Chapter Three
RYAN
San Antonio doesn’t feel like anywhere, and that’s the point.
The apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that looks like every other building on the block, with beige walls, gray carpet, and blinds that filter the Texas sun into something flat and directionless. There are two rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen stocked with the basics and nothing else.
No photographs.
No personal effects.
Nothing that belongs to anyone.
Just a space to exist in while the world believes you don’t.
I’ve been here long enough to memorize every crack in the ceiling above the bed, every sound the pipes make in the morning, and the exact angle the afternoon light hits the far wall before it disappears entirely.
Old habits, I guess. When you’ve got nothing to do, you observe. When you’ve got nothing to observe, you think, and thinking is the problem.
The burner phone sits on the kitchen counter where I left it this morning. I’ve walked past it more times than I’d like to admit.
It has one purpose—contact Sam or the Bureau, nothing else. Those are the rules. They’re not negotiable, and I understand exactly why they exist.
I pick it up anyway.
Standing there in the apartment’s kitchen that belongs to no one, in a city that means nothing to me, I open the keypad.
Her number comes without thinking.
I’ve had it memorized for two years. I could dial it in the dark, half asleep, in the middle of anything. Some things just live in your hands.
I stare at the screen.
Ten digits.
That’s all that stands between her voice and me.
Between the mission and the man I used to be.
My thumb hovers.
Then I clear it.
Setting the phone back on the counter, I walk to the window and stand there looking out at a city I don’t know, breathing slowly until the urge passes.
It passes.
It always passes.
That’s both the best and worst thing about being trained for this.
Sam arrives at noon with another agent I don’t know, who’s young and sharp-eyed, the kind of focus that comes from wanting to prove something.
He introduces himself as Agent Cole. Ex-military, I’d guess.
It’s in the way he moves, sets things down with quiet and deliberate precision, and stands when he’s not doing anything.
Some habits don’t leave you. He carries a hard case in one hand and a file in the other and sets both on the table without being asked.
Professional, efficient… good.
I appreciate people who don’t waste words.
Cole opens the hard case and slides a passport across the table toward me. “Marco Reyes.”
I pick it up.
My face looks back at me.
Different name. Different history. Same eyes. Different color.
There’s something deeply strange about looking at your own face in a passport that belongs to someone else entirely.
Your features staring back at you from under a name you’ve never answered to, and knowing that for however long this takes, months, maybe longer, the man in this photograph is more real than you are.
Ryan doesn’t exist. Ryan is in a closed casket in a New York cemetery with a Blood Brothers’ patch and a name on a headstone.
Marco Reyes is the one who gets to keep breathing.
I set the passport down, and Cole continues with the background story, cover history, the legend they have built around a man who never existed until they needed him to.
Colombian father, American mother. Grew up between two worlds.
Knows how to move in both. Criminal record carefully constructed, enough to make him believable, not enough to make him untouchable.
Everything about Marco Reyes is plausible.
That’s the word they use.
Sam slides the dossier across next. It’s a file thick enough to tell me everything I need to know about the operation and nothing I don’t.
Opening it, I work through it methodically, the way I was trained to.
Maps. Known associates. Entry points. Clemente’s structure, his network, the gaps in it that the Bureau has been trying to widen for three years.
I don’t rush.
I read everything twice.
And then I turn a page and stop.
Riley.
She’s in a photograph taken from a distance with a long lens and natural light, somewhere that looks like Mexico City. She’s standing outside a building I don’t recognize, dark hair down, sunglasses on, dressed like she belongs exactly where she is.
She looks completely in control. She also looks like a woman playing a game with no safety net, and only I would know the difference.
She’s the woman I once loved. The woman I’d bought a ring for before she found it tucked in the back of a drawer and told me she wasn’t ready.
We didn’t end badly. We just ended. And somewhere in the years since, she’d walked back into the Bureau and into the most dangerous operation of her career, completely alone.
I stare at the photograph longer than I should.
Her undercover name is listed beneath it. Her current status. Her last confirmed contact with the Bureau.
Weeks ago.
Closing the file, I set it flat on the surface in front of me. “She’s overdue for contact.”
“We’re aware,” Sam says.
“How overdue?”
A pause that tells me more than the answer does.
“Enough that getting someone inside is no longer optional.”
I nod once and say nothing else.
Cole takes me through the rest of the briefing, including entry timeline, communication protocols, and extraction parameters. He’s thorough and doesn’t skip anything or assume I’ll fill in the gaps myself.
When he’s finished, he reaches back into the hard case and sets something else on the table.
A watch. It’s plain-faced and good quality without being flashy, and the kind of thing Marco Reyes would wear.
“Bureau issue.” Cole taps the side of the watch face once. “Stores seventy-two hours of audio. Activate it at the crown.” Another tap. “Passive recording, no transmission. You pull it out, and we pull the data.”
I pick it up.
Turn it over.
Setting it on my wrist, I fasten it without a word.
Cole stacks his materials, closes the hard case, and looks at Sam.
Sam gives a small nod.
Cole picks up his case, shakes my hand firmly, and lets himself out.
The door clicks shut behind him.
The apartment goes quiet. It’s just Sam, the file on the table, the passport with my face on someone else’s name, and me.
Sam reaches into his jacket’s inside pocket and slides something across toward me. There’s no explanation or ceremony. He pushes it and looks away like he hasn’t done anything.
A photograph.
The three of us are in the picture—Tate, Sophia, and me, taken at the Blood Brothers’ yard. Tate is looking at the camera with that particular expression of his, the one that gives nothing away. Sophia is laughing at something off frame, completely unguarded, entirely herself.
I look at it for a long moment.
Sam says nothing.
Because Sam has always understood the things that don’t need words.
Folding it carefully, I tuck it into my jacket’s inside pocket.
That part still feels like old times, the easy silence, the shorthand, the way we’ve always been able to sit in a room without needing to fill it.
Everything else has changed.
Sam pulls out the chair across from me, sits, and for a moment, neither of us speaks.
“How are you doing?”
Not Bureau Chief to asset—Sam to Ryan.
“I’ve had better months.”
He nods like that’s exactly what he expected to hear and doesn’t try to improve on it. “The funeral,” he says after a moment. “I know that was—”
“Don’t.” My voice stays level. “We don’t need to go through it.”
He looks at me steadily. “Ryan.”
“I said I’m fine, Sam.”
“I know what you said.”
Leaning back in the chair, I look at the ceiling for a moment with similar cracks but a different room, and then back at him.
“She was crying,” I say. “When they lowered the coffin, her knees went.”
Sam doesn’t say anything.
“Tate caught her.” A pause. “He’s good. He’s going to look after her.”
“I know he will.”
“She doesn’t know that yet.” I look down at my hands on the table. “She’s going to struggle for a while before she finds her footing. And I can’t—” I stop, then start again. “I can’t do anything about that from here.”
“No,” Sam says. “You can’t.”
I appreciate that he doesn’t try to soften it, tell me it’ll be okay, that she’ll be fine, or that time fixes things. Sam has never been that kind of man, and I’ve never needed him to be.
“Riley,” I say after a moment, shifting back to ground I can stand on more steadily. “Tell me everything you didn’t put in the file.”
Something briefly moves behind Sam’s eyes. He controls it fast. Six years together, and I catch everything he thinks he’s hiding.
“She went in deeper than the original parameters,” he says. “Clemente trusts her. More than we anticipated.”
“How much more?”
A pause.
“She’s not just in his circle, Ryan. She’s his.”
The words land heavily in the quiet apartment.
Looking at the closed file between us, Riley’s photograph is somewhere inside it with sunglasses on and completely composed.
“She knew what she was signing up for.”
“She did.”
“That doesn’t make it easier.”
“No,” Sam agrees. “It doesn’t.”
Picking up the passport again, I turn it over in my hands and run my thumb across the name embossed on the cover.
Marco Reyes.
A man who never existed until he needed to.
“When do I leave?”
“Ten days.”
I set the passport down.
“Then I’ve got ten days to become someone else.”
Sam studies me across the table the way he always has, like he’s reading something underneath the surface that I haven’t said out loud. After six years, he usually can.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I know what this costs you. I know what you’re leaving behind. And I know you didn’t choose any of this.”
I meet his gaze. “I chose to stay. In that hospital room, you laid it out, and I chose to stay.”
“You chose to save Riley.”
“I chose all of it.” A pause. “Don’t make it smaller than it is by taking the choice away from me.”
Sam holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods, once, and something in the room shifts. Not lighter exactly, but more honest.
He stands and picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
“Ten days.” Moving toward the door, he stops with his hand on the frame and turns back once more.
“She’s going to be okay, Ryan. Sophia.” He says it like he knows I need to hear it, even though I told him not to say it. “She’s stronger than you think.”
I focus on the table. “I know she is. That’s not what worries me.”
Sam waits.
“What worries me is that she’s strong enough to move on, and I need her to be.”
A pause.
“And I hate that I need her to be.”
Sam doesn’t try to answer that.
Some things don’t have answers.
He gives the doorframe a single, quiet knock with his knuckle. It’s an old habit from our partnered days, the way he always signed off, and then he’s gone.
The door clicks shut.
The apartment settles back into silence, and I sit there for a long time without moving.
The burner phone is still on the kitchen counter where I left it.
I don’t pick it up again.
Instead, I open the passport one more time, look at my face staring back at me from under a name that isn’t mine, and I make myself a promise.
I need Sophia to move on.
I know that.
I’ve told myself that every day since I watched them lower that coffin.
She deserves someone who can actually be there. Someone who isn’t dead to the world and walking into Mexico under a stolen name.
Closing the passport, I set it down.
Then I pick it up one last time…
And start becoming someone else.