It wasn't something I did often. Likely because I pitched enough of a fit about it to make my old handler throw up his hands, find one of the all-too-willing other agents to handle it.

But experience was telling me lately that Allen would not be so accommodating. Like he was the kind of man who got off on pushing people around, especially when they tried to fight him.

I wasn't getting out of this one.

And my training told me that an impressionable girl with possible body image issues would be the easiest target of all.

Which just made me feel all the fucking scuzzier.

She was a goddamn child still.

Nineteen.

Legal.

Yet way too fucking young.

But it wasn't like I had much of a choice, I guess.

I flipped to the back of the folder, finding my new false flag - fake ID - clipped there.

Mikhail Osman.

Mikhailov was my actual last name. Some of the guys in the business called me Mikhail. I guess Allen still thought I was too green to get a completely unique cover ID.

Resentment was a real, burning thing. I'd proven myself time and again. There was no reason for him to assume I couldn't do my job.

It wasn't long before determination overcame my distaste for the job.

I was going to get the information needed.

By whatever means necessary.

Even if it meant I had to use Mackenzie Minasian to get it.TWOMackenzieYou know that first guy who comes into your life, grabs you by the heart, and whips you around by it for a while, leaving you disoriented when they finally let go, making you spiral to the ground with no way to brace yourself for the fall, for the scattering of all your pieces all around?

Yeah.

That was what Mikhail Osman had done to me.

I had to stifle a snort every time I thought that name, knowing it was as fake as he was, as the feelings he pretended to feel were.

Mikhail wasn't a complete lie, at least.

He was Roan Adil Mikhailov.

It took me years to learn his name.

Well after he reached into my chest, grabbed that traitorous, slippery thing I called a heart, and ripped it clear out of the confines of my ribcage, leaving a hollow place inside.

I had to shake my head from where I was standing in front of the wall-to-wall mirror in front of the faux black and white marble double-sink vanity in the hotel room I was staying in.

I didn't need to think of that day. The worst day of my life. Which I was still angry at myself for calling that, considering the hell I had been through since then. But nothing, it seemed, could compare. Maybe because there was no heart left for things to penetrate into.

Besides, that was all in the name of this.

The whole reason I was in some place called Navesink Bank on the coast of New Jersey.

Of all the places I had tracked him through, all the slums, the actual hells on Earth, or, on the contrary, all the beautiful cities, all the stunning, unforgettably stunning paradises, this was where he decided to put down roots.

New Jersey.

I had a much-needed laugh at that from my temporary lodging down in the mosquito paradise known as Miami, Florida.

New Jersey.

This big, bad, infamous, respected, feared, connected, then disgraced spy ended up in freaking New Jersey.

At a biker compound.

I'd learned a lot since my stunningly ignorant young adulthood. About things usually not spoken about. The intelligence community. Spies.

Not a bit of that information came the easy way, mind you. But I had a mission, and the single-minded focus of a scorned woman. I paid my dues. I took my beatings. I got my goddamn information.

See, I understood a term that never would have made sense to a much younger me.

Burned.

Spies got burned.

The severity of the definition attached to that had a lot to do with your capacity - a contract agent or a primary one who had ties to one of the seventeen agencies that made up the US intelligence community.

Contract agents got burn notices that went out, telling all other agencies that their information was unreliable, cut off ties with them.

But for primary agents - and make no mistake, Roan was a primary agent - got it worse.

They were unemployable in the intelligence community, of course, but their pensions were taken, assets frozen. In some severe cases, warrants would be issued.

It didn't matter if the information about the asset was truly grounded in reality or not. I guess the Big Guys in the intelligence game figured that, by trade, spies were expert liars, so even if they tried to question them, there was no telling if they would get the truth. So it was safer simply to burn them, cut ties, pretend no such person by their name had ever worked for their agency.

No one, save for maybe me, I guess, seemed to question if Roan had done what had led up to his burn notice.

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