Cordelia Evans was rather annoyed.
She'd been told to get out, to take a bus or a train or a taxi and get the hell out of town, to form a new life with the means she'd been given. She'd even formed a plan as she rode on the bus to Boston and tried to ignore that Holly girl. From Boston, she would take another bus up to Maine, and from there, she'd catch a plane to Paris, France. She'd always liked Paris, since she spent a semester there in college, and she was fluent in French, so it seemed perfect. Plus, the food there was far superior to anything she could get in America.
She'd chosen to fly out through Maine because it rhymed with plane. Because honestly, she had no better reason to choose anywhere else. And she liked the way it sounded. Go to Maine, catch a plane. Catch a plane from Maine.
God, she had no life. Literally. She seriously had absolutely no life. Technically speaking, she didn't exist anymore. There was no Cordelia Evans – she had been scrubbed from existence. Though she was still having a ton of trouble thinking of herself as Felicia.
Anyways, she'd had this whole plan. And then out of the blue, the very people who'd told her to skedaddle call her up on her brand-new phone and tell her to get her butt back to the city because there had been some sort of complications. Some sort of emergency.
It had better be some emergency.
Cordelia – no, Felicia – stepped boldly down the steps off the bus and into the station. Even with the new clothes, the new haircut, the makeup she'd piled onto her face to make herself look more like some innocent tourist and less like Cordelia Evans, she still felt recognizable. And as such, she felt vulnerable.
There was nothing she hated more than vulnerability.
She couldn't stop glancing around, looking over her shoulder, expecting to see police running towards her, with Kate Beckett, her personal kidnap victim, heading the charge. Which was stupid. Even if the police did find her, Beckett wouldn't be with them. Cordelia – Felicia – cut her up enough that she was sure she wouldn't be able to return to work at least for a little while. She was sure of that.
Now that she was back in the city, her paranoia was worse than ever. She kept seeing brown hair and expecting Beckett, or black clothes and expecting uniforms. So she shoved her iPod headphones into her ears and tried to tune out the world around her with her loud death metal music, but there was too much screaming and loud noises and it only made it worse. With every shriek, she expected to see people jumping sideways to make way for cops with guns held out in front of them. With every drumbeat, she looked around wildly for the firearm that had discharged. So she yanked out the headphones, turned off the music, and shoved the phone in her pocket.
It was kind of like she had post-traumatic stress disorder. Except there was no trauma involved. Well, maybe there was, but only for Beckett. Cordelia specialized in causing chaos and mayhem, and doing what she does best – creating trauma for others – wasn't likely to be traumatic for her. That didn't even make any sense.
There, she did it again. She kept forgetting she wasn't Cordelia anymore.
Felicia. Felicia. Felicia.
I am Felicia. Felicia Phillips. That's me.
Felicia. Felicia. Felicia.
It wasn't working.
It took a lot to override twenty-four years of using the same name. Maybe she'd have gotten used to it by the time she was forty-eight. God, she hoped it didn't take that long. But she wasn't very hopeful.
She walked through the bus station, her backpack dangling from her shoulders, her laptop bag looped over her head and left arm, her right hand firmly grasping the handle of the large blue suitcase she'd bought to cart around all of her new clothes. And she kept going, and going, and going, dragging her suitcase along behind her and keeping an eye out for NYPD.
It was a rather big bus station. And since she had no idea where she should go to meet up with her contact, she just kept walking the length of it over and over again. They'd promised that they'd find her, but it was almost an hour before anything out of the ordinary happened.
"Cornelia."
Instinctively, she looked up, searching for the source of the voice that had said something so close to her name – her old name, that is. She still responded to it. She really shouldn't, but she did. If a cop were to call out 'Cornelia Evans' right then, she knew she would look up. It was subconscious. She didn't mean to do it, but she did anyways. So if a cop were to call out for her, she'd basically be screwed.
But her gaze landed instead on a tall man with a casual stance and short, scruffy blonde hair in jeans and a t-shirt for a sports team she didn't know. He was rather cute, probably a few years older than her, and decidedly not a cop.
She'd never seen him before in his life.
"Excuse me?" she says, stepping forward. "I – I think you have me confused with someone else."
"Really?" The guy laughed nervously, looking down at his feet – now that she was paying attention, she could hear a hint of a French accent in his voice, but it was very faint. Something about him seemed familiar, too, though she couldn't put her finger on what. "I'm sorry, then. Really. You just look exactly like this girl I used to date. Cornelia was her name. Cornelia… Devin, I think. Yeah, that sounds right."
Cornelia Devin. Cordelia Evans.
It was too close to be a coincidence.
It seemed like maybe it was possible that he'd dated Cordelia a while back and was remember her name wrong. But she was pretty sure she would remember if she'd dated a blond French hottie, and she hadn't.
"Alright, then," she said, feeling slightly awkward and extremely confused. "I'll be going, then… there's someone I have to meet…"
She turned and began to walk away, but after a second, the guy's voice called out to her again, and his words stopped her in her tracks.
"Hey… you aren't Quinn Solace, are you?"
Quinn Solace.
Quinn Solace.
Quinn Solace.
She was Felicia Phillips. But yes, she was also Quinn Solace. Quinn, another of her seven identities. Quinn, who technically did not exist yet and would not until Cornelia – Felicia – chose to change her name and identity once again.
Quinn Solace, a name that this guy could only know if he was a part of the group that hired her.
"Yeah," she said after a second, turning around. "That's me."
"Really? Quinn? No way!" He grinned. "Nah, you know what? I don't believe you. Prove it. Show me some ID."
He was good. Anyone passing by would think they were childhood friends, maybe high school sweethearts, reuniting after years of no contact and not quite believing that the person standing before them was the one that they used to know. No one would suspect anything. So she nodded, and subtly opened her laptop bag, rifling around inside for something belonging to Quinn Solace. What she found first was her driver's license, and she held it up, showing the guy the hard piece of plastic with the unflattering picture of her and the name QUINN L. SOLACE stamped across it in black letter.
She wasn't sure what the L stood for. None of Quinn's other things said. Leslie. She'd go with that. It was a nice name, and 'Quinn Leslie Solace' had a pretty ring to it.
"Quinn!" the guy said, sounding delighted, and as she tucked the driver's license back into the bag and closed it again, he stepped towards her and wrapped her in a hug. It was rather awkward, seeing as she actually didn't know him at all, but she tried to wrap her arms around him, pretending to be his old friend as convincingly as he was pretending to be hers.
With her new mousy-brown pixie cut, there was no hair to mask the man's mouth as he whispered instructions in her ear. Still, he managed to do it so subtly that no one walking past suspected a thing.
"There's a diner a ways down the street called Loretta's," he said. "Go there, and order something. Anything, it doesn't matter. Use Quinn Solace's credit card?"
"And then what?" she whispered back.
"You'll know what to do," he told her. "I'll meet you there. Twenty minutes." And then he pulled away, grinning, falling easily back into the persona of her old friend. "I've got to go," he said. "I've got a meeting – can't be late." He pulled a pen from his back pocket and grabbed her hand, writing something down on her palm and saying, "Here's my number – call me when you get the chance. We can catch up."
"Sure," she agreed, and he stowed the pen away in his pocket again and walked off, waving to her as he disappeared into the crowds.
She waited until he'd been gone for a minute to read what he wrote on her hand.
It wasn't not a phone number. It was words – three simple sentences, written in large, messy scrawl, all capital letters.
YOU ARE QUINN SOLACE
GO WITH THE FLOW
DON'T GET CAUGHT