“Evelyn will kill me if she finds out.”

“Evelyn has nothing left. She is a disgraced agent with no badge and a mute child.”

The recording clicked as they moved further from the microphone.

I took off the headset and threw it onto the metal desk.

The plastic cracked against the steel.

The deed to my family home had been transferred.

The house that had belonged to my grandparents, the house where I had planned to raise Lily, was no longer mine.

Grant had signed it away.

I stared at the name Sarah Jenkins on the screen.

I opened the agency’s classified alias database.

I ran a cross-reference search for the name Sarah Jenkins and the region of Eastern Europe.

My undercover assignment in Budapest five years ago had involved a network of human traffickers and money launderers.

The leader of that network had used several female couriers to move cash across borders.

The database returned a hit.

A black-and-white surveillance photo appeared on the left monitor.

The woman in the photo was younger, her hair dyed dark brown instead of the platinum blonde Vanessa now wore.