The Daughter You Left to Fire

"If I didn't have to bring you home, Chloe wouldn't have died. Eve... I regret everything."

Those were my fiancé Lucas's final words as we lay dying beneath the crushed concrete.

I blinked, and suddenly my lungs were full of air.

I had returned to the exact day my billionaire biological family came to claim me.

I stared at their forced, plastic smiles.

I watched the imposter daughter eyeing me like a threat.

Without a second thought, I ripped the paternity test in half.

I didn't want their money.

Instead, I walked away and joined the FBI's deadliest bomb squad.

If I was your biggest regret, fine.

This time around, I'll make sure I'm completely erased from your world.

But when a blast finally reduced me to ash in a blinding flash of fire...

The very family who once treated me like dirt tore through the police tape.

They were clawing desperately at the blazing ruins with bare, bleeding hands.

Screaming my name, begging my ashes to come back to life.

Eve's POV

"Hey. Eve. Eve—wake up. You okay? You're white as a ghost."

A hand grabbed my shoulder and shook hard. My eyes flew open. I shot upright on the bench, sucking air like I'd just come up from the bottom of a pool.

"Whoa, easy." Vasquez crouched down in front of me, eyebrows raised. Behind him, Kowalski choked on his Mountain Dew, and half the locker room busted out laughing.

"Bad dream?" Vasquez grinned and threw an arm around my neck. "Relax, rookie. Nobody's blown you up yet."

I forced a smile. "You'd sleep bad too if you had to look at your face all day."

That got another round of laughs. He ruffled my hair and let go, heading back to his boots. Nobody looked twice at my hands.

This wasn't hell. It was the basement locker room at the FBI's LA field office—EOD. The bomb squad. The place smelled like bleach, old sweat, and body armor that hadn't been washed since the Clinton administration.

No rubble. No bodies. Nobody's dying words eating me alive.

No. It hadn't been a bad dream. It had been a red one.

I could still taste the rust and cement dust in the back of my throat. Lucas, folded in half under a collapsed beam, his insides strung out along the rebar. Margaret twenty feet away, arms locked around Chloe's body, her chest long since gone still.

And Lucas's eyes on me. Those blue eyes that used to melt me. Now they held nothing but hate.

"If I hadn't come to get you… Chloe would still be alive." Blood on his lips, every word forced out through his teeth. "Eve. I regret ever taking you home."

Then his head dropped. I reached for him anyway. Grabbed nothing but ash.

I got up and walked to the sink. Threw cold water in my face until it stung. The mirror showed me a pale face, a hard jaw, a thin scar along it from close-quarters training.

Three months. That's how long it had been.

Three months since I woke up back on the day Margaret and Arthur drove into the slums to claim their long-lost daughter.

Last time, I watched that Maybach pull up and thought God had finally cut me a break. So I groveled. Bent over backwards. Changed how I dressed, how I talked, how I stood—all to fit what they wanted.

It bought me nothing. The family had enemies, and one of them came for them. They took Chloe. To get her back, Margaret and Arthur handed me over as the trade—the daughter they'd just brought home, worth less than the one they'd raised. The exchange went wrong. The bomb went off and we all died in the rubble.

So this time, when Margaret slid that DNA report across the table—99.9%—I didn't even read it. I tore it in half right in front of her. In front of Lucas. In front of Chloe, watching me like I was the threat.

"My name's Eve. I'm an orphan. Wrong girl. Get off my street."

I never went back to that house. I took the stamina and the muscle memory from my first life and ran with it—straight through the Bureau's worst selection course, and straight into the unit with the highest body count in the field. EOD. The ones they call when everybody else backs out.

"Hey. Rookie. You gonna stare at that wall all day?"

Gravel and cigarettes. I looked up. Harry stood in the doorway with half an unlit Marlboro in his mouth, limping in on the shrapnel leg from Iraq. Mid-fifties. Grey at the temples. Unit Chief. The closest thing to a father I'd ever had.

He kicked an eighty-pound Kevlar suit across the concrete at me. Dust puffed off the floor.

"Suit up. No dummy runs today, kid." He clapped my shoulder hard enough to make me wince. "We're walking into the real thing."

"Copy that, Chief." I wiped my face dry and reached for the plates.

Then I heard them. High heels, clicking across the concrete outside the door. Down here, in a basement that stunk of diesel and gun oil, that sound did not belong.

The door banged open. Margaret walked in like the room owed her rent. Lucas came in behind her, jaw clenched tight.

"Eve. How long do you plan to keep this up?" She slapped a folder and a check down on the bench next to me. "Consent to resign hazardous duty. Sign it. You think running off somewhere you might get blown up is going to make us feel guilty? Chloe hasn't slept in weeks because of you. Arthur called in every favor he had just to find this place."

I kept buckling the chest plate. Click.

"Listen to me, Eve." Lucas stepped in. "Your mother's willing to compromise. Sign the papers. Quit this insanity. Come home. We'll forget the DNA thing ever happened. That check sets you up for life."

I finally looked up. Past his shoulder, at the check. Five million dollars.

Buying my life. Or buying their consciences.

"This is a federal facility. No civilians past the checkpoint." My voice came out flat. "Door's behind you."

"Are you out of your mind?!" Margaret grabbed for my arm, hit the hard shell of the suit, and jerked her hand back, stung. "I am your mother! I did not bring you into this world to die in a sewer out of spite!"

"Mother." A dry laugh came out of me. "You gave birth to me and dumped me in the slums for twenty years. Now you show up to play devoted mom? Bit late, don't you think?"

"I told you—that was an accident!"

"Enough."

Harry spat his cigarette into the trash and filled the doorway with his shoulders. His eyes went over Margaret and Lucas.

"Look, lady. I don't care if you're a studio exec or a hedge fund. My operator's on standby." He hooked two fingers out and flicked the check off the bench into the trash. "You keep obstructing a deployment, I'll have security put you on the floor and show you what a federal charge feels like."

"Who do you think you are?!" Margaret was shaking. "Do you know who you're talking to?!"

Harry smiled. Wasn't a nice one.

"I'm her CO." He jerked his chin at the door. "Now get the hell out."