Chapter 1 The Last Clean Job

POV: Imogen

The necklace felt heavier than it looked. Real diamonds always do.

I clasped my coat over it and walked out of Marcus Whitfield's townhouse like I owned the place, which, for the last six weeks, I basically had. Behind me, somewhere upstairs, he was probably still asleep, dreaming about the wedding we were never going to have.

"Leaving so early, Miss Cole?" the doorman asked, holding the door.

"Early meeting," I said. "You know how it is."

"I don't, actually," he said, smiling. "But I'll pretend I do."

He didn't know my name was fake. Neither did Marcus. Neither did the jeweler who'd sized the engagement ring three weeks ago, measuring my finger like it meant something permanent. Nobody in this city knew my real name. That was the whole point of me.

The cab pulled away from the curb, and for the first time in six weeks, I let my shoulders drop.

"Rough night?" the driver asked, catching my eye in the mirror.

"Rough six weeks," I said.

"Boyfriend?"

"Something like that."

He laughed like I'd made a joke. I let him think I had.

Six weeks of laughing at things that weren't funny. Six weeks of pretending to love wine I couldn't stand, at restaurants that bored me, with a man who talked about himself the way other people talk about weather ,constantly, and without ever noticing who else was in the room. It had been, by every measure that mattered, the easiest job I'd ever run.

It was also the last one.

I'd made that promise before. Different city, different cab, a different pile of cash sitting warm in my lap. One more, I'd told myself. Four times now, if I was counting honestly, and I always was, eventually.

This time was different. This time I had enough saved that I'd never need to charm another lonely man out of his savings again. This time, when the train doors closed behind me, I meant it.

The train to Castryn left at 4:15. I bought a first-class seat because, for once, I could afford to sit somewhere quiet and not think about anything at all.

That lasted four hours.

My phone buzzed against my hip while the city thinned into hills and then into sky. I told myself I wouldn't check it. I checked it anyway.

The message came through the way Ledger messages always did ,disguised, this time, as a grocery delivery. Your order of 4 items has shipped. Only someone trained to look would notice the extra zero buried in the tracking number, or think to run it through the decoder hidden inside a weather app three screens deep on my phone.

I ran it anyway. Four hours of self-control was apparently my new personal best.

Six lines unscrambled onto the screen.

One job. Castryn. Target: Graham Fenwick, CEO, Fenwick Dynamics. Objective: Cradle Files, physical retrieval only, no digital trace. Payment: 2.5 million, half up front. Client anonymous. Time-sensitive ,Veil Week only.

I read it twice, then a third time, like the number might shrink if I stared at it long enough.

Two and a half million wasn't a number I'd ever seen attached to a job. Not from a jealous ex-wife hiding assets before a divorce. Not from a business partner settling an old score. That kind of money came from someone who needed a thing gone badly enough that the risk stopped mattering to them.

Which meant the risk, for me, had probably just gotten enormous.

I knew Fenwick Dynamics the way everyone in my line of work knew it ,carefully, from a distance, the way you know a dog that's bitten someone you trust. They built identity security systems. Software meant to catch people exactly like me, if it worked half as well as it claimed to.

Robbing a company like that wasn't a job. It was a dare with a very expensive prize attached.

I should have deleted the message. I'd built a career on knowing when a job smelled wrong, and this one reeked from six lines of scrambled text alone.

Instead, my thumb hovered over the screen, and the voice in my head ,the one that always sounded far too reasonable ,said, one month, and then you disappear with enough money that nobody ever has to work again.

I was still holding the phone, undecided, when the woman across the aisle laughed sharply and tilted her screen toward her friend.

"Did you see this?" she said. "Right here in Castryn ,can you believe it?"

"See what?" her friend asked.

"This robbery thing. They finally named her."

I wasn't trying to listen. But my eyes are trained to catch what other people miss, and the headline on her screen caught the window light at exactly the wrong angle for me to look away.

LOCAL ROBBERY SUSPECT IDENTIFIED: IMOGEN VANCE, 29, WANTED FOR QUESTIONING

My stomach dropped so fast I nearly dropped the phone.

"Crazy, right?" the woman said, still to her friend, not to me. "They think she's still in the city."

I hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in almost ten years. I'd buried it myself, brick by brick, so carefully that even I sometimes forgot the grave existed. Imogen Vance wasn't a name anymore. She was a ghost I'd built and buried on purpose.

And she was on a stranger's phone, three feet away from me, wanted for a robbery I'd never heard of, in a city I hadn't set foot in for years.

I kept my face still ,years of practice made that easy ,but underneath it, my mind was already running.

Coincidence. Common name. Has to be.

Except it wasn't common. I'd chosen it because it wasn't. Nobody else in the world answered to Imogen Vance. I'd made absolutely sure of that.

The train rattled on toward Castryn, carrying me straight into a job I hadn't decided to take yet, chasing a name I'd buried on purpose, that had somehow crawled back into the world without me.

I looked down at the message still glowing on my screen.

Payment: 2.5 million. Client anonymous.

My thumb moved, steady, past delete.

I typed one word back.

Accepted.

Then I put the phone face-down on my knee and stared out the window, wondering ,for the first time in a decade ,whether accepting the job had been my decision at all, or whether someone had already made it for me.