Her K9 froze when a sniper targeted the mafia boss—then his warning exposed a traitor inside the estate.

Chapter 2

The file existed before the night did.

That’s the fact that still holds me down when I think about it too long. Somewhere, two days before the red dot ever touched Silas Croft’s shirt, someone sat in front of a computer and built a version of me that had never existed. Not a sketch. Not a few suspicious lines in a shared drive. A complete, annotated professional history — four years deep, cross-referenced, flagged with the kind of detail that takes either months of research or direct access to sealed records.

It named contracts I’d never taken. It tied me to a private intelligence broker operating out of Atlanta — a man they called Voss, whose name I’d heard exactly once, in a conversation I was never supposed to be part of. It made me look embedded. Calculated. Like a woman who had been inside rooms like this one long before anyone hired her to walk a dog through them.

I found out because of one word.

My agency contact — a man named Rhodes, twelve years in the business, not given to drama — sent me a single text at 6:14 that morning.

Careful.