Roots of Deception

Abena Mensah has spent her whole life becoming whoever the moment requires.

Recruited as a teenager into a covert operation built on manufactured trust, she learned to read people the way others read weather, always in control, always one careful step removed from herself. By the time she is grown, she has perfected the art of the long con: study the mark, learn what they want to hear, take what the operation needs, and disappear before they understand what happened to them.

Her latest assignment seems routine. A wealthy American, a careful script, a clean exit.

Except he isn't who he seems to be. And the longer she stays inside the deception, the less certain she becomes of where the performance ends and she begins.

On opposite sides of the Atlantic, two investigators are pulling on threads that lead toward the same operation, unaware of each other, unaware of how close they already are.

Neither is looking for Abena specifically.

Both are about to find her anyway.

As the people who built her, the people hunting her, and the man she was sent to deceive all converge on the same narrowing point, Abena faces the one choice she has never been permitted to make on her own terms: whether to keep surviving as whoever the situation requires, or risk everything on the possibility that she can choose who she actually is.

Some lies cost nothing. This one will cost her everything.