like she's not describing the end of the only safety net I've had since this started. "We're moving you at dawn. A furnished apartment, a car registered under Elena Salazar, everything built to survive a background check. From here forward, contact is burner phone only, emergencies only. No comms inside their world. No easy check-ins outside it either."

"And if something happens?"

"Then you handle it until we can reach you." Her voice doesn't soften. It never does. "That was always the deal."

I think of the locked doors, the three minutes it took my body to believe I wasn't in danger. I think about how thin that margin already is, and how much thinner it's about to get.

"Understood," I say, because there's nothing else to say that she'd hear as anything other than weakness.

I turn toward the door, but Isa's voice stops me. "You have until dawn. Go home, grab your things, say what you need to say to Daniel. Because when the sun comes up, Selene Vasquez doesn't exist anymore.”

—

Daniel is at the window when I walk in, arms crossed, looking out at nothing in particular, the posture of a man who's been standing there longer than he'd admit.

Neither of us says anything at first. Hours of silence have a way of making even simple words feel enormous.

"Daniel." I say his name like testing whether it still means what it used to.

He turns. "I've been thinking." His voice is rough, like he hasn't used it much today. "About what I said. About needing space."

"And?"

"And I don't want space." He crosses toward me, slow, careful, like he's not sure yet whether I'll let him close the distance. "I want you. Even the parts I don't understand. Even the parts that scare me."

I meet him halfway, and he catches me like he's been waiting to for days, arms tight around me, face pressed into my hair. Neither of us says anything for a while. There's nothing that needs saying, not yet, not in this part.

"I missed you," I whisper into his shoulder.

"I missed you too." He pulls back just enough to look at me, thumb brushing my cheek. "Let's not do that again."

"I'd like that."

For a moment, it's easy. It's the two of us again, before Marchetti, before Elena, before any of it, and I let myself have it, just for a minute, before the rest of the night catches up to me.

"I don't know any details about this op," he says eventually, sitting down on the edge of the couch and pulling me with him, "but I know it's dangerous, and I'm scared, Selene. What if it gets too close to us?"

Not a question. Cassie must have said something again, or he's simply gotten good at reading the parts of me I can't hide anymore.

"It won't. FDOCS is providing an apartment. I have to move, for our safety, especially yours."

"How soon?" His voice shakes.

"At dawn."

"Selene." He says my name like it costs him something. "Pull out. Tell them you're done. You don't owe this to anyone."

"I can't."

"You can. People walk away from jobs, even ones like yours."

"Not this one, I'm too deep in it." I sit beside him, close enough that our shoulders touch, and for a second neither of us moves. "Not yet."

"Then what am I supposed to do? Just wait, not knowing if you're safe, not knowing who you're becoming in there?"

"I'm not becoming anyone. I'm playing a part."

"Are you sure that's still true?"

I don't answer fast enough, and we both hear it.

"I won't cross the line, Daniel. Whatever happens in there, it isn't real. And I'll find a way back to you, even if it has to be in secret. I promise you that."

He looks at me for a long moment, like he's deciding whether to believe a promise from a woman who's about to disappear into someone else's name, and like he's remembering how close the last few days came to costing them everything.

"Okay," he says finally, quiet, unconvinced, but not willing to fight me on it tonight. "Okay. Please stay safe for me. I only just got you back. I'm not ready to lose you again."

I hold onto that word longer than I should, because some part of me already knows it might be the last easy thing he ever says to me.

After some time, we both fall asleep in each other's arms. Then my phone rings.

I stare at it, my finger hovering over Answer, knowing exactly why he's calling at this hour.