Delgano: A Dark Contemporary Interracial Romance

She swallowed. “No.”

“Do you know the name Wolfe?”

“As in the animal?”

“Ty Wolfe, Zach Wolfe, Steven Wolfe, Anne Wolfe.”

“No, I don’t know those names.”

“Aron Price?”

Inside, she twitched, but she tamped down the reaction and prayed he didn’t notice. She didn’t know who Aron was, but Price was the last name on her official birth certificate. Until someone sent her the certificate, a man who went by the name “Atlas,” she’d assumed that the unsigned one her aunt kept on file had been the real deal.

“Should I know who these people are?” she asked. “Are they celebrities or something?”

The man smiled. “No, not celebrities.”

“Then who are they?”

“No one.” He tapped his chest. “I’m Novi. You can call me Novi.”

She didn’t want to call him anything.

His accent was hard to place—faking accents, she was good at, but pinpointing them, not so much. He sounded as if he could be Russian. Slovenia, Belarus, and Serbia were also possibilities to her untrained ears. Maybe, like her, he wasn’t from a Slavic country but blended his English with the accent to convince people he was.

As little as five years ago, she’d known zilch about clandestine operations and ghost organizations. In her obtuse little mind, her mother’s military career and her father’s “abuse” were what had led her to be raised by her aunt. Now, not only did she know too much about what her mother did, but she’d also become part of it.

Her.

A girl whose boyfriends had once all lived in fictional novels, whose best friend used to be a stray cat, and who was, technically, a bastard.

The only thing she knew of her father was that she had his eyes and complexion, and that information had come from her aunt. Atlas, on the other hand, had revealed that her father used to be part of the “ghost organization,” which was probably how he and her mother met. The single time she’d confronted her mother, begging for the truth, the only thing her mother had admitted to was lying about her father’s abuse.

No name.

No location.

Not even a picture.

Her cousin was a former Marine, and her mother was the leader of a secret government entity. Yet, she was a cook, and only a year ago, she had been a student.

Danger didn’t run through her veins. Still, here she was, breathing danger’s air. She should have known her future would have turned out off-kilter when her aunt made her learn Arabic, as a child, at her mother’s insistence.

“Who is the man with the dark hair?” Novi asked. “The American.”

“He’s from Brazil, actually,” she clarified, as if correcting his ethnicity mattered in this particular instance.

“Who is he?”

“My boss.”

“And that’s it?”

“Do you know something that I don’t?”

The smile, which had yet to leave his face, grew wider. “Come with me.”

“Where?”