pen she wished would never run dry. The keychain from a hiking trip along the southernmost part of the Appalachian Trail. Her phone with pictures of her few Georgia friends.
Her friends, who would never know what had happened to her. Her students, who would only know that Ms. Naylor never showed up for class. The entire life she’d built here was firmly erased by the taking of her messenger bag.
The bag with a photo slipped inside a torn lining, the photo she wasn’t supposed to have in the first place.
“Wait!”
Deputy Maldonado had pulled the door open but stopped before he slid in. “What?”
Amy reached across the seat and grabbed his hand, gripping tight, desperate for him to understand that she needed this one forbidden thing or she might lose her real self forever. “In the top pocket of my backpack, the lining is cut. There’s a picture...”
His expression tightened, the no already forming on his lips. She shouldn’t have mementos like that, pieces of her old life that someone could find and use against her. But she couldn’t let this one go. It was all she had left. “Please.”
He eyed her for a long moment before he shoved away from the car and walked over to the other deputy. There was a brief conversation before Sam dug through the messenger bag then returned, passing the picture to her as he shut the door and started the car. “I can’t promise they’ll let you keep it.”
“Thank you for trying.” She stared down at the photo in her hand. Two women and one man, smiling and happy, in better days when they didn’t know that the next two years would rip them entirely apart.
Deputy Maldonado shifted the car into gear and rolled out. He cast a lingering glance in the rearview, likely at the car that held Deputy Edgecombe’s remains.
Amy wasn’t the only one who was losing today. With a crushing weight in her chest, the grief returned. Deputy Edgecombe’s family was about to get a devastating visit. A team of men had lost a colleague. There was a difference in losing a temporary life and losing a permanent one. “I’m sorry.”
Deputy Maldonado’s eyes shifted to her and he eased out of the parking lot. “For what?”
“About Edgecombe. He was a good man.”
“The best.” He massaged the steering wheel for a moment, then tipped his chin toward the photo in her hand. “What’s so important about that photo that you’re willing to risk your neck to keep it?”
Amy turned her eyes to the picture and scanned the faces forever frozen in time. “I can look in the mirror any day and see my twin sister’s face looking back at me, but this is the only actual picture I have of her. And it’s the only one I have left of my husband and me together.”
His head jerked back. “There’s no mention of a husband in your file.”
“Then you haven’t seen my whole file. We were married six years ago, shortly before he deployed to Afghanistan.” Amy stared into Noah’s laughing hazel eyes. Their entire relationship had been the very definition of a whirlwind. They’d met in January, married in April and he deployed in July. On the first chilly autumn day in September, an army chaplain flanked by two other soldiers knocked on her door. From the first time they laid eyes on each other until the day he died, less than ten months had passed. “He was killed in a firefight in the Arghandab Valley.”
“I know the place well.”
Amy started to ask how, but experience with the buttoned-down deputy marshal told her he’d only change the subject without answering. While she’d seen him and spoken to him many times, little had changed between them in the months since she’d first met him. Back then, he’d ridden the edge of frustration and anger for the two days it had taken for him and his team to be certain she hadn’t compromised her new identity. Deputy Edgecombe had been the one to fill her in on exactly what it was Deputy Maldonado and his people did. An elite recovery team within WITSEC, they were sent after missing or endangered high-value targets in the most desperate situations. She’d gone missing on her own the first time, prompting the deployment of his team. She’d deserved his irritation and annoyance then. This time... She gasped, guilt burning in her stomach. “Deputy, is all of this happening because of me? Because you had to hunt me down the last time?”
“Call me Sam. We’re about to spend a lot of time together, and it will make things easier.” Before she could ask what he meant, Sam shook his head. “None of this is your fault. Despite how foolish your actions were a few months ago, no one tracked you then. To be honest, we’re not certain what’s happening now or how you were found. Our cyber expert was trolling the dark web and found a hit out on you placed only a few hours ago.”
“A hit?” It wasn’t possible. This was the stuff of action movies and TV shows. How had she landed here? Three years ago, she’d been a normal person working for a living after the loss of her husband, whose insurance money had gone to his mother. She’d wrapped up her degree in sports medicine and was interviewing for full-time jobs in her field. While working on her college job as a personal trainer and part-time receptionist at a day spa, she’d discovered an ugly truth straight out of her worst nightmares.
Her boss, Grant Meyer, had been using New Horizons Day Spa’s multiple locations in Texas to traffic human beings. Worse, his partner was a man she’d trusted enough to introduce to her twin sister. Logan Cutter had manipulated Eve until she’d pulled away from everyone in her life, including Amy. When Amy had notified the authorities about the evidence she’d found at the day spa, she never dreamed her life would end up jumping the tracks so completely. She’d been forced to leave everything behind and to become an entirely new person. Certainly, she’d never imagined she’d be the target of real-life hit men, something she’d foolishly thought only happened in the movies.
“Why now?” It had been more than three years since she’d stepped into her life as Amy Naylor. Three years in which, while she never stopped looking over her shoulder, she’d at least grown slightly more comfortable in her skin teaching underclassmen biology at the community college. It was the closest she could come to using her real degree without giving away who she used to be.
“The prosecution is close to securing a trial date. It’s possible Grant Meyer was able to make contact with the outside and have you targeted. It seems unlikely, since his organization fell apart after he was jailed and agents rounded up most of his men. Still, if he has any sort of reach, he’ll use it to get to you. You’re the biggest thing the prosecution has against him. Even though he knows the evidence you turned over is enough to take him down without you ever taking the stand, revenge would be a pretty sweet dish to him. Our big concern is how he was able to tell others where to look for you. And why he’d put out a blanket call for a hit on the dark web where authorities could be tipped off, instead of having someone he trusted come after you. At this moment, none of it makes sense.”
The more he talked, the more Amy tensed. Nothing he said made this better. Everything was only getting worse and the crushing weight of it threatened to suffocate her.
Sam glanced in her direction and seemed to notice his words were having the opposite effect of his intentions. “Amy, you’re safe with me. I promise. That’s why they sent me and why they put my team on the job. No one is going to hurt you as long as you’re doing as we—” He tipped his head away from her, to the left where his earpiece was. The lines around his mouth and above his eyes drew tighter and he gripped the steering wheel with both hands, gaze roaming from mirror to mirror.
Amy pressed deeper into the
