Breaking True Excerpt

Chapter One

For almost five years, every word that came out of Kirby Delacroix’s mouth around me was a lie. Well, not just me. Everyone. It was a genius strategy for an undercover agent: Lie about everything, and do it so obviously that it’s just the thing you do. No one questions what’s a lie.

Not that he ever told me he was undercover. That might just be a lie I told myself—then and now, even ten years after he’d disappeared and despite the lack of anything resembling confirmation. The people we’d both worked for didn’t get raided or busted or even arraigned for mail fraud. They went on with their business as if nothing had happened. As if this guy hadn’t shown up, disrupted—but also stabilized—my life, and left behind a legacy stronger than Marley’s ghosts of all the Christmases.

I’d never held any animosity toward him. He hadn’t made any promises. Hell, there hadn’t been anything to make promises about. We’d never had more than friendship, as powerful as our connection had been. I’d never had any doubts about who he was, who he revealed himself to me to be, despite all the lies trying to obscure it. Nor any doubts about the truth of his completely unvoiced feelings.

Until now. When he stood in front of me and offered a polite stranger smile, with no hint of recognition in his pale-blue eyes. “I have an appointment,” he told me, as if he thought I was the receptionist. Since I was standing behind the reception desk in the gleaming onyx lobby of Maticular Enterprises, he could be forgiven. Even if the indifference made my heart squeeze in my chest as I questioned everything I remembered.

“Okay. Let me look. May I have your name and who the appointment is with?” I leaned over the computer to grab the mouse and switch from the spreadsheet the actual receptionist had been working on to the scheduling software. My squeezy heart jumped, sank, and bounced, as if unable to settle on shocked, dismayed, or excited. Because his appointment was with me.

Kirby Delacroix. Right there in the ten o’clock box next to my name, Greer McCutcheon. How had I not seen that before now? Well, shit. I straightened and gave him a polite smile, waiting for him to respond. I had to make sure this was legit, and I couldn’t let on that I knew his name. Not because it would blow whatever his cover had been or currently was, but because it would blow mine.

“I’m not sure who it’s with,” he said apologetically. “Delacroix is the name.”

I smiled politely. “Turns out you’re meeting with me.”

Angela, our receptionist, tap-tapped briskly around the curve of the walkaway into the lobby, carrying two coffee mugs. Hers was giant, navy blue, with “I’m sorry, bullshit is only accepted on the top floor” written in script. Mine was tall, capped with a travel lid, and covered with butterflies. Buried in the beautifully rendered art were repeated skulls, some breathing fire.

Kirby turned at the sound of her footsteps, and I watched his eyes widen as they landed on the mugs. It was a tiny tell, one very few other people would notice. But so was the mug, in a way. Those kinds of designs were popular now, but the sentiment was very true to the Greer Kirby had known ten years ago. If he hadn’t remembered me at first, the mug might have triggered it. But he could also be pretending to not remember.

I’d find out in a minute.

“Sorry,” Angela said, handing over my mug and smiling at Kirby. “How can I help you?” She set her mug down and sat at the computer, laying her burnished-copper fingers on the keyboard and waiting expectantly.

“Mr. Delacroix is my ten o’clock,” I told her as the door to the foyer opened and another client walked in.

“Follow me,” I told Kirby. Instead of obeying, he fell into step beside me as we walked down the plushly carpeted hallway to the left of the lobby.

“Oh.” I stopped and looked down at my mug. “I should have offered you coffee.”

“Thanks. This is fine.” And he smoothly lifted my weird-but-definitely-feminine mug from my hand. “We always took it the same way.”

I gaped at him, but it wasn’t because of the coffee. Damned if his voice hadn’t gotten deeper. Maybe it was the suit—navy, rack but high quality, breaking at the perfect length across his burgundy dress shoes, contrasting nicely with the crisp white shirt under the jacket—but his shoulders seemed broader, his chest slightly fuller, too. No, that wasn’t right. More refined? As if he’d stopped bulking up in the gym and did real work instead.

Stop it. That’s not analysis. It’s distraction.

“Uh.” So articulate. I closed my mouth and kept walking toward my office. “So you do remember me.”

His blue eyes hit me hard, chiding me. “Of course I remember you. I can’t believe you bought into my act back there.”

“It was a pretty convincing act,” I told him, even though part of me wanted to hold back any possible compliments. After all, he’d left me with no word. Left me in a dangerous, stupid place. Because back then, I hadn’t been the person I was now. I had never lied to Kirby a single time in five years.

Ironic that I was starting now, just by my very existence in this place.

We walked into my office, and he waited while I stepped around my desk to my chair. I paused, watching him take in—well, probably everything. My degrees on one wall, some photography a friend of mine had done on the other. He lingered when he reached those, and understandably so. It was amazing, what my friend called urbal art. Nature in urban settings. My furniture was mid-grade fake cherry with comfortable chairs in front of the desk and a tiny sofa under the art.

“Okay, Kirby.” I gestured and waited until he sat. Then a couple of seconds longer before I also eased into my chair and crossed my legs, draping one arm over my lap as I leaned on the armrest. “Tell me why you’re here. Because I’m fairly certain it’s not to talk about the Brisson Package.”

His mouth curved the tiniest bit, one side slightly higher than the other, and my heart skipped. That had been his Greer Smile. I never saw him use it on anyone else, though to be fair, he didn’t smile very often at all back then. Not real smiles. There had been plenty of illusionary ones, like magicians who did the “look over here” thing while producing doves out of the backs of their jackets.

He took a drink from my mug, nodded, and leaned to set it in front of me. “Is that what they used when they scheduled this meeting? I have no idea what the Brisson Package is.”

I waved that off. There was no point in explaining it. Those services were all bullshit. Profitable bullshit, but it couldn’t be what he was here for. “Who do you work for?”

He studied me for a minute, and while I waited for him to decide how to handle this, I thought about all the ways he was different from ten years ago. His dark-blond hair was still on the long side, neatly styled but giving the impression it preferred to be shaggy, like it was before. The lines around his eyes and mouth marked the time passage, but he otherwise looked the same physically. Strong, lean, like he could handle himself and knew it. Quiet confidence that had always lurked below the brashness of his character.

But he also seemed…heavier, maybe. Like he carried more of the weight of his job, unable to shed it as easily. Then again, maybe I was projecting.

How did I look to him? Had he known who I was from the moment he saw me, like I did him? Or did it hit him after we’d spoken, or as we walked to my office? I looked more different than he did. I’d grown my hair out from short, spiky, and raven-black to below my shoulder blades, thick and wavy, a richer brown than my original natural color had been. My brown eyes were framed with normal makeup rather than the stark eyeliner I’d been prone to back then, and I wore a fitted, light-blue suit, four words that would never have described anything from my old wardrobe. Baggy, tattered, and dark had been the norm, and those clothes had mostly hidden my too-skinny frame. I was the same height, of course, five-eight to his six-three, but it had been more than healthy eating and strength training that had given me my current curves. Self-confidence, determination, and an entirely different world view built this body.

Still. I’d always felt that Kirby had known me, beneath the layers of armor and through the guileless acceptance of everything around me. So it was killing me not to ask the question out loud.

I waited. He didn’t answer, or even speak at all. Apparently, I was going to die a slow death, because with every minute that passed, my ability to not ask any questions until he told me who he worked for was severely strained.

And then he said, “Nope. I can’t.” Got up. Turned around. And left my office. Closing the door behind him, and leaving me even more flummoxed than he had the first time he walked out on me.