Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
H er phone buzzed while Marise was eating her lunch and focused on her handwritten notes from the pub night with Ted. She checked the screen: Langford Services . Elise.
She swallowed the last bite and answered, “Veronica speaking.”
“Good morning, Veronica. I have a client request for you.”
Marise sat up a little straighter. “Who from?”
“Dr. Knowles. On Saturday, she asked for a daytime booking. An outdoors excursion, she said.”
That caught Marise off guard. She blinked. “Did she say where to?”
“No specifics yet. Only that it would be out of the city and low-key. She said it was up to you if you wanted to go, but she’d like if you did. And to wear casual clothes, and bring a bathing suit.” Elise let a pause settle before continuing, “Darlene Hunt also asked for you on Saturday night.”
Marise leaned against the bench, keeping her voice neutral. “Tell Dr Knowles I’d be delighted to accept her invitation. Inform Mrs Hunt I won’t be available.”
There was a glimmer of amusement in Elise’s voice. “I shall inform Mrs Hunt.”
“I’m sure some of the other girls will be pleased to accommodate her,” Marise said dryly. Fucking Darlene had no hope of getting her again. “I’d prefer it if you would take me off her list.”
“That can be arranged,” said Elise. “We understand some clients do not suit everyone.”
Marise smiled to herself. If anything, Elise was certainly diplomatic. “Thank you,” she said and meant it.
Elise hesitated before going on, “Dr Knowles is becoming a valued client. She sounded…very tentative about asking for our services again. She’s…impressionable and needs to be treated with care. She isn’t like our regular customers.”
“I am aware of that, Elise,” said Veronica. “I’ll look after her.”
“Very good. I’ll forward the final details as soon as I have them.”
The line disconnected and Marise lowered the phone, feeling a flush of pleasure. Kathleen had asked for her, not Ava.
She’d picked a daytime outing, something to do with water—unsupervised, not built around champagne flutes or flattery. It wasn’t a date per se, but it felt like it.
She braced both hands on the counter, her palms cool against the table. Elise hadn’t said it outright, though it was clear she was watching. If Kathleen got hurt, the agency wouldn’t hesitate to come down on her hard.
Well, they didn’t have to worry about hurting Kathleen. Not when it didn’t feel like a performance anymore.
And there lay her dilemma.
Marise closed her eyes. She had three days to work out how the hell she was going to do this without making everything worse.
Things had become complicated. She was juggling too personas now: Veronica, the composed, high-end companion with perfect manners and cultivated charm, and Cass, the sweetly awkward sci-fi nerd who laughed over fries and could disarm a PhD student without blinking.
She wanted to be the real her for Kathleen, but she didn’t know who that was anymore.
Marise got up, walked slowly toward the window and rested her forehead lightly against the glass.
She’d been alone since she was seventeen.
Her childhood home had been in a part of town where nothing bloomed except graffiti and mortgages.
Her mother lived on booze and cigarettes, and had a succession of men in her bed; no-hopers, who drank or sniffed coke.
She doubted her mother knew who fathered Marise, but she never made that mistake again. There were no more children.
Some nights Marise went to sleep with a stomach so empty it ached.
School was an escape, but she learned quickly not to bring friends home.
She taught herself how to cover bruises, hide report cards, and keep quiet.
Especially around her mother’s fourth boyfriend, the one with the cold eyes and louder fists.
When her mother didn’t protect her, Marise learned to do it herself.
By fifteen, she was working. Cleaning rooms at a motel on the edge of town. Paid in cash, no questions asked. By sixteen, she was waiting tables at a dingy dine-in. The smell of grease clung to her skin. After handing over a portion to her mother, she hid the rest under a floorboard.
By seventeen, she had enough saved to escape the misery.
She’d left home with nothing but a second-hand backpack and a high school diploma. Her mother hadn’t stopped her, merely watched from the porch with a cigarette between two fingers, a beer in the other hand, and an expression that said, you’ll be back when you run out of money .
Marise never returned.
The streets were no safer, but at least she wasn't trapped in the hopeless cycle.
For the first four weeks, she crashed on couches, stayed in hostels, and slept in a youth shelter, learning the life of shared beds and stolen food.
Then she found a room in a falling-down share house with four girls, with one bathroom, mould on the ceiling, and a German shepherd that barked at everything except burglars.
When the hot water ran out—which was often—she showered at the old gym down the road.
Her first job was the evening shift at McDonalds.
During the day, she worked the front desk of a bulk billing medical clinic.
There she juggled health forms and breathed through the stench of antiseptic and people’s bad tempers.
On the weekends, she worked in a garage, which was more of a relaxation for she loved cars.
Her body was a machine, earning her enough to get a degree to escape the poverty cycle she was entrenched in.
She enrolled in a community college, taking one subject at a time, studying Psychology.
Not to help people, but to understand why people hurt each other.
Why they kept doing it and why no one ever stopped them.
There were nights she cried herself to sleep, not because she was sad, but because she was exhausted. There was no glamour in survival. Only persistence. Getting through the next shift, the next lecture, the next overdue bill.
She was mugged once walking home from a shift, and was left on the pavement with a black eye and a cracked tooth.
After that, she took a self-defence class.
She found a women’s boxing studio in the back of a mechanic’s garage, rough and cheap.
She learned to punch, to pivot, to fight dirty if she had to.
Not for sport, but for safety. For the three seconds that mattered when someone grabbed you by the collar.
She learned how to fight standing, to read her opponent, to watch their balance, and throw her weight into a throat punch.
She studied at night for the psychology degree.
It was slow at first, two subjects a semester or three if she could manage them.
She printed her textbooks at the library to save money, learned to eat cheap and stretch groceries past the use-by date.
There were nights when she didn't sleep at all, mornings when she stared at herself in the mirror and thought, this is killing you , but she kept going. There was no one to hand her a future.
It had taken her six years instead of four to finish.
Six years of double shifts, second-hand laptops, scrappy dinners, and pretending she wasn’t tired all the time.
After she graduated, her first real job had been at a crisis hotline, taking calls in the dead of night from people who needed someone— anyone —to hear them.
At first, she believed in the work. Thought she was doing good, but eventually, it wore her down.
The repeat callers. The hang-ups. The ones who thanked her and then topped themselves.
It chipped away at something inside her.
When a private risk consultancy offered a position doing behavioural profiling, it felt like a lifeline and she jumped at the chance.
Twice the pay, with daylight hours, a desk and a business card.
At first, it was clean work, mainly psychological profiling for managerial roles.
She did the risk assessment and personality testing.
Catching red flags before they were employed were her specialty, but the firm had layers she didn’t notice at first.
They weren’t only screening corporate hires. They were also contracted, discreetly, by political donors, government departments, private equity giants. Clients who wanted more than risk assessments. They wanted leverage.
Marise was tasked with conducting “personal ecosystem reviews.” Which, in practice, meant mapping every contact in someone’s life.
Friends, lovers, roommates, exes, professors, mentors.
She ran digital footprints, combed through deleted social media, and cross-referenced metadata from dating apps and online purchases.
The firm had access to private sites and they used them without blinking.
She was good at it, catching patterns others missed.
Then the job changed even more. They paid her to find weaknesses they could use. If someone had a drinking problem, she flagged it. If someone’s partner had a sibling with an arrest record, she documented it. If someone volunteered for the wrong charity, she highlighted it.
It wasn’t illegal. It was something worse.
She wrote one report that made her sick.
A mid-level clerk in a government department, who was a bright kid with a clean background.
She uncovered that his fiancée had been arrested during a college protest seven years earlier.
There were no charges laid, nothing violent, it was political.
The client wanted justification to freeze him out so she gave him that.
The clerk was sidelined within the month, and she never heard what happened to him.
But she never forgave herself.
After that, Marise stopped pretending. The work wasn’t about risk; it was about control. Information was power, packaged with polished language and plausible lies.
She left the firm, giving no notice. Walked out on a Friday and didn’t answer her phone for a week.
She burned the SIM, deleted the email account, the job history and took her skills and went freelance.
She built a new identity from scratch. She took contract work—doing background checks for small law firms, or discreet investigations for private clients. She kept her head down off the radar.
Her reputation grew and she was offered more lucrative contracts until she hit the big one.
A million-dollar payment to find a politician’s daughter in the seedy prostitution underbelly of LA.
Marise found her, but when the police became involved, the shit hit the fan.
The mob was after her and she had to get out of the city.
After that, she left the west coast and bought a unit in Boston, leaving no paper trail. She became a ghost, someone who came, tracked down what she came for, then disappeared like a thief in the night.
Now, here she was in a New York a loft apartment, with a new name and a wallet full of false identity cards.
Marise tapped the pen against the table for a few seconds, then jotted a note: Sunday. Dress: casual. Terrain: unknown. She stared at the page, and almost without meaning to, she added: Don’t hurt her.
Kathleen might think she was hiring company, but the truth was, she’d invited in the devil.