"You know, you're the first person on this team I can actually trust with the ball."
Ethan's words echoed long after practice ended, following Maya through the locker room where she avoided the showers, through dinner where she picked at her food while teammates replayed the day's drills, through evening study hall where calculus problems blurred together on the page.
Trust.
The word dug deep, dangerous as a blade sliding between ribs. Trust meant letting someone close, and close meant risk—the kind of risk that got families killed and witnesses discovered. Maya couldn't afford that. Not with Ethan, not with anyone.
He doesn't really trust me. He trusts Alex Rivera. And Alex Rivera doesn't exist.
But even as she repeated the reminder like a mantra, Maya couldn't shake the memory of Ethan's smile, genuine and bright as California sunshine. The way he'd looked at her when the drill ended, like he'd found something rare and valuable that he wanted to protect.
Don't think about it. Don't make it mean more than it does.
Maya finished her homework with mechanical precision, each problem a small victory over the chaos in her head. Advanced calculus didn't care about identity crises or emotional attachments. Numbers followed rules that made sense, unlike everything else in her life.
When she finally crawled into bed that night, exhaustion dragged her under fast. The physical demands of practice, combined with the constant mental strain of performance, left her body craving unconsciousness. Sleep was supposed to be safe—the only time she didn't have to be Alex Rivera, the only place where Maya Castellanos could exist without consequences.
She was wrong.
The dreams came like they always did, uninvited and inevitable.
Gunshots. Four in a row, too fast, too final.
Maya was seventeen again, scrolling through her phone in her childhood bedroom, annoyed about chemistry homework she'd blown off until Sunday night. The house was warm, filled with the sounds of her family living their last normal evening—her mother's voice drifting up from the kitchen, Diego's video game beeping from the living room, her father's quiet laughter at something on the news.
The smell of copper, metallic and sharp, clogging the back of her throat.
The transition was always sudden in dreams, skipping over the moments between safety and horror. One second she was complaining about molecular formulas, the next she was standing at the top of the stairs, staring down at the ruin of her entire world.
Her mother's hand, reaching toward the stairs, blood streaking her fingers like paint that wouldn't dry.
Maya's mom had been trying to get to her in those final moments, trying to warn her or save her or just touch her one last time. The reaching hand was the worst part of the memory because it represented everything Maya couldn't change, couldn't fix, couldn't undo.
Her little brother's cracked glasses on the floor beside his Superman t-shirt, one lens completely shattered.
Diego had been eight years old. Eight. He'd lost his first tooth in that living room, learned to ride a bike in the driveway outside, built Lego castles on the carpet that was now soaked red. He'd never hurt anyone, never threatened anyone, never done anything except exist in the wrong family at the wrong time.
The sound of boots retreating across hardwood floors, leaving behind a silence worse than the gunfire.
Maya was frozen again at the top of the stairs, mouth open in a scream that produced no sound. Her throat burned with the effort, her chest split with grief so massive it threatened to tear her apart, but no one could hear. No one could save them because they were already gone.
But this time—this time was different.
The masked men turned around. This time, they saw her. This time, they came for her.
Heavy footsteps on the stairs, getting closer, and Maya couldn't move, couldn't run, couldn't do anything but wait for the inevitable. In the dream logic that made nightmares possible, she was simultaneously the girl on the stairs and the boy in the Riverside Academy dorm, trapped between two identities that were both about to be destroyed.
Maya jolted awake with a scream tearing out of her throat, raw and desperate and loud enough to shake the walls of her single room. The sound echoed off concrete and glass, a violation of the dormitory's nighttime quiet that would definitely be noticed.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
For a moment she couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but lie there shaking as reality reassembled itself around her. The dream fragments clung like spider webs—blood and broken glass and the sound of her brother's last breath. Her sheets were tangled around her legs, sweat dripping cold down her back despite the room's controlled temperature.
I'm not there. I'm not her. I'm Alex Rivera and I'm safe.
But safety was an illusion, and Maya knew it better than most. She'd learned that safety could be shattered in four gunshots, that families could be erased in minutes, that the people you trusted most could disappear without warning.
Then she heard them—footsteps in the hallway outside her door. Slow, deliberate, belonging to someone who'd been woken by her scream and was now investigating the source. Maya's blood turned to ice water as she realized what this meant.
Someone heard. Someone knows something's wrong.
The footsteps stopped directly outside her door. Maya held her breath, praying whoever it was would decide the sound had come from somewhere else, would move on to investigate other rooms, would leave her alone with her trauma and her secrets.
But the shadow appeared under the crack of light that leaked in from the hallway, feet planted firmly outside her door. Someone was standing there, listening, waiting, deciding what to do next.
Please go away. Please just go away.
Maya lay perfectly still, controlling her breathing through sheer willpower, hoping silence would convince her visitor that everything was normal. But even as she willed herself to become invisible, she knew it was too late. The scream had been too loud, too desperate, too obviously not the sound of someone having a normal nightmare.
And then his voice came through the door—low, careful, heavy with concern that sounded genuinely worried instead of merely curious.
"You okay in there?"
Mateo.
Of all the people who could have heard her scream, it had to be him. The one person whose attention she'd been trying to avoid, whose interest was already dangerously personal, whose room was apparently close enough to hear her night terrors.
Maya's heart hammered against her ribs as she stared at the door, knowing that whatever happened next could change everything. Because Mateo was already suspicious, already attracted, already pushing boundaries she couldn't let him cross.
And now he knew that Alex Rivera had secrets dark enough to cause nightmares that shook the walls.