Chapter 2 - THE DEVIL’S TRANSACTIONThe silence inside the diner was deafening. Behind the counter, Priya dropped a glass mug; it shattered across the linoleum, but nobody turned to look. The air felt thick, heavy with the weight of unsheathed steel and decades-old blood.
"Your brother was a monster, Cross," I said, my voice steady despite the adrenaline coursing through my veins. "And he got the death he earned."
Scarface was whimpering softly beneath my forearm, his broken thumb throbbing, but he didn't dare move an inch. The heat from the coffee pot was still radiating against his cheekbone.
"Perhaps he was," Cross replied smoothly, adjusting his silk tie. "But he was my blood. And in my world, blood demands repayment. I could have six men walk through those doors right now and riddle this cheap diner with lead. I could let Marcus rip your young friend behind the counter apart."
My eyes darted toward Priya. She was pale, shaking, staring at me like she didn't recognize the woman who had shared shifts with her for six months.
"Leave her out of this," I warned.
"That depends entirely on you, Evelyn," Cross said. He reached into his tailored breast pocket and pulled out a sleek, black leather folder, sliding it across the sticky table. "I didn't come here to kill you tonight. If I wanted you dead, you would have eaten poison three weeks ago when I traced your social security burner number."
I kept my pressure on Scarface’s collarbone while flicking the folder open with one hand. Inside were high-resolution surveillance photographs.
My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit.
The photos weren't of me. They were of a little girl—maybe seven years old—with dark curly hair and bright brown eyes, sitting on a swing set in an suburban park in Indiana.
"Who is she?" I demanded, though a terrifying, instinctual horror was already clawing at my throat.
"She is Maya," Cross said, his tone sickeningly gentle. "And according to the genetic ledger left behind by the Vanguard's medical officers, she is the daughter you gave birth to in a black site prison cell before you faked your death and went into hiding."
The world tilted on its axis. A daughter.
When I broke out of the Vanguard eighteen years ago, I was bleeding out, half-dead from a botched siege. They had performed emergency surgery on me. I was told I was barren—that the child I carried had been lost to the cold, sterile concrete floor of the bunker. It was the trauma that broke me, the final push that made me burn my identity and run into the dark.
They lied to me.
"She’s alive," Cross said, leaning back. "And thirty minutes ago, a strike team from the remnants of your old agency—the people who trained you—located her foster family. They don't want to kill her, Evelyn. They want to harvest her. They know what's in her bloodline."
"Why are you telling me this?" I snapped, my vision blurring with lethal fury.
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"Because the man who holds her right now is the commander who trained you. The man who ordered my brother's execution and framed me for it," Cross said, his eyes flashing with a rare, genuine spark of hatred. "I want him dead. You want your daughter. We have two hours before they put her on a cargo plane out of O'Hare."
He gestured to the door. "So, 'Clara'... are you going to keep pouring cold coffee, or are you going to become the monster you used to be?"
