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“Sure, but Bastian isn’t enough. You need to find who you are. You need to discover yourself. Your identity. You can’t give yourself to someone else before you know what you’re giving away.”
He was right, but I wished he wasn’t.
“I’m tendering my resignation.”
“You can’t come back from that, and if the bureau decides, in the future, that you’re with Bastian, they’ll always be watching you two.”
“I’m willing to take the risk.”
If he’d take me back. It seemed improbable with each passing second.
“There’s another way.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his desk, and pressed his fingers together in a steeple. “You could disavow. Keep your cover. There’d be no severance check. No bureau loyalty package. You were wiped clean from our agency databases when you started your cover, but since your cover is you…”
“I still have my Degory degree, my name, a social security number, and a fake job employment history that will pass off as the real thing. I can start over.”
“You can build yourself a new identity.”
An identity I wanted.
Someone I could be proud of.
Not Apate.
Not Ganymede.
Not a liar.
Not a con.
Me.
Chapter
Forty-One
When love and duty are one then grace is within your soul.
SHANNON L. ALDER
Dear Ariana,
Nearly thirty years ago, I spent less than twenty-four hours in Devils Ridge, Texas. I had a contract that needed negotiating.
I’d finished it as fast as I could, hoping to get out because everything about Angelo De Luca was toxic.
On the way to the airport, my tire blew. People passed me, ignoring my car on the side of the road, my waves and hollers. But this woman, barely pregnant and scared for her life, didn’t ignore me.
Maybe it was fate or maybe it was a leap of faith, but she stopped for me, knowing who I was, and helped me anyway.
I knew who she was. I knew her situation. She was the forced mistress of a man I wouldn’t wish on any woman.
She needed help. I could see it in her eyes, the tense lines of her shoulders, but she didn’t ask.
Instead, she helped me. A man I knew she suspected could be just like the one she ran from.
So, I offered to help.
It was her eyes.
