Alana did have a job—but not necessarily one she could explain to her sister. Not without being committed to a psychiatric ward.

Her official title? Temporal Bounty Hunter. Technically Alana only consulted for the TBH. It was part of her probationary agreement. In exchange for clemency and a clean record, she’d devoted the equivalent of Five-hundred human years to them. A moderate sentence for someone in her predicament.

She pushed through the large glass doors and crossed the seemingly empty lobby. The silence was more deafening than usual, drawing her attention to the clock on the far wall. She’d done nothing more than yank on a pair of boots before rushing out the door, but traffic had been a bitch. Hopefully she wouldn’t be the last one to stroll into the briefing.

She was.

A handful of agents were already scattered around the unremarkable conference table. Barely sparing her anything more than a glance of disinterest, they spun back to their phones in the awkward silence.

It was precisely how she’d wanted it, how she’d needed it. Being close to anyone meant ignoring the warlock’s warning. She’d already done so in favor of her sister, and even that she questioned on the regular.

To the table’s end she slipped, pulling a lone chair out with an ear-cringing scrape of metal on tile. “Sorry,” she muttered, before sinking into the chair under Mason’s narrowed gaze.

“Nice of you to join us,” he dryly remarked while taking point at the room’s front. There was no telling how long he’d been part of the TBH, but Alana had always wondered. Even in the face of potential immortality, the man’s dark hair was tinged with stray grays that distracted her on the regular when their meetings turned dry.

“That’s everyone, right?” Mason asked of an unfamiliar face. Within seconds the door was shut, and the lights snapped off, leaving them all to stare at the mirrored screen of Mason’s laptop on the wall. “Numerous rifts have been reported within the last hour across the city. This first grouping contains an energy signature we’ve seen before, and shouldn’t be difficult to deal with.”

Across the screen he flashed several images. Locations where the rifts had been felt, along with a few shimmering images that looked to the untrained eye like nothing more than a lens flare.

They all knew better.

Alana shifted uncomfortably within her seat, uneasy by the still unspoken. It would be too much of a coincidence though, for the very rift she feared to be tossed into her lap to investigate.

The odds of it were unimaginable. Or so she tried to convince herself.

“This,” Mason continued with a click to the next photo, “is the site where the most reports came from.” There wasn’t much to go on, given the image on the screen depicted a derelict mansion. Onto the table, Mason tossed a rusted hunk of metal. Alana needed only flick her gaze once from the screen and back down to realize it was one in the same. “The energy signature still resonates in this,” Mason explained with a shove of it to the table’s center.

Long and hard Alana stared, cold and unmoving. She didn’t need to touch it to feel the power rolling off of it. Her worst nightmare was coming true, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“Alana.”

Up her head snapped, and from her face the color drained. Everyone was staring at her and had been for a long while as she’d zeroed in on the hunk of trash. “What?”

Mason’s lips pulled into a thin line. “You’re on this last rift,” he said with a point toward the object she’d wanted to recoil from. “We’re stretched too thin with too little resources, you’ll be on your own for now. We’ll send others out as soon as possible.”

In slow motion, she nodded. “Yeah, got it.”

“Don’t disappoint me.”

It was enough of a dismissal as any. With nausea settling in, Alana lurched from her chair and rushed out the room as fast as her legs would carry her. Over her mouth a hand slammed, forcing back the inevitable.

Down the long corridor she hurled herself, while mentally cursing the architect who’d thought placing the restrooms so far away was a good idea. Then, things only got worse.

Behind a vanishing figure the women’s door slammed shut, and down the empty corridor the lock’s click echoed. Fear and guilt clenched in a tight wrap around Alana’s stomach, driving her to slam shoulder first into the men’s door without a second thought.

To her knees she fell, and grasped the porcelain bowl with every bit of strength she had. The pit of her stomach clenched, hurling up her sugary breakfast in an unrecognizable mass.

All she saw in the murky water, was her downfall. All this time she’d been lucky, but now? Her luck had run out.

Ripping off a wad of tissue paper, she wiped at the sides of her mouth before flushing and making her way to the sink. The face staring back at her in the mirror wasn’t even one she truly recognized. She was hard, and confident, maybe even a bitch sometimes, but this woman? This pale, terrified face?

It was someone else, and if she wasn’t careful, everyone would notice she had something to hide.

“Get your shit together, Lana,” she whispered while rinsing away the acrid taste in her mouth. Letting them in to the truth would be just as deadly as stepping into it herself.

She wouldn’t escape Damon alive a second time.

Drawing in a settling breath, she freed herself of the men’s dingy restroom, grateful to find no curious eyes or resistance awaiting her outside. There was work to be done, and whether she wished to tempt fate or not, she couldn’t renege on her job, not when it was the only thing keeping her from spending much of her life behind bars.

She’d just need to find a balance, somewhere between truth and a lie, to keep herself out from the rift that would surely be her death.

Forcing her chin up, she left the building and made her way to the mansion from Mason’s briefing. Gravel crunched beneath her boots, and every hair on her body stood on end. She wasn’t even certain one needed to be Fae kissed to feel the remnants of outright danger on the air.

Creeping along with a healthy dose of fear, she paid mind to the tales of her body that alerted her to the very spot in which the rift had appeared. It assaulted her senses, drowning her mind in a wash of confusion, and setting her skin ablaze with a tingling unease.

Across the ground at her feet, a giant gash lay in the cracked pavement. At a crouch, she reached for the earth’s ragged cut, only to recoil at the force that pushed her back.

Damon.

The very warlock she’d effectively banished had come back. It was the only reasonable explanation, and there was one reason in particular she could think of for why he’d be on the prowl.

He wanted what was his, what she’d taken from him, and that which she would never willingly give back.

“Shit.” Overcome with dread, she knew there was nothing left for her to do. Not here, and not the way Mason would want it to be done. She couldn’t investigate fully, not when opening the rift meant putting herself directly into it. Though, if Damon had already escaped somehow…

Taylor. At a skid, she set off running. She and her completely mortal sister were as similar as they’d ever been. They were both detectives, even if their focus was vastly different, and now they’d both be in equal amounts of danger.

There would never be any amount of forgetting Damon’s threat, and the repeat of those words set her on a collision course for Taylor’s apartment.

Everything Alana had ever feared coming true—had.