Chapter 1

R uth stepped into the door of my office, so much stress drawn over every inch of her body language that it looked like she would snap if something happened, and it was precisely my luck that a pigeon chose that moment to slam into the window behind me. Ruth jumped about a foot into the air, banging her head on the corner of the door, and she nursed the spot muttering a string of profanities.

"For fuck's sake," I sighed, standing up. "Are you all right? I felt that from here."

"No, I'm not all right. Christ. I should have hit it harder and just taken myself out for good, that's what I should have done." She sank onto the couch opposite my desk—I'd put a couch in my office instead of a chair just because a couch was less likely to go wrong for any poor soul sitting in my office. I watched her for a second longer, making sure she wasn't bleeding or about to pass out, before I settled back into my chair.

"All right, Ruth," I said, sinking back in the chair, tenting my hands on the desk. "Well, if you're not dying, talk to me. Why are you so desperate to take yourself out on a door?"

She let out a short, exasperated puff of air. Ruth was a slim, tall Black woman with a short Afro hairstyle, dark skin and a penchant for gold eyeshadow, but right now the only thing wreathing her eyes were deep lines of exhaustion. The poor woman had probably been about to keel over even before she'd brained herself on my door.

Speaking of—the pigeon had left a mark. I'd have to be out of the office when the window-cleaners came around, though. They'd probably fall.

"I'm this close to losing Garcia," she said. "I need help. Trust me, I'd rather bash my head on every damn door in this place than admit that, but—I need help. You're better at this than I am. He doesn't like me. How could he? He never gives me a chance to say a goddamn word, so I can't say anything to win him over."

"Ah… Mister Garcia." I turned to my computer, pulling open the files. Adam Garcia, current head of Exo Solutions, a consulting and logistics management firm for tech companies in the Miami bay area. Looking to purchase a new office building. Ruth Sanders had been the unfortunate soul put in charge of selling him on the fifteen-million-dollar development we could procure for him. A second-generation Cuban-American man who'd grown up between Miami and Havana, with an easygoing countenance but a ruthless, rock-solid bargaining sense. Ruth's assessment of the man lined up with the intel.

"If we don't close this by the end of the week, you and I are dead in the water, London," Ruth said, a hand to her forehead. "This works, it keeps us alive for another fifteen minutes while María deals with the fraud case. If it doesn't?"

María Gonzalez was a big girl. She'd live if we didn't close Mr. Garcia. But we did need all the help we could get right now.

I needed to stop sinking companies. Queen Pearl had been good to me. María too—like the mother I never had, taking me on even though she knew I was cursed. I didn't want this damn fraud case driving us to bankruptcy. It was the least I could do for Mother Goose—even if I still didn't get why we called María that sometimes.

"You do know I have my own job," I said, my voice light. Ruth rubbed the back of her head again.

"You won't if we don't do this. You rather I ask Miguel instead?"

Miguel could take a long walk off a short pier, but that voice was staying inside my head. I gestured her to the door.

"Right then. Point taken. I can spare some time to help out with Mr. Garcia. In the meantime, why don't you put some ice on that?"

"You think you could have put a harder door on your office?"

"They're all the same doors, Ruth. Watch out for pigeons on the way out."

∞∞∞

"Going home already, are we?"

María caught me on my way out of the office, walking in with a cup of coffee in hand from the Cuban café in the building lobby. She put a hand on her hip, giving me a wry smile as I passed reception, heading for the elevators.

"Must be nice, clocking out early," she said.

"I'm doing some field work. Ruth asked me for help with Adam Garcia."

"Perfect. I was going to ask you to help her with it. I know you have a lot on your plate already, but… we need your magic touch."

María Gonzalez was—although I would rather be put on a firing range than say it to her face—possibly the most attractive fifty-year-old woman alive, with a fit figure and a sharp eye for fashion in her white blazer and gold jewelry, lively brown eyes, and dark brown skin with the most flawless complexion, those kinds of perfectly placed wrinkles on her forehead and corners of her eyes that added a touch of class. A Colombian woman who'd moved to Miami eighteen years ago now, she'd worked as a barista for six months before launching a real estate company, really the epitome of a career glow-up. I wasn't sure how it had worked out so well for her. She'd attributed it to a killer glare that made people want to do as she'd said. Here I'd thought maybe it was charm and charisma.

"Relax. I'll close the guy and be back for lunch."

"Back for lunch? How late do you take your lunches?"

I folded my arms. "Don't think I didn't notice you sneaking that pizza yesterday. We don't have the luxury of proper mealtimes these days, do we?"

She pursed her lips through a thin smile. "Too true. So, your wizardry find anything on Garcia?"

"Maybe. I'll have to see. Hasta luego, María."

"Your accent still needs work."

"Yeah, I know…"

The elevators whisked me to the lobby and out the glass doors that led to the muggy heat of Miami in August. I put on my sunglasses against the blinding sunlight and stopped at a food truck for a fish taco, and I winced when a dash of spilled oil flared up in the truck and almost seared some poor guy's eyebrows off. They scrambled covering the flame and snuffing it out, and I pretended I didn't see the commotion.

I didn't know what gods of ill fortune I'd pissed off and how. All I knew was that I'd been like this all my life, but the bad luck never seemed to apply to me—just everyone around me.

It had already caused an abrupt end at the last three companies I'd been at. EWO Operations had been my first real job after college, and I'd had a great year there until they got sued into oblivion, completely out of nowhere. Castleton Office Suites had hired me right out of the flaming wreck, and I'd been ready to dismiss the weird ending as a one-off until a catastrophic systems failure made the company go insolvent in an hour, its shares going in a fire sale and our clients tripping over themselves to back out of their agreements, creditors suddenly snapping for their share of what was left. A couple employees left for lunch with everything fine and found no company there when they got back, their access cards pinging off the scanners all of a sudden.

But I'd done exceptional work there, so it was easy for me to move on to my next job, a real estate officer at the regional firm Pillar. I'd enjoyed it for a year and a half, confident that the company's fundamentals were good, we ran our business cleanly, and we had good relations with everyone we worked with. Thought we were safe.

Then the founder shot his wife, got in a car chase, and landed in jail. Turned out that was bad for a company's image.

Having the three of them lined up on my resume—well, it didn't look good. And I'd had a hard time for a second finding a job. María had scoffed at the superstition of it all, looked at the past deals I'd made, and she'd offered me a job on the spot. Queen Pearl had been good to me—a cushy job that valued me for what I really knew how to do, and María had always been good to me personally and professionally.

And then, just two weeks ago, our bright shining star in accounting, Philip Dauer, turned out to have a neat trick behind his great work: fraud. María had managed to keep the whole thing under wraps as much as possible as we got slapped with mountains and mountains of fines for accounting fraud, investigation after investigation, and by now, we were on the brink. Only a handful of people knew—Queen Pearl was a strong name, and most of the Miami luxury real estate business respected us as a small but elite group. It would have been just my luck if we'd disappeared overnight, but María had kept it together.

She'd stuck her neck out for me, a little bit. I didn't really believe in superstition and curses, but I couldn't deny the feeling that she'd taken a big risk bringing me on. And I didn't want to bring her down after how good she'd always been to me.

"There you are," Ruth said once I'd gotten to the meeting spot outside the front doors of the tall, glassy office building. She folded her arms, giving me an appraising look. "So, counting on you. Find anything?"

"Yup." I hoisted my bag up my shoulder. "How are you feeling? Tired?"

"Tired?" She raised her eyebrows. "When haven't any of us been tired lately?"

"Fancy a nap?"

She snorted. "That's your brilliant plan?"

"Pretty much." I gestured her away from the building. "C'mon. We'll go hang around Mr. Garcia's office later. For now, I booked us an experience."

"An experience? What, a nap experience?"

"Literally." I pulled up the booking on my phone, handing it over to her. "Mr. Garcia, turns out, is a big proponent of consciousness exploration and an advocate of lucid dreaming techniques."

She took the phone, scrunching up her nose. "We're going to ask him about naps? "

I suppressed a smile. "From what I can tell? He seems quite passionate. Should be a good in, as long as I can look like I'm as excited about naps as he is."

She chewed her lip. "Where did you even find out about—"

"Standard procedure." I waved her off, turning away. "I called his coworker, chatted a little, got her to like me, asked her if it's true Mr. Garcia has some esoteric interests —I'd never heard that before, but it's always a safe bet with these guys—and she offered it up. Said he was on a meditation retreat just last weekend. I looked up the retreat and did some digging, jotted down some questions to ask him about it."

She shook her head, catching up alongside me. "You're something different for everyone, aren't you? Last I looked you were getting into jazz music, and now you're a spiritualist hipster."

"Ah, y'know. Bait the hook to suit the fish."

She shrugged. "Hey, I get to take a nap and get away with it, sign me up. Let's go, then."