Page 42 of Once Upon a Lie

Probably just my imagination and old PTSD.

I shake it off and turn back toward the door.

Because this life has taught me that paranoia is the most expensive. It costs you sanity and robs you of hard-earned time.

I’ve worked too hard over the years to let shadows steal moments like this.

There’s no one watching me but my own talking head.

I mean, really. My life is the definition of unremarkable.

What in the hell would there even be to watch?

13

Shane

Friday, October 15

2:45 p.m.

I’ve been sitting on my couch for so long that the pattern on my jeans has imprinted into the leather as I stare at the cursor inside an encrypted message from Mike.

Info on Alfred?

Good news: I have the information.

Bad news: There’s no good way to make myself sound like anything other than an idiot when I deliver it.

Put simply, the odds of Alfred Sutter being tied to the Cordone crime empire are about as good as me being invited back as an undercover liaison by the Feds when this assignment is over. At eighty-four, he spends his days floating in the pool of an old house he refuses to sell with a tiny dog, missing his wife who’s been dead for a decade, and keeping a relatively reclusive Valentina Cordone company on evenings and weekends.

Valentina joins Alfred and Pip at the park nearly every afternoon after she closes down her bagel shop, and they toss Pip a blue ball. They try other ball colors, but Pip rejects them like a food critic rejects a well-done steak.

Pip also must have allergies and occasionally sneezes himself off balance, but it appears he’s on allergy medication because of the subscription deliveries Alfred gets monthly from a company called Chewy.

Also, Valentina is currently switching up her bagel menu to give fall vibes. It’s PSL season, and her pumpkin spice bagel is proof.

Conclusion: Valentina likes bagels, kind old men, and sunshine.

Real cutting-edge counterterrorism work, Maddox.

Sighing heavily, I settle on the least offensive option.

Dead end. I’ll keep digging.

I’m not bad at my job. I’ve been doing this for over a decade—undercover work, gang cases, stakeouts. But right now, I feel like a baby recruit who doesn’t know how to load his fucking gun.

Watching her from a distance has proved to be nothing but a waste of time. I need to be on the inside, not surveilling her making bagels through a window. Charm without opportunity is just noise, and Shane Maddox doesn’t usually have to be loud.

Silver lining is that I’m not invisible to her.

I’ve spoken to her twice. She knows my name and smiles when she sees me—even seems relatively open to my charisma—but she’s way too busy to entertain men outside elderly ones.

I stopped by The Hole Story again, and she slid my Asiago across the counter with a wink and a smile that said I see you and I do not have time for you in the same gesture. I knocked on her door one evening, ready to suggest dinner like a normal human man, but she had just left.

The paranoid part of my brain—the part that keeps me alive and sounds a lot like Mike these days—whispers that the constant motion might be the cover. Maybe the bagels and the park and the sweet smiles are a distraction from a much bigger operation.

But my gut disagrees.