All Chapters of ROUGH TRADE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The parking garage under Parker Center smelled like motor oil and old rain. Nina Falcone stood under a single swinging bulb in heels she'd bought that afternoon, her red dress cut open in the back, clinging to the body the department had told her to weaponize. Long black hair fell past her shoulders. Full lips painted a red that matched the dress. Green eyes that could go cold as a blade or molten as honey depending on the job. Tonight they were molten, and she hated herself a little for how easily the mask slid on.Captain Briggs stepped out of the shadow of the concrete pillar, file folder under his arm, and looked her over the way a father looks at a daughter walking down the aisle toward the wrong man."You look the part," he said."That's the point, isn't it."He handed her the folder. "El Sombras. The Shadow. No photographs. No confirmed real name. Every street source we've turned has gone quiet or turned up dead. The only people who get close to him move in money circles we can

She didn't sleep well that night. She lay in her apartment in Silver Lake, the city humming outside the window, and stared at the ceiling and replayed Calloway's hands on her, the grip on her arm, the slap, the way he'd pressed her face into the mattress and used her like a thing. She told herself it was the job. She told herself that every cop did things they hated. She told herself the mission mattered more than her pride.She thought about Valeria, asleep in her dorm room at UCLA, probably with a textbook open on her chest and her phone on silent. Nina hadn't called her in two weeks. She used to call every Sunday. Now the calls were getting shorter, more spaced out, the lies getting easier and the guilt getting heavier. Valeria didn't know what her sister was doing. Nobody did. That was the point. But the distance between them was growing, and Nina could feel it like a thread stretching, and she was afraid of what would happen when it snapped.In the morning she showered until the

The month between Asher's booking and the party itself felt like the longest of Nina's life. She went through the motions of her cover, saw a client here and there, played the companion, collected nothing. She spent her off hours at the precinct, combing old files, looking for anything that might tell her who El Sombras really was. Nothing. The man was a ghost.She called Valeria on a Sunday, the way she used to. Her sister was mid-semester, stressed about a public health midterm, and talked for twenty minutes about a professor she hated and a boy in her study group who kept correcting her. Nina sat on her kitchen floor with the phone pressed to her ear and listened and almost cried, because this was the life she was supposed to be protecting, this ordinary, beautiful, boring life where the biggest problem was a pompous professor and a boy who wouldn't shut up."You okay?" Valeria asked. "You sound weird.""I'm fine. Just work stuff.""You ne

A week passed before she saw him again, and in that week Nina lived two lives. By day she was the detective, checking in with Marsh, running the Sombras file, seeing a client here and there, collecting nothing. By night she was the woman who couldn't stop thinking about Cruz, about the way he'd looked at her, about the things he'd said, about the way he'd made her laugh. She told herself the second life was part of the first. She told herself that lie right up until she knocked on his door.But first, the cop had work to do.She met Marsh at the diner, same booth, same burnt coffee. She'd been thinking about the fragments she'd caught at the party, Rojas, territory, a meeting, and she laid them out for him."Someone at the party was talking about Rojas. A meeting. I couldn't get the context, but the tone wasn't friendly. If Sombras and Rojas are circling each other, that party was neutral ground. Men from both sides, in the same room, drinking the sam

After that night, Nina stopped counting the days she spent at Cruz's and started counting the nights she spent at her own apartment, which grew fewer and fewer. She brought a toothbrush. Then a change of clothes. Then a drawer of his became hers, and neither of them said anything about it, and the domesticity of it undid her more than the sex.It became a rhythm. Days spent at his place or hers, nights tangled together, and somewhere in the middle of it the line between the job and her real life blurred until she couldn't find it anymore, couldn't remember where the mission ended and she began. After that first broken condom, they stopped pretending. He didn't reach for the nightstand anymore. She didn't ask him to. They wanted to feel each other, skin to skin, and the recklessness of it thrilled them both in a way neither would name.In the mornings he'd wake her with his mouth between her thighs. Lazy. Unhurried. He'd start at her neck, kissing down her body