Chapter 7
Ten years ago
I’d had dreams about getting caught. Nightmares, really.
My father had promised me it would never happen.
We’re too good for that, baby. Trust me.
I had trusted him, mainly because I’d had no choice.
Nor did I have any other adults around to intervene if they noticed little whatever-my-fake-name-was being forced to play along with a con.
And that really was a testament to how good my father was.
No one ever knew what we were up to until it was too late, and we had vanished into new identities.
I was alone in so many ways.
And here I was, alone in the worst possible way.
Save for the ones where we died, the darkest versions of my nightmares about getting caught culminated in the scene I was currently sitting amid.
Me, alone in an interrogation room with no idea what was happening or who to call for help.
On top of the sheer terror tightening my veins with adrenaline, I was soaking wet with someone else’s blood staining my hands.
My feet had begun to regain feeling after having gone numb from running in the rain in strappy heels, but I was still freezing.
I shivered in the small, ugly room with concrete walls and a bald floor the color of pea soup.
Hours had passed since everything had gone sideways in the hotel room and I’d fled down the service stairs into a back alley.
Lucky me, I’d run straight into an FBI agent ready to arrest me.
I had no idea where my father was nor if one of the gunshots I fled had hit him.
I’d been sitting in this cold, empty room with no answers and only my spiraling thoughts for company.
I jerked in surprise when someone opened the door. Finally.
A man with dark hair beginning to hint at gray, a mustache, and crow’s feet at his eyes from squinting at criminals like he was squinting at me, stepped inside.
He wore a jacket and slacks and a neutral face other than the squinting.
He wasn’t the man from the alley who’d cuffed me, and he hadn’t been in the hotel room, but an intimidating authoritative energy pulsed off him, filling the small room and making me stiffen.
My father had trained me on what to do should I ever find myself in this exact situation, but his lessons expired with my childhood.
Refusing to talk without a parent present no longer held water since I was one week past my eighteenth birthday.
I had to assume the man now sitting across from me at least knew my age, if not many more troubling details based on the textbook-thick folder he set on the table.
“So, Erin Daniels …” he said, flipping the file’s cover.
My stomach sunk through the pea-soup floor. I nearly dissolved in terror. If he knew my real name, I was beyond trouble.
“You were a tough one to track down. Lots of different names in your past, aren’t there,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t phrase it like one.
Instead, he began pulling photocopied images of me from the stack.
School photos, still surveillance footage, an old library card.
The artifacts dated back to the time I was twelve.
I recognized my class photo from the school in the new town we moved to soon after my mom died.
It was the first time my name had changed.
“Looks like you’ve been all over the place for the past six years.”
Visual evidence of my nomadic life put a bitter taste in my mouth.
We never stayed anywhere for more than a year.
As soon as we finished a job, we were in the wind.
I had half a mind to shove all the photos off the table and erase the reminder, but I was still shaking too hard. My teeth had begun to chatter.
He laid the most current of my fake IDs on the table: the driver’s license for Ana Prescott. “Tell me about her.”
I stared at the photo I had posed for in a motel bathroom before my father sent it off to his favorite counterfeiter.
Ana Prescott looked just like me, of course, but she came from a world of privilege.
Her father bought her jewels for her birthday and sent her on vacations to Aruba.
On paper, she went to a private school and ran in elite social circles.
In reality, she was a con artist’s daughter being dragged to another job with a promise it would be the last.
It was the last, but not for the reason we had planned.
“Who is she?” he prompted when I didn’t say anything.
I braved meeting his eyes. He stared at me with an honest curiosity accompanying the penetrating inquiry.
I knew how to dance verbally and mentally.
To outwit and outmaneuver; I’d been trained by an expert.
If I hadn’t been so terrified, perhaps I could have summoned some of my skills and talked my way out of the situation.
But the way he was staring at me, watching me, had me too afraid to make a move.
Not to mention, he literally held all the cards what with my life’s fabricated history belly-up on the table.
“Who are you?” I asked, realizing he hadn’t introduced himself, nor was he wearing a badge visibly displaying his name.
His mustache twitched at the corner with what might have been a small smile. “We’ll get to that. First, I want you to tell me about Ana Prescott.”
The name ground against my ears like sandpaper. I hated all my fake names. Hated them. They served as a constant reminder that my identity did not belong to me. A burst of anger gave me the guts to sass.
“Looks like you already know all about her,” I said, and nodded at the photo and folder.
He pursed his lips, undeterred by my attitude. “I know some, but not enough. I’d really like to know what she—you—were doing in that hotel room tonight with your father.”
A hard shiver shook me at the mention of my father. The memory was still solidifying in my reeling brain, but it came rushing back. The gunshots, the panic.
“Where is he?” I said.
He looked up at the raw scrape in my voice and the sound of my teeth chattering.
I stared back at him, trying to muster whatever nerve I had left and fight the tears burning the backs of my eyes.
He watched me wring my bloodstained hands and involuntarily shudder from cold, from fear.
From everything. As he took in the thin straps of my dress, my stringy hair, my makeup, which had run with rain and tears, his face softened.
He looked like he was seeing a person sitting across from him and not just a crime.
When he stood from his chair, the metal legs scraping the floor, I cautiously leaned back, not sure what he was doing.
He removed his jacket, exposing the gun holstered to his hip, and I flinched at the sight of it.
The sound of the shots in the hotel room rang out in my memory again, forcing my eyes closed in fear.
I could see it all again, feel it all again.
I jumped when I felt something warm and soft land on my shoulders.
He draped his jacket around me and moved back to the other side of the table. He gave me the slightest sympathetic smile, and the tears almost boiled over.
“Now,” he said, pulling out a paper pad and pen, “why don’t you tell me what you and your father were doing in that hotel room tonight.”