Sins of the Masquerade

Chapter 4: The Ghost Knows My Name

Three hours.

Julian had been gone for three hours, and I'd spent every second pacing his bedroom in bare feet, wearing his shirt, trying to remember how to breathe.

The necklace — the Lacroix, seventy-five years of emeralds and diamonds — still lay on the floor where I'd dropped it. I'd stepped over it twice. Stepped *on* it once. The gems didn't matter anymore. Neither did the money. Neither did the faceless collector who'd hired me.

What mattered was the name Julian had said before he walked out the door.

*She calls herself your sister.*

I didn't have a sister. I had a hole in my memory shaped like a girl with braids and a gap-toothed smile. A girl who'd disappeared from a foster home when I was twelve and she was nine. A girl the system had labeled "runaway" and never looked for again.

Her name was Lena.

And Lena had been dead for fifteen years. Or so I'd told myself every night before I fell asleep.

The penthouse phone rang.

I stared at it. It rang again. Then stopped.

A moment later, the text came through on the encrypted burner Julian had left on the nightstand. One line.

*Look under the bed.*

I dropped to my knees. Lifted the dust ruffle. Found a lockbox — steel, fingerprint-activated, already warm to the touch. The screen glowed green.

*One print remaining.*

I pressed my thumb to the glass.

The lockbox opened with a soft hiss. Inside: a stack of photographs, a USB drive, and a single sheet of paper folded into a square.

The photographs were of me.

Not recent. Old. Grainy. A fifteen-year-old girl in a ratty hoodie, sitting on a curb outside a group home. The same girl, two years older, stealing a watch from a department store display. The same girl, now a woman, climbing out of a window in Prague.

Every crime I'd ever committed. Every city I'd ever hidden in. Every name I'd ever used.

He'd known. Julian had known all of it — before the gala, before his hands on my hips, before he'd whispered *come for me* like a prayer.

I unfolded the paper.

It wasn't a letter. It was a photograph. New. Glossy. Taken in what looked like an empty warehouse.

And in the center of the frame, tied to a chair, was a woman.

She had my eyes. My jaw. My stubborn, crooked eyebrow.

Lena. Alive. Thirty years old, give or take. Bruised. Exhausted. But alive.

The burn phone buzzed again.

*She's been looking for you for three years because she needs your help. The people who took her the first time found her again. I'm going to get her back. But I can't do it alone.*

*You have ten minutes to decide if you're in.*

*After that, I'm leaving without you.*

---

I didn't need ten minutes.

I needed clothes that weren't a borrowed shirt, shoes that weren't bare feet, and a weapon that wasn't my shaking hands.

The penthouse had all three. Julian's closet was a museum of expensive tailoring — suits in charcoal and navy, leather jackets that smelled like him, a drawer full of things I tried not to think about. I found black jeans that fit with a belt, a cashmere sweater that swallowed my hands, boots that added two inches to my height.

And in the back of the closet, behind a false panel, a gun safe.

The code was my birthday.

Inside: a nine-millimeter pistol, three magazines, and a note in Julian's handwriting.

*You're a better shot than you think. Don't waste bullets on warning shots.*

I loaded the gun. Chambered a round. Slid the safety on and tucked it into the waistband of the jeans.

Then I picked up the Lacroix necklace from the floor, carried it to the window, and watched the sunrise burn through the clouds.

I should have felt afraid. Instead, I felt awake. For the first time in fifteen years — since the night Lena vanished and I learned that nobody saves children like us — I wasn't running.

I was running *toward*.

---

Julian's car was a black SUV with tinted windows and an engine that growled like an animal. He was in the driver's seat, phone pressed to his ear, jaw tight. When I opened the passenger door and climbed in, he didn't smile.

But his shoulders dropped half an inch. Relief. Carefully hidden.

"Took you nine minutes," he said.

"I had to find matching socks."

He looked at my boots. "You're not wearing socks."

"Decoys."

Something flickered across his face — almost a laugh, almost a kiss, almost something neither of us had words for. He ended the call, dropped the phone into the cup holder, and pulled out of the underground garage.

The city blurred past. High-rises gave way to warehouses, then to empty lots, then to the kind of roads where streetlights forgot to exist.

"Tell me about Lena," I said.

Julian's hands tightened on the wheel. "She was taken from the same foster home you were. Different family. Same traffickers. She escaped three years ago — crawled through a window, walked twenty miles in the rain, showed up at a police station with no ID and a broken arm."

"She went to the police?"

"They didn't believe her. No records. No file. You'd vanished years before. She had no proof either of you had ever existed." He glanced at me. "So she found another way. Started asking questions. Following money. Following *me*."

"And you found her instead."

"I found the people holding her." His voice went flat. Cold. The voice of a man who'd done terrible things and planned to do more. "They've had her for six weeks. She's alive. That's all I know."

I reached across the console. My hand found his. His fingers interlaced with mine — automatic, desperate, like he'd been waiting for permission.

"When we get there," he said quietly, "I need you to do exactly what I say."

"I'm not good at that."

"I know." He lifted our joined hands and pressed his lips to my knuckles. "But Lena is. She learned how to survive by following orders. You learned by breaking them. Between the two of you, we might actually pull this off."

The car crested a hill. Below us, a warehouse sat in a pool of yellow security light. Chain-link fence. Guard shack. Cameras on every corner.

Julian killed the engine. Cut the lights.

In the sudden dark, I could hear him breathing. Slow. Deliberate. The same rhythm he'd used the night before, when his hands were on my hips and my back was arching into his chest.

"One more thing," he said.

"What?"

He turned to face me. Moonlight cut across his cheekbones, his scar, his mouth.

"If we survive this," he said, "I'm taking you to bed properly. No more dry humping like teenagers. And I'm not going to ask permission."

My pulse hammered. My thighs pressed together.

"Then don't," I whispered.

He kissed me. Hard. Fast. A promise sealed in teeth and tongue and the taste of morning coffee. When he pulled back, his eyes were molten.

"Let's go get your sister," he said.

We got out of the car.

And I didn't look back.