Free Breathless by Emily Snow, Heidi McLaughlin, Aleatha Romig, Tijan, Jessica Wood, Ilsa Madden-Mills, Skyla Madi, J.S. Cooper, Crystal Spears, K.A. Robinson, Kahlen Aymes, Sarah Dosher Page A

“You can do this.”
    “I can . It’ll be simple,” I repeated while I examined my appearance one final time. I looked nothing like the little girl Margaret had last seen at my father’s funeral, and not all that much like the young woman her lawyer turned away seven years ago, but I was still terrified she would know. That she’d immediately spot the word IMPOSTOR branded all over me—from the straight blond hair that I’d worked into a sleek ponytail, to my heart-shaped face with its small nose and full cheeks, and finally my eyes. Brown with amber flecks—eyes that looked ... terrified.
    For a damn good reason.
    If this ended badly, if I was found out, so much ugly would be unleashed I couldn’t even stand to think about it without strings weaving tightly through my ribcage and suffocating me.
    I could go to prison for this.
    Smoothing back a nonexistent stray wisp of platinum hair, I spun away from the mirror. I faced Pen with my hands fisted by my side. She glanced up from the DVR’d episode of Sleepy Hollow and smiled encouragingly. “You have this. Get in there—”
    “And take that bitch down,” I finished breathlessly, and she pumped her fist.
    “That’s my girl. I’ll stick around for the day, just in case you need me. As long as you don’t mind, that is?”
    Picking up my purse and keys, I shook my head. “Make yourself at home.”
    “Did you think I wouldn’t?” She returned her attention to the TV, but before I left the apartment, she cleared her throat tentatively. Lowering my hand from the doorknob, I looked back at her.
    “You’re not Gemma there. Don’t forget that,” she gently reminded. “You’re Lizzie.”
    It was something I couldn’t forget. I’d crammed that reminder into my brain ever since she and I came up with this crazy, messy plan. My name was Lizzie Connelly, not Gemma Emerson. Gemma Emerson didn’t exist—at least, not where Lizzie was concerned.
    Clearing the lump of hysteria from the back of my throat, I bobbed my head briskly, and Pen’s shoulders relaxed. “I remembered to be Lizzie a couple weeks ago when I met with HR, so you don’t need to worry. Besides, this’ll be simple .”
    As I drove from the seaside Marina del Rey apartment in my leased Mini Cooper, I continued to tell myself that.
    ***
    Up until a week and a half ago, I hadn’t stepped foot in Los Angeles since I was sixteen—when I hopped a Greyhound bus from Vegas with the intent of meeting with my stepmother. My parents had divorced when I was seven, and the moment everything was finalized my tall, dark-eyed mother had promptly departed the city with me in tow. She was a model, which was how she met my father, and at first, we moved wherever her work took her—New York, Miami, Chicago, but never back to Los Angeles. By the time I was thirteen, I’d lived in more places than most people visited in their lifetime, but I welcomed it.
    Mom and I had been a team, and it hadn’t mattered where we lived.
    Sin City was our final move. It had come a couple months before my fifteenth birthday, but we would have ended up in a new city if my mom hadn’t died a year later. It was one of those wrong place at the wrong time tragedies I always read about but didn’t think would happen to us—she’d forgotten her credit cards at home and when she went into the convenience store to pay for gas, she walked into a robbery that had already turned deadly.
    She was killed. And so was that team of ours that was my world.
    With my mother’s entire family in Ukraine, and relatively unknown to me, I’d stuck around the apartment we’d shared in North Vegas and prayed the state wouldn’t catch wind of me living alone. The idea of being tossed into the foster care system for two years scared the shit out of me, but I successfully avoided it. Since my mother’s death, the only time I had left Sin City, I’d returned almost immediately—nearly too broke to put food in my refrigerator and still reeling