Semua Bab ROUGH TRADE: Bab 11 - Bab 15

The weeks that followed the family dinner were the happiest and the guiltiest of Nina's life. She moved through Cruz's world like a woman in a dream, sleeping in his bed, eating at his table, wearing his shirts in the morning while she made coffee. She stopped checking in with Marsh on the rotation. She let the burner phone go dead in her purse for a week at a time. When a client request came through from Greer, she read it and forgot to reply, and the next day she forgot again, and Cruz would come up behind her at the window and slide his arms around her waist and the request would stop mattering. The detective was still in there somewhere, but her voice had gone thin as a whisper, and Nina had stopped listening for it.She thought about Valeria. About the dinner invitation she'd never answered. About the texts her sister sent every few days, funny, concerned, increasingly worried, that she answered with short replies that grew shorter. She thought about her sister st

The precinct was empty at three in the morning, the fluorescent lights buzzing, the coffee in her hand cold. Marsh ran the name in the system while Nina stood beside his desk, and she watched the results come back, and she felt the world tilt beneath her.Cruz Navarro. No priors. No arrests. No photos. No registered address. A ghost in the system the same way he was a ghost in the city. Clean. Impossibly clean.Marsh's fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling threads the way he'd been trained. DMV. No license under Navarro. Voter registration. Nothing. Property records. The penthouse was leased through a trust, no named beneficiary, the same pattern as the hills estate, the same pattern as Sombras's known shells. Tax filings. None. A man with a penthouse downtown and no tax return on record."He doesn't exist," Marsh said, his voice flat. "On paper, Cruz Navarro doesn't exist. No birthday, no Social Security number that belongs to a real person, no

They drove through the night, Cruz's hand on her thigh, her hand over his, the city falling away behind them. He had a car waiting in a garage downtown, no plates, cash paid, untraceable, a go-bag already in the trunk. He'd planned for this, she realized. He'd planned for the moment he might have to disappear, because men like him always did, because the world they lived in left no room for the unprepared."How long have you known about me?" she asked, the dark road unspooling ahead of them."Since the party. Since you looked at me across the room and didn't look away." He glanced at her, and she saw the ghost of a smile. "I went to find out who the beautiful woman was who didn't flinch from the shadows. Imagine my surprise when I found out she was a cop.""And you stayed anyway."His jaw tightened. "I stayed because of you. Not the job. You. From the moment you looked at me, I was gone. I didn't care what you were. I only cared that you stay