Prologue
The U.S. Marshals didn’t give us much choice.
After our parents got tangled up with the wrong people — some serious financial fraud that turned into threats against the whole family — the only way to keep everyone safe was witness protection. They split us up. Mom and Dad went one way. Layla and I… we went another.
They gave us new names, new IDs, and one very specific instruction: we had to pose as a married couple. It was the cleanest cover. A young married couple in a quiet suburban neighborhood would draw the least attention.
So here we were — Ryder and Layla Thompson, newlyweds, moving into a modest house in a sleepy town no one had ever heard of.
I was twenty-seven. Layla was twenty-four. We’d been step-siblings for eight years, ever since our parents got married. We’d always been close, but never like this. Never sharing a house. Never pretending to be husband and wife.
Layla had always been the shyer one — quiet, a little reserved, the type who observed more than she spoke. She was nervous about all of this. I could see it in the way she kept fidgeting with the simple gold band on her finger as we stood in the empty living room of our new “home.”
The Marshal handed us the keys and left us with one final warning: “Act natural. No contact with anyone from your old life. And don’t blow your cover.”
The door closed behind him.
Layla looked up at me with those big, uncertain eyes.
“So… husband,” she said softly, almost testing the word. “What now?”
I looked at her — my stepsister, now legally my wife for who knows how long — and felt the weight of the situation settle over us.
This was going to be complicated.