Chapter 2 - The boyfriend who existed only on paper
The SUV took me to a federal building rather than a hospital.
I refused to go inside until someone explained why.
My lip had stopped bleeding. My scalp still burned where Mark had pulled my hair, and the place where my cheek hit the hood had begun swelling.
Director Cole stood beside the open vehicle door.
“You need medical documentation.”
“I need an answer.”
“You’ll get both.”
“That sounds like something people say when they control the order.”
His expression changed.
Good.
I was frightened enough without being managed by another stranger.
Cole stepped back.
“You’re right.”
Then he called for a female medical officer to meet us in a private room and told me I could leave if I wanted, though he strongly recommended I remain until we understood whether Mark’s associates knew where I lived.
That sentence got me out of the SUV.
Inside, a doctor examined me while an agent named Priya Shah stayed nearby because I asked her to.
No serious head injury.
Split lip.
Scalp tenderness.
Bruising on my arm from an older incident.
Priya photographed only what I consented to document.
Then Cole returned without the firearm and placed his credentials on the table.
Director Ethan Cole.
I had seen his face before.
Television.
Congressional hearings.
News clips I usually ignored while making dinner.
“What is happening?”
He sat across from me rather than beside me.
“First, Mark’s legal name is not Mark Avery.”
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
“His name is Marcus Vale.”
I stared at him.
“He works at Halden Analytics.”
“No.”
“I have been to his office.”
“You have been to an office leased by a subsidiary whose records were altered before you arrived.”
My mouth went dry.
“What does he do?”
“He has worked under several identities as an intermediary for a network involved in procurement fraud, financial extortion, theft of protected data, and witness intimidation.”
The words reached me individually.
Not together.
I thought of Mark making pasta in my apartment.
Mark remembering how I took coffee.
Mark buying me a scarf in January because I was always cold.
“You’re telling me my boyfriend is some kind of spy?”
“No.”
“Criminal?”
“We believe so.”
“Believe?”
Cole’s precision annoyed me until I understood why he used it.
Investigation was not conviction.
Allegation was not proof.
“We have evidence tying Marcus to the network,” he said. “We’re still determining his exact role.”
“Then why was I being watched?”
His eyes held mine.
“That is the question.”
I laughed once.
“You don’t know?”
“We know he approached you deliberately.”
That sentence struck harder than the car hood.
“What do you mean deliberately?”
Cole opened a folder.
A photograph showed Mark—Marcus—sitting at a café.
Date:
Seven months earlier.
Three weeks before we supposedly met accidentally at a bookstore.
He was watching me through the window.
Another photograph.
Outside my office.
Another.
Across from my apartment building.
My hands began to shake.
“He followed me.”
“Yes.”
“For why?”
“We don’t know yet.”
I pushed the folder away.
“No. You do not get to show me photographs like this and then say you don’t know.”
Cole did not react defensively.
Instead, he slid one more image toward me.
It showed Marcus speaking to a man beside a parking garage.
Older.
Expensive coat.
Face turned partly away.
I recognized him anyway.
My uncle.
Victor Dane.
My mother’s younger brother.
A man I had not spoken to in almost eight years.
I looked up sharply.
“Why is Mark meeting my uncle?”
“That,” Cole said, “is why you were under surveillance.”
“My uncle is a criminal?”
“We don’t know that either.”
“Then what do you know?”
Cole was silent for a moment.
“Twenty-three years ago, your mother worked for the Department of Justice.”
My entire body went still.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“She was a public accountant.”
“That was her cover after she left federal service.”
“My mother died when I was nine.”
“I know.”
I stood so quickly the chair moved backward.
“You know?”
Cole’s face tightened.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Then I saw something I had not noticed before.
Not authority.
Grief.
He knew my mother.
Personally.
I sat again.
“What was her real job?”
Cole folded his hands.
“She was a forensic accountant assigned to a joint federal task force investigating laundering through defense subcontractors.”
My ears rang.
“And Victor?”
“Her source.”
I stared at him.
“My uncle?”
“At first.”
Two words.
At first.
The room seemed to narrow.
“What happened later?”
Cole looked toward Priya, then back at me.
“Your mother disappeared from the task force eight months before her death.”
“She died in a car accident.”
“That is the official record.”
My heart stopped.
“Official?”
Cole did not say murder.
He did not need to.
Not yet.
Then Priya entered quickly, holding a phone.
“Director.”
She showed him something.
His expression hardened.
“What?”
Cole turned the screen toward me.
A surveillance camera outside my apartment building had captured Marcus entering my apartment forty-three minutes after the SUV left the restaurant.
He had a key.
I had never given him one.
May you like
And he was carrying a small black case.
Cliffhanger: Marcus had secretly copied Elara’s apartment key—and while she sat inside FBI offices learning her mother once worked for the government, he was already searching her home for something he believed she possessed.
