I was the youngest deep-cover agent the DEA's El Paso Field Division had ever fielded.
He was the most expensive trigger the Iruegas cartel had ever bought.
I came in as a burned fed — walked off with a sealed evidence locker, lit my own file, took the federal warrant on my back as paperwork — and signed on as his partner.
For three months he took a round meant for me, and for three months he taught me how to put a man down without blinking.
Everyone south of the river said Cass Ardent didn't have a heart.
Then I found a photograph under his pillow.
In the photograph: the half-melted badge my father was wearing the night he died.
The night we closed the net, I pressed the muzzle of my service Glock to the bridge of his nose.
He smiled up at me.
"Pull the trigger, Officer."
"I forgot to tell you. Your first assigned target — your own father — that was me too."
But before my finger could finish the pull, my handler's voice broke open in my ear.
"Maren, exfil. Now."
"Cass Ardent's real file just decrypted."
The first time I saw Cass Ardent, I was zip-tied to a steel folding chair in an abandoned cold-storage warehouse outside Juárez. My right shoulder was still bleeding through the gauze somebody had packed wrong.
Three men had been working on me for two hours.
They wanted the active roster out of El Paso Field Division. They wanted the name of my handler. They wanted to know why I'd walked.
I gave them one line.
"I want to live."
The one running the room — bald, neck like a fire hydrant — backhanded me across the mouth. I turned my head and spat blood onto the concrete.
The door opened.
Cass came in wearing a black rain shell, dripping. He had a beat-up umbrella in one hand. He let it close, water running off the ribs onto the floor.
He looked at me. Then he looked at the bald one.
"What's she said?"
"Nothing. Cops have hard bones. Break two, they soften up."
Cass leaned the umbrella against the wall and walked over to me. His fingers were cold. He took my chin and tipped my face up.
"Maren Vance. DEA, El Paso Field Division. Twenty-six. Two commendations. Last spring she ran a CI in Sunset Heights all the way through to the cuffs herself."
My chest dropped.
That file was not supposed to be in cartel hands.
He bent down. His voice went under the others'.
"You want to live, you bring something worth a seat."
I held his eyes.
"You've got a load moving through the South Port hangar. Tomorrow night, transfer to a second crew. EPIC's already got the wire up."
The room went quiet for half a beat.
Then the bald one came off the wall. "Bullshit—"
Cass raised one hand.
The bald one shut up.
Cass looked back at me. The corner of his mouth moved, barely.
"Take her to see Don Tavo."
Somebody hauled me up out of the chair.
When I passed him, Cass put two fingers on the bullet hole in my shoulder and pressed.
The pain went off behind my eyes. My knees almost folded.
He said, very low, "A cop pretending to be a defector — the thing that gives it away is always the eyes."
I bared my teeth at him.
He let go. He hooked a strand of my hair back behind my ear, like a man fixing a piece of furniture.
"From now on, don't look at me like you still want to cuff me."
Octavio Iruegas lived on a hilltop south of Juárez, in a compound built around a courtyard with a brass aviary in the middle.
Don Tavo never touched the product. He touched people and he touched money.
When they brought me up he was hand-feeding mango slivers to a scarlet macaw through the bars.
"A defected fed." He smiled. "Four words. Expensive. Also burning hot to the touch."
I gave him the South Port hangar — the transfer window, the call sign on the second crew, the plate on the chase car.
The intel was real. The El Paso Field Division had spiked a perimeter bust to put me through this door.
The morning Holroyd put me into the warehouse, he'd only said one thing.
"Maren. The Iruegas stay up, this corridor keeps killing."
I'd written it down behind my teeth.
So when Don Tavo nodded and one of his people slid a Glock across the patio tiles to my feet, I didn't move.
He pointed at the man on the ground.
The man had been worked over with something heavy. Around his neck on a broken lanyard hung a battered DEA confidential-informant tab.
"A vow of blood," Don Tavo said. "Kill him. Then I believe you."
I knew the face.
Miguel Calderón. Migs. Three days ago he had radioed in the location of the Juárez warehouse. He had two kids. The older girl was six.
He saw me. His eyes went red instantly.
"Agent V—"
The courtyard air died.
Cass was behind my left shoulder. I felt the muzzle of his rifle find the small of my back, light as a finger.
I bent down and picked up the Glock.
Migs was shaking his head, broken sounds coming up out of his throat.
My finger crossed the trigger guard. My palm was wet.
Cass's hand closed around my wrist and pushed the muzzle a foot off line.
The round went into the brass aviary. The cage came apart in a bright clap of metal. Mango pulp and water everywhere. The macaw was already in the air, screaming.
Don Tavo's face changed.
Cass took the Glock out of my hand, pivoted, and put the muzzle against Migs's forehead.
"She doesn't get to kill a cop yet."
His voice was easy. "New blades break when you make them cut too soon."
Don Tavo's eyes narrowed.
"You're going to do it for her?"
Cass smiled.
"I'll do it."
The shot was very flat in the courtyard.
Migs went down with his eyes open.
I didn't move. I didn't cry. I didn't go to him.
Cass wiped a fleck of something off my cheek with the cuff of his sleeve.
"You pass."
I looked at his hand. The blood on it. For the first time I knew it clean.
This man should die.
The first job they gave me was a black hardshell case, riding shotgun across the bridge to a private cargo dock on the U.S. side.
Cass drove.
Halfway down the access road he cut the wheel and took us down a service alley behind a row of body shops.
I put my hand on the knife in my back waistband.
"Where are we going?"
"Losing a tail." He didn't look at me. "You feds run surveillance to a manual. Third car back, silver panel van, two streets."
My breath went short.
That was Holroyd's protective detail.
Cass put his foot down. The car came off the alley like a thrown stone, into the rain.
The van came with us. He took it through six turns and stopped under the overpass on Stanton, hard enough that I almost ate the dash.
"Out."
I didn't move.
He looked sideways at me.
"You want them to die on this asphalt, sit there."
I got out.
The rain was loud. The van pulled up twenty meters back and held.
Cass came around with the umbrella up over my face — and lifted my phone out of my back pocket with the other hand.
He held it where I could see it and dropped it down a storm drain.
"Defectors don't carry old numbers."
The anger came up my throat fast enough I had to bite it.
That phone was the last emergency line I had to my handler.
The van door cracked open. Cass already had his pistol up.
I put my hand on his wrist.
"Don't."
He stared at me.
"Reason."
"They aren't agents. They're collectors. I'm into a guy for thirty grand."
He laughed.
"Slow. You wrote that one slow."
Rainwater ran off his brow.
The van door opened the rest of the way and a young guy in a soaked jacket leaned out. I knew him. Ridge Halloran. Six months out of FLETC. He had no idea I was inside on purpose; on paper I was a fugitive.
"Maren! Stand down!"
Cass's eyes flatlined.
I took the Glock off his hip before he could close his hand and put a round into the asphalt two feet from Ridge's boots.
"Move!"
Ridge froze.
I made my voice ragged. "You follow me again, I put the next one in your head!"
The van started backing up.
Cass did not stop me.
He took the Glock back, and then he tipped his head down close to mine.
"Maren. You saved him."
My fingers were numb.
He pressed the handle of the umbrella into my hand.
"You saved you, too."
After the run they put me in a room in the compound's east wing. They called it a guest room. The window was screwed shut. There was always a man in the hallway.
At two in the morning I worked the cover off the bedside lamp and slipped the micro-transponder out from under the false acrylic on my left ring finger.
It was the last live line I had.
The chip had just woken up — a thumbnail of blue — when the lock turned.
I had the lampshade back in place before the door cleared the jamb.
Cass came in with a small tray. Gauze. Iodine. Tape.
"Time to change that dressing."
"Get out."
He didn't get out.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wet a cotton swab.
I pulled away. He put his palm on my shoulder and held me there.
"You're afraid of me."
"I think you're filthy."
His hand paused.
I looked him full in the face.
"Migs had a six-year-old daughter."
He went on cleaning the wound. The iodine bit and I bit through my lip.
He reached up and wiped the bead of blood off with his thumb.
"You remember everyone's name."
I made it cold. "And you don't?"
"I remember."
He started the new gauze. "The first one. Marcus Vance."
My heart stopped for half a beat.
My father's name went into me like a rusted blade going back into the same wound.
He had died eight years ago in a Juárez ambush. The official write-up: a contract hitter on cartel payroll, killed to seal a leak. Alias logged in the file as CROW.
Nobody in the Iruegas organization should have known I was Marcus Vance's daughter.
I made myself look at him.
"Who?"
He capped the iodine. His voice was flat.
"A cop."
I forced a half-smile.
"Plenty of cops die."
He looked at me for a long time.
"Yeah."
He stood. He took the tray. He went.
When the door shut I went into the bathroom, turned the faucet on full, and pressed both hands over my mouth.
The face in the mirror had eyes that wouldn't stop watering.
I didn't burst the chip that night.
Because for the first time it occurred to me that the cartel might already know more than my own people had told me.