The blood came up her neck and hit her face in patches.
The pastry fork clinked on her plate.
"Wren — how can you say that?" The eyes filled on cue. "I know — I know you're still angry with Mom and Dad. They were stupid. They were panicking. They regret everything. They've barely slept since they put you out —"
"They regret it," I said. "Or they regret putting Hale Capital out."
She stopped with her mouth half open.
She had clearly not been briefed for that.
"Wren — how can you think they'd —"
"Stop." I let the word land. "I'm not interested in this version of you. Save it for the next person."
I didn't raise my voice. I didn't have to. Across the room Theo had already started moving — small, smooth, hospitality-staff weight. He was at her elbow before she'd decided what to do with her face.
"Ms. Calloway. Ms. Marlow needs the room. If you'd come with me."
The mask cracked all at once. She slammed the fork onto the tray, hard enough to send a silver clatter through the lounge, and stood up so fast her chair scraped.
"Don't get comfortable, Wren," she said. The voice that came out was not the lost-sister voice. It was lower and dirtier and entirely hers. "You think any of this is yours? You're just a piece of arm candy for a man old enough to be your grandfather. He'll throw you out the second you stop being useful. Just like we did."
I let her finish. I tilted my head a little to one side.
"Are you done?"
The calm seemed to enrage her more than anything I could have said.
"You wait." She jabbed a finger at me, mascara starting to go. "I am going to make sure every single person in this town knows exactly what kind of trash you are. You can wear whatever dress you want. You'll always be a foster brat from Hagerstown. You don't get to be anything else."
She turned and went out the door so hard the frame shook.
Theo closed it behind her gently. He turned and looked at me.
"Inspector. Want me to do anything about that?"
I shook my head. "No. She's a yappy little dog jumping on the couch. Let her bark."
But under my collarbone something small and trained was trying to get my attention.
Cassidy Calloway's hatred was too sharp. Too fluent. It didn't fit a teenager who'd been gone since she was three. It fit a grown enemy who had been waiting for me by name for a very long time.
Soren and I rode back into the District together. Town car, two-vehicle escort, the partition up.
"How was tonight?"
"Beau Prentiss is careful," I said. "But August and Cassidy made a scene at the right time. Beau's curious about the mystery niece now in a way he wasn't an hour ago. He'll come to me himself within the week."
"He'll come for you."
"I know."
The safe house in Foggy Bottom had three locks on the door and no name on the buzzer. I changed into sweats and a Quantico T-shirt, made tea I didn't drink, and started the debrief I always did after an op night — replaying every glance, every shift of weight, every word.
Beau's eyes when he took my hand. Sterling's chin trembling once, just once, in his corner. Cassidy's face when I sat the cup down too hard.
I was missing something.
The phone buzzed. Theo.
Cassidy posted a story. Worth a look.
He'd attached the link.
It was the Calloway daughter's verified Instagram — half a million followers, mostly the tween-and-prep-school crowd that was apparently now her demographic. The story was a single mirror selfie taken in the gala atrium. She was in pale pink, lit beautifully, half-turned to flash the dress. The caption — white serif on a black bar — read, reunited with the family that's actually mine 🤍
In the mirror behind her, two figures were just visible at the far end of the atrium: my back, in the gray gown, and Soren's gray-suit shoulder.
The replies were already a thousand deep, every one of them on script.
gus deserves so much better than his fake sister latching on to a sugar grandpa lmaooo
the imposter girl had the AUDACITY to crash a real Calloway event
I heard Soren Hale "relocated her here" 👀 girl
praying for cass and the family. she's been through enough. cuckoo bird needs to stay out
Theo called as I was reading.
"You want PR to do anything about the dogpile?"
"No," I said. "Let her run. The louder the better."
I sat with the phone for a while. Cassidy's little stunts didn't move me. But why she was doing them — that was the part that didn't fit.
Pure jealousy?
I pinched the photo wider, my back, Soren's back. Pinched wider still.
In the corner of the frame, behind a half-pulled curtain near the catering doors, a server stood with her hands on a rolling cart.
Her free ear had a small cream-colored bud in it that wasn't a hospitality earpiece. The way she held the cart handle — left wrist higher than the right, weight on the back foot — was the way you held a cart you had carved a sightline through. The way her eyes were angled — not at any guest, not at the head waiter — was the way an operator stands when she is logging a face.
I knew her.
I had last seen her in Zurich, three years ago, on an op that had nearly cost two of my colleagues their lives. She had blonde hair then. She had, at the time, been called Scorpio.
I pulled the gala's full vendor and staff manifest in two minutes. The catering company had been onboarded that morning. The server's bio was clean. Photo, license, two prior contracts. Nothing to flag. Of course nothing to flag.
Cassidy hadn't taken that selfie to humiliate me.
She had taken it to mark me.
I called Soren on the encrypted line at six in the morning.
"Scorpio's in DC," I said. "She was at the gala in catering whites. Cassidy posted a photo with her in the background. Cassidy is running a covert handoff."
The silence on his end of the line was the silence I'd learned to read three years ago.
"Then Ouroboros is reading Beau Prentiss for replacement," he said. "And they sent Scorpio to pre-clear the ground."
"Or to remove him."
"Wren — your assignment is realigned, effective now. Until further notice, your priority is keeping Beau Prentiss alive. He's the only intact line we have. We can't afford to lose him."
"Understood."
I hung up. On the screen of my laptop, Cassidy's school portrait — the one the Calloways had framed on the entry-hall console — looked back at me, all eyelashes and pink cheekbones. Nineteen years old. The girl who had picked the longest possible route through the room.
Whatever she was, she was older inside than the face suggested. By a great deal.
The next morning, Beau called me himself. He proposed golf.
TPC Potomac. Eighteen holes. He picked me up in a car that was not the car of a man worried for his life.
Theo came along as my analyst, polo and khakis, deferential. We teed off at ten under a clean autumn sky. Beau's swing was country-club good. He talked the whole time, about nothing.
"My niece," Soren had said in the brief, "knows her way around a deck. Let him see it."
I let him see it. I broke down the energy-deal proposal Theo had floated under Hale Capital letterhead the night before — a proposal we'd seeded with three small structural traps any actual operator in his position would have to flag.
"Wren," he said over the third hole, "you have a real head for this. I'm impressed."
"My uncle was a patient teacher."
He laughed. He waited until the eighth hole to come at me sideways.
"I'd heard, you know, that you'd been with the Calloways. Before all this."
"I was. It was a charitable arrangement that ran its course. The Calloways are not, as it turns out, comfortable with anyone they can't put down on a tax return."
He smiled. He looked at me with the small attentive expression of a man who had found exactly what he came looking for.
"That Calloway boy. August. Sharp instrument. Bit of a temperament." He swung. The ball arced clean. "I always thought he had real potential. Pity about the family."
I felt the small click in my chest of a piece moving on a board.
"You like him for something."
"He's young. Hungry men can be useful. The Calloway ship is going down. He's smart enough to want a lifeboat." He looked at me sideways. "Don't you think?"
The next group was loud at the tenth tee. We turned to look.
It was August, in a quarter-zip and a grim face, with Cassidy in white tennis whites at his elbow, beaming.