2. The Calm Before the Re

Sydney Cossette was the kind of girl nobody noticed.

She could enter a room without a single glance turning her way. A stranger would strike up a conversation with her only until they spotted someone more interesting. She supposed that she was pretty, with dark blue eyes and blond hair chopped in messy waves to her chin—but unremarkably so. She could meet the same person over and over and they would never remember her name. She could drift from place to place without anyone realizing she was there, flitting along the periphery as a tolerable presence but never the center of attention.

Niall, her mentor, told her that it was her natural talent. When people don't notice you, they tend to entrust to you their secrets, sharing weaknesses and vices, failing to recall that they'd ever given them away. Sydney saved those crumbs in her vast memory, as Panacea had trained her to do, archiving them until they became useful. When she needed them again, she'd lay them all out in a neat row. Confessions. Fears. Sins.

Or, in this case, confirmation of the location of Winter Young's rehearsal studio.

Sydney leaned against the driver's window of the parked white van, adjusted her earpiece, and pretended to be bored as a pair of security guards outside Winter's hotel argued within earshot.

"We can't keep his car idling around the back."

"Claire said it had to be here for him first thing in the morning."

"But Queen Street will be blocked off until four A.M."

"That's fine. He always practices early."

Queen Street. That meant the Waikiki Dance Studio, the only spot with the right facilities in the area. Sydney smiled a little as the two men argued, keeping them at the edge of her vision. Half an hour earlier, one of them had rapped on her window, asking her how long her equipment van was going to be parked here. She'd just given him an innocent shake of her head.

Claire told me five minutes, she'd said, holding up one hand with all her fingers outstretched. The man had shrugged and walked off, thinking Sydney was part of Winter's team, and then promptly forgotten all about her.

"Jackal?"

"Ouais chef?" she replied distractedly to Niall's gruff voice in her ear. This was her habit when talking to her mentor, greeting him in one of the twenty-seven languages she knew.

He grunted, as he always did, and she smiled.

"Syd, this isn't a game," he said.

"Fine, stopping."

"You're waiting in the van until dawn?"

"Unless you want me to knock on Winter's door. I could grab a bellhop uniform," she offered.

"No. Fine. Whatever works best," Niall said. "Just letting you know we only have that van rented out until ten in the morning."

"Ten's all I'll need."

"You sound so sure he'll agree."

"Because I am sure." Sydney glanced up at the hotel. "After that nightmare of an interview, Winter's mood will be much better when he wakes up tomorrow. And I'd prefer him at his happiest if I'm going to be asking him to risk his life. Again."

"Just try to keep the insults to a minimum."

"Me?" Sydney feigned shock. "But I'm always nice."

Niall laughed, warm and genuine, and Sydney smiled again. "Just be careful. That area's crawling with security. Don't get yourself a black eye from one of his guards."

Sydney raised an eyebrow. "Are you telling me, the agent you once sent to infiltrate a Swiss bank, that you're worried I can't handle a superstar's security detail?"

"I don't know, you can tell me later which is worse. Our intel says Winter's detail has gotten much more serious since last year."

"Have you forgotten that you promoted me to full operative? I'll be okay, Dad."

He sighed. "I've told you to stop calling me that."

"But it's our last mission together, Dad. When will I ever get to call you Dad again?"

Niall snorted, but didn't argue the point, and a pained silence cut through their conversation. Sydney felt her chest seize, even though her lungs felt fine.

"What are you going to do," she asked, keeping her voice light, "once you're officially retired from Panacea?"

"Take a vacation, maybe. Go to Bora-Bora. I hear the water's very nice."

"Is Quinn excited to see you?"

Another pause, followed by Niall clearing his throat. He never seemed comfortable talking about Quinn, but Sydney was always fascinated by Niall's biological daughter. His real daughter. "I haven't told her anything yet," he said at last.

"Are you nervous?"

"I'll be fine."

But behind Niall's deep growl, Sydney could hear a hint of fear. She recognized it from their own conversations—she heard it each time she had a brush with death on a mission or pushed her lungs too hard or missed a rendezvous. Sydney recalled the day he'd shown up at her high school in her decrepit, dying town, a secret agent disguised as a recruiter from a local factory. He had been touring the West, looking for promising agents to join Panacea's training program, and she had been a fifteen-year-old girl who spent her days cutting class, who shoplifted as a coping mechanism, a girl still grieving her mother's death from the same illness she had. A girl searching for a way out. Niall had caught her breaking into the school's locked gym, had noticed her penchant for acquiring languages, and offered her a job. She wouldn't find out until weeks later what Panacea was—or who she was about to become.

Niall never talked about Quinn, but his silence said more than anything. Sydney knew it must have been hard to have a relationship with a daughter who never saw you, whose childhood you missed but could never explain why.

"She'll talk to you," Sydney said gently.

Niall didn't answer right away. "Here's hoping, right?" he finally replied, and Sydney felt a pang of envy.

It was stupid, of course, to be jealous of Quinn. She'd never met the woman, and Niall wasn't Sydney's father. Hers was an alcoholic who hit her whenever he had a bad day at work, would taunt her for wanting to see the world beyond their small, suffocating town. Her father had let her mother die alone at the hospital because he was too much of a coward to be at her bedside.

Her father was not a good man, and Sydney had turned her back on him long ago.

She shoved the memories aside and stared up at the hotel. She knew the truth behind her pain—she was grieving Niall's retirement as if he were giving her up along with Panacea. After this mission, he would be gone, off to make amends with his estranged daughter, the one that really mattered. Per the agency's strict rules, he would never make contact with Sydney again. She would be truly alone.

She still had Sauda, Panacea's director and her advisor of sorts, but Niall was the one who worked directly with Sydney on each and every one of her missions, had trained her from the start, had vouched for her when her thieving habits returned, when Sauda wanted her kicked out of Panacea for good.

Served her right, Sydney supposed, for letting herself get attached to someone. Hadn't that been one of her first lessons at Panacea?

Loyalty to a secret, above all else.

Above emotions, above human bonds, above love. Loyalty to duty, to making the world a safer place.

"Just get the van back before ten." Niall was still talking, and Sydney's mind snapped back to the present, to the task at hand. A humid drizzle had begun dotting the van's windows.

"I'll have it back to you with a bow on top," she replied.

"Leave off the bow, please."

"You're no fun at all," she said, and he hung up.

Sydney put her phone away and slumped in her seat. At least Winter was a welcome distraction.

How long had it been since she'd seen him, anyway? A year?

Before she met him, Sydney—like the rest of the world—had her own assumptions about the superstar. Too aware of his good looks, too aware of his charisma, too aware of what he could do.

But then she'd learned that the truth was much worse. He was too aware of her. Sydney Cossette was good at being the girl no one noticed—better yet, she enjoyed it. But Winter had seen her immediately, in a way that made her feel exposed, in a way that unsettled and excited her.

She and Winter had had their fair share of arguments during their first mission together, and had gotten a bit… carried away with each other during a rather heated tryst in an indoor swimming pool. It all came flooding back, her cheeks starting to warm at the memories.

Maybe their reunion would be a painfully awkward one. But she still found herself looking forward to seeing him. She might walk through this world alone, but when she was with Winter, she had someone to walk with. And on this night, when she was feeling particularly vulnerable, the thought was comforting.

Unless… he didn't want to see her again. Maybe he remembered their time together differently—maybe he didn't remember it at all.

"Only one way to find out," she murmured to herself, her eyes gazing up at the window to his room. The rain was picking up. With a sigh, she settled deeper into the van's seat, trying to get comfortable for a few hours of sleep. Changing someone's life at four in the morning was going to require getting some rest.