“Miss Aston?” The man is the kind of tall that makes you look up. He’s wearing a dark suit with a skinny black tie, and even though we’re indoors, he’s got sunglasses on.
Anyone over the age of six can spot him for what he is. I stop walking so ten years of manners and settling can fall away and the girl I am underneath can take over. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Special Agent Jax, Miss Aston. And I have a few questions for you. Please come with me.”
“Am I under arrest for something?” Holy fuck. He leads me through a set of double doors, and then another door, and then another door, until I’m three layers deep inside the fucking Denver International Airport. We finally come to a small office, where he waves me in and says, “Please, take a seat.”
I take my seat as my mind races with all the possible reasons the FBI could be interested in me.
Just be cooperative, Sasha, Ford tells me in my head. We’ve covered my tracks well since he adopted me ten years ago. But we’ve always planned for the day when people discover my history is a lie.
“Am I under arrest?” I ask again, trying not to take deep breaths. Trying not to sit on my hands and fidget in my seat. Trying not to wonder if this is the end of the line for me.
“No, ma’am,” he says. “I just need to ask you some questions, if that’s OK.”
“What if it’s not OK? What if I want to call my dad?”
He sits down at the table opposite me and opens up a folder. His hands are large and his fingers are long and slender. I concentrate on those two characteristics as he shuffles some papers around. Who uses papers anymore? You’d think they’d have this shit on a tablet. It’s a ploy. To unsettle me. Make me think they’ve got dirt on me. Make me fuck up and talk. Make me—
Hush, I tell the killer locked away deep inside me. Be cool, Sasha.
“You are Sasha Aston, correct?” He waits as I process things. Not smiling, not frowning—impassive. Typical.
I can be impassive as well. I learned from the best. “You know I am. I just got off that plane. So I was checked in.”
“You came from…”
“Peru.” I fill in the blank for him.
“What was your business in Peru, might I ask?”
“I was at an archeological dig. They found bones.”
“Bones?” He cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Dinosaur bones. I’m a paleontologist. Well, a grad student. It was a summer internship. Why?”
He looks at me for a moment. I have been questioned by enough dangerous men to recognize the pause as reevaluation. I tend to have that effect on people. “Impressive. And your father is Rutherford Aston IV?”
“Yes.” I swallow hard. Jesus Christ, we are totally busted for something. “I need to know what’s going on. You’re scaring me. Did something happen to my dad?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am. I’m twenty-four and you look like you’re about thirty.”
He eyes me down the bridge of his nose. “Thirty? I don’t look thirty. I’m twenty-seven.”
“What?” I have to shake my head at that. “What do you want, Special Agent Jax? If I’m not under arrest, then I’m leaving.”
He flips the page in the folder just as I begin to stand up, and produces a photograph that steals all my breath away.
“Do you know this man, Miss Aston? Can you identify him for us?”
I shake my head as I study Nick’s face. His perfect face. The blond hair, the brown eyes. The steely gaze. I can picture him smiling at me in that hotel room in Rock Springs back when I was only thirteen years old.
Thirteen and already a killer several times over. Thirteen and I had lost everything. There was absolutely nothing left of me that day. Thirteen and wanting to die so bad because this boy here left me. Live your life, he told me. Grow up, move on. You will love again.
I never had a choice, did I? Because just a few days later I was on a boat heading out to sea and he was standing on a beach. Didn’t even wave goodbye.
“Never seen him before,” I say, lying right to Special Agent Jax’s face. “Why?”
“Take another look, Miss Aston. How about this one?”
This time, Nick is shirtless. His whole body is covered in tattoos. His chest, his arms, his neck. And when I look closely, even his hands have tattoos on them. It pains me—emotionally and physically—not to reach out for that photo.
I shake my head again. “No, sir. Sorry.”
“Hmmm,” Jax says. “Well, that’s interesting, Miss Aston. Or should I call you Miss Cherlin?”
I stare him in the eyes and do not flinch. I don’t deny or confirm. From this point on, I do not talk. I say nothing until I’m given a phone and then I call my dad and tell him I need Ronin. Ronin, the liar. Ronin, the one who talks for all the Team members if we get in trouble. Ronin. That’s the only name on my mind right now.
“They call him Santino down in Central America. But here in the US, they call him Holy Boy. He’s white with blond hair—but somehow, he’s the second highest-ranking member of the Mara Perro, Gang of the Dogs.”
“Very interesting. But what’s this have to do with me?” Shit, I just broke the no-talking rule.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, Miss Cherlin. If that’s who you are, it makes a lot more sense.”
“How so?”
“I think you know how so.” He grins at me and flashes a dimple. His eyes are blue and his hair is light. Not quite blond, but not quite brown, either. He’s handsome. That’s probably why they sent him to me. Thinking I’m easily distracted by a pretty face.
“I don’t have time for this. I don’t know that man—”
“He knows you, Miss Aston. He knows you very well. Because he’s sent more than two dozen people here to find you while you’ve been digging down in Peru this summer.”
“What?” My heart thumps.
“Did you two have some unfinished business? Before you took on this new identity?”
I can’t breathe.
“Or some prearranged agreement to meet up in the future?”
I shake my head no as I close my eyes to picture the prearranged meeting that never happened. “We didn’t.”
“But you do know him?”
I just gave myself away. I lean on the desk with my palms down and bow my head to try to think clearly. Agent Jax places his hand on mine.
“Miss Aston, I’m not here to arrest you or pry into your past. I understand your fear right now, I do. Better than most. But if you know him, and if he’s looking for you, you should understand… he’s probably planning on kidnapping you.”
“What?” I pull my hands away from the desk to take my mind off the fact that Agent Jax is touching me.
“We’ve intercepted several of these men he’s sent to look for you. Three of them confessed to this plot. Now I don’t expect you to tell me much. Just yes or no. Is this man, the one they call Santino, Nicholas Tate?”
I nod. “That’s him. I’d recognize him anywhere. But I haven’t seen him in ten years. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I was in Peru, not Central America—”
“You‘re not under suspicion, Miss Aston.”
“Then why did you ask me here?”
“We don’t want to arrest you, Sasha. We want to recruit you.”
My childhood flashes through my head. Stalking, hunting, shooting, killing. Being blown up, being tracked, being hated and wanted dead. The anger I had, the love I lost, the life that was ripped away.
Ford Aston did his best with me. It was better than anyone else on this planet could’ve done, that’s for sure. I respect him. I love him. I love my brother, Five, my sister, Kate, and my mom, Ashleigh. I had dogs, and cats, and a nice house, and trips around the world. I had my own room. I was sent to private school where I made friends and got good grades.
James, Harper, Merc and I made a lot of money off that final job we pulled. Nick never got his cut. Nick never got the chance because he took off with a Central American drug lord in order to save the rest of us.
And no, none of it was perfect. We ran into troubles here and there over who I am. Who we all are. But it got handled. I graduated college and I’m on the verge of completing my oral examinations and being fully invested in my career in anthropology as a PhD candidate.
I. Am. A success.
“I moved on,” I tell Agent Jax. But I know it’s a lie. And he knows it’s a lie. Because even though I’m the toughest girl you will ever meet—I am the killer of killers, for fuck’s sake—just one picture of just one man can take me back to the moment I realized… I lost.
I lost everything.
And no amount of money—not new mothers and fathers, not new friends and schools, or college degrees, or even the simple satisfaction that comes from my grad school research—can make up for it. None of that can fix the fact that I lost.
My father is dead. Mother dead. Grandparents dead. Home gone. And Nick—the one thing I held onto after the Company took my childhood away and turned me into a murderer—left me behind. Left me all alone. Because only a Company kid can understand what I am. We don’t walk the edge, we live on the other side of it.
Harper has James. Merc wasn’t a Company kid, but he was a Company assassin. And Sydney has him to keep the crazy at bay. So good for them. I’m glad they have each other.
But I’ve been alone on the other side of things for ten years because my partner left me. And yeah, I’m tired of it. I want my past back. And just a glimmer of the future I was promised and denied, just one more conversation with Nick, would be worth it for me.
But if this agent thinks I will sell my soul to the government to see Nick Tate again, he’s wrong. I’m not a snitch. So if he wants to play a game of cat-and-mouse with me, fine. I’m in.
“I’d like to leave now.” I fold my arms over my chest and zone him out. I don’t even hear him as he uses the next thirty minutes trying to persuade me.
He threatens me with a forty-eight-hour hold, felonies that list into the dozens, and a visit to my grad school mentor at University of Kansas.
That last part is the only thing that gives me pause. My mentor is cool. I chose her for a reason when I decided to take KU’s grad school offer. She thinks the world of me and I’d hate for her to find out I’m such a lowlife piece of shit.
But it can’t be helped. I am stone, that’s how firm I am in this. There is no way in hell I will work with the corrupt FBI to take down the only person I ever called a partner.
If Nick Tate is looking for me, then I can make myself available without any help from this asshole.