My apartment is very small and I'm not used to that. My father has always made a great living off of his crimes and we have a pretty large house, I have my own very large room. I'm the chief of technology at the Renegade and I have a very big office there too. I'm always used to so much space but this tiny apartment makes me feel like I can barely stand up without banging my head on something.

All of my 'spy' gear is hidden away in the closet such as maps and blue prints of the Berardi buildings, laptops, my burner phone, and anything else that makes me look like Vera. The rest of the apartment is for Elisa. A small living room connected to a small, dirty kitchen. There's basic furniture and appliances but I have not decorated yet. I'm not sure how to decorate it either.

I basically have unlimited funds but Elisa isn't rich, hence the claustrophobic apartment, so I can't give it any rich taste. Maybe this weekend, I should go shopping for new decorations.

Wearing a black lace skirt, a white blouse, and a peach blazer, I'm ready to get to my second day of work at the Berardi Casino. It's much more girly than I am used to because I can't wear skirts when I'm Vera. I need to be able to run and fight at a moment's notice. Now that I have a lowly tech job updating a website though, I can wear whatever I want.

I know that yesterday, I said that I'd go with flats but I changed my mind last minute and went with some black pumps. I remember the last time that I'd worn them, I had used the heel to kick somebody in the junk because he was trying to break into our warehouse to destroy some drug shipment we had coming in. I'd spent a whole hour this morning scrubbing the dried blood off.

I text Sergei that I am leaving for the day on my burner phone and I don't wait for him to respond because he's not supposed to. I put it back in the closet, lock the door, and I head out of the apartment.

At the office, I use my new key card to go through the back door of the casino and I offer the receptionist a tired smile before I follow the familiar hallway all the way down until I get to the double doors that lead into the office room where my office is.

It's very early in the morning and I kind of wish that I had grabbed some coffee before coming in today but I didn't think that I'd be so tired. When I get to my desk, I smile at the girl sitting beside me who had introduced herself to me the day before.

"Good morning, Denise," I say in a friendly voice but it feels foreign on my tongue. I never really have time for polite small talk or pleasantries such as 'good morning' at the Renegade. Nobody ever feels like it's necessary but I want to blend in here. I want people to think that I'm an innocent, nice girl who's just trying her best. And to do that, I need to tell people 'good morning'.

"Hey, Elisa," She responds. There's a divider between our desks so when I sit down, I can't see her bright red hair anymore. That is, until she slides her chair back so that her head peeks over the divider and her white teeth are shining with a grin. "How was your night?"

"Uneventful," I mutter lamely. "Just getting situated in the new apartment. What about you?"

"I had a date," She explains and I wonder if that's normal, for people to just share things like that even though we've only known each other for less than 24 hours. Maybe she just has nobody else to talk to, I guess.

"On a Tuesday?" I question curiously.

"Yeah, I know," Denise sighs. "It was terrible too. He smelled like rotten milk and cried about his ex the whole time. A bit of advice: blind dates are the worst and you should never try it."

"I'll keep that in mind," I assure her with an amused laugh. Is this really what people talk about in the real world? Tuesday night dates? How... mundane. I will never have anything in common with this lady but she's nice and so I will continue to pretend like her terrible date is very interesting to me.

"I have another date this weekend from a guy on Tinder," She tells me and I almost want to ask her how old she is because she seems too old to be using that dating app but I know that it would be rude to ask and so I keep my mouth shut and let her finish her story. "So I'm hoping that it goes better this weekend."

"I wish you the best of luck," I tell her, starting to get to work in hopes of her getting the hint that I can't keep talking because I really do have a lot of work to do.

"Thanks. He was really hot in his profile pictures but you know how that goes," She's saying as she slides back to her desk. She's in the marketing department and I don't know specifically what she does but she's on the phone almost all day, I can hear her talking through our little divider. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No," I respond to her. I don't mind talking to Denise and now that she's out of my line of vision and can't see my facial expressions, I can talk to her without putting on a fake smile. Humans smile a lot. I thought that I smiled a lot back at Renegade but compared to Denise and the other members of the office that I've met, I've realized that I only smile a lot compared to other criminals but compared to the world, I'm pretty much frowning all of the time. "I'm focused on work right now."

"That's boring," Denise tells me. "You should let me set you up."

"No," I say again, even laughing a little bit at the idea. "I'm too busy right now but thank you. I appreciate the offer."

Right now, I'm using my double monitors to do real Berardi Casino website work, revamping the search results page so that it looks readable and has better usability. It's really easy work and I think that if I claim to have just a little less experience than I really do have, I can get the website done in a fraction of the time than the deadline demands and I can spend the rest of my time snooping around the Berardi security system to see how hard and how long it will take to hack.

"Alright well just in case you change your mind, I do know a lot of really cute guys," She tries to entice me but I don't go for it. I'm basically working two jobs right now, working for Berardi and then my real job, working for Pantera. I've never had time to date, even in my real life. I'm close to Coleman, the only person that I ever spend time with outside of work, but we aren't romantic.

I don't respond to her because I feel like she's just going to keep pushing this and I need to get to work on this website. Right before lunch, I finish updating the search results page and so I spend just a few minutes digging through the shared server to see how far I can get on my own machine. I'm not stupid enough to hack into restricted servers from this desktop but I'm just curious as to what I have access from here.

Unsurprisingly, the shared server is practically bone dry. I grab my tote bag from where I had kept it by my desk and I head out for my lunch hour. Denise is not at her desk, she had gone to a pasta restaurant with a few co-workers. I was invited but declined because I will not actually be eating on my lunch break.

In my tote bag, I brought a clean laptop that I'm going to use to hack into the Berardi systems and see how much digging I can do in one hour, just to inspect the system to see how hard this really will be. I'll need privacy and so I decide to try the roof. Giovanni had warned me not to go where my key card doesn't allow me but just up a few flights of stairs and down the hallway, the stairs to the roof are unguarded and so I just assume that it's not restricted territory.

If it is, I'll just play dumb when if I get caught. I head up the stairs and into the vast roof of the casino. It's a tall building that blends in with the other really tall, regal looking casinos of Las Vegas. It's a very pretty view and I can see the Renegade Casino in the distance. My home. In the daytime, there's not very much happening in either building as most people visit the casinos during the night but there are many cars bustling through the streets and people walking on the sidewalks to explore what the city has to offer.

I stand by the ledge of the building, looking over the city only for a moment before I sit down on the ground and lean my back against the ledge. To get more comfortable, I take off my shoes and extend my legs out in front of me so that if anybody does come up here, they won't get a look up my short-ish skirt.

And then I get to work.

My first step is to get my Bluetooth ear piece hacked into their security radio so that if somebody gets a whiff of the security breach that I will cause, I will immediately know about it, shut it down, and get the hell out of here so that nobody knows that it was me.

This part is really easy, I just have to find the frequency of the radio that they use and then a few more technical steps that are kind of hard to explain. With my ear piece in my ear, I can occasionally hear a voice on the other end saying something like a hallway being all clear or a drunk customer getting lost in the wrong area.

Once that's done, I start searching for the restricted servers so that I can force myself into those and gain access. I don't know what my father is looking for, or if there's even anything specific, so I just start looking for anything. I know that it won't be that easy to do and that's why this is an undercover mission, because it will take time. I'm going to have to plant an invisible bug in their system and let it fester until we get all of the information that we need. I don't want to corrupt their files or anything else to let them know that we're in their system, which is probably going to be the hardest part.

I find a server that my laptop is trying to talk to but of course, it is not working at first. There are passwords being demanded of me to move forward and so I use my password hacking skills to go through another entrance into the server. A backdoor instead of just entering the password that I do not have.

I spend a few minutes typing away, trying to get into this server and once I finally figure it out, there's a progress bar that's slowly filling, telling me that when the bar is full, I will have complete access to this one server. Granted, I have no idea what this server is or if it's useful information but in about fifteen minutes, I will know for sure.

As I'm watching the bar crawl with progress, the rooftop door opens and it makes me jump. I do not slam my laptop shut or anything because I am facing the door and whoever is coming out here cannot see my screen. I simply minimize the panel that is hacking into the server and I open up the code that I've been using to update the website to make it look like I'm just doing some work up here.

"What are you doing up here?" A deep voice rumbles at me from across the roof. I look up and see Young Berardi standing there, looking at me with caution.

"I didn't think it would be a problem, there wasn't a keypad or anything to get up here," I mumble, pretending to be flustered but I'm actually just feeling on edge. Maybe I was being too risky by coming up here, maybe he's not going to believe me. "Sorry, I'll go back downstairs."

"You're allowed up here," He tells me as I'm about to stand up from the ground, my shoes still sitting beside me. He continues walking toward me until he gets to the ledge that I'm sitting against and he surprises me by sitting down right next to me, now able to see my screen. He's sitting very close to me, I notice, and I'm sure that he's just suspicious and wants to see my computer screen, just to make sure that I'm not up to anything fishy. It looks completely innocent even though I'm stealing his family's information right in front of him. He told me yesterday that he doesn't know anything about computers and I'm praying that that's true. "Most people just choose not to."

"It's quiet, it's easier to think," I explain to him. That's true, it is one of the reasons why I decided to come up here. The other one being privacy obviously but I leave that in the silence. It didn't work anyway. "And it's inspiring, really, how depressing the city looks in the daytime. Everybody's hungover, regretting the night before, maybe even married to a stranger and absolutely broke. It's pathetic."

"Yeah," He agrees with me. "I'm not sure that I find it so inspiring."

"Right. I guess that it sounds kind of weird," I give up, not wanting to explain myself to this guy. I would much rather just throw him over the building's edge and watch him splatter on the pavement below. "Anyway, is there something that you need from me? I'm about halfway through the website upgrades, they should be done by the end of the week."

"No, I didn't come up here looking for you," He denies as he pulls a to-go container out of the book bag that he has with him. "This is my lunch spot."

'You eat lunch?' I think to myself. I thought that guys like him just swallowed a bucket of bullets every morning and that's how they lived. I bite back a laugh at my own joke and just watch as he pulls out a salad and a fork. It's so strange to watch somebody, a monster like me, do something so human like eating a salad. I've also noticed that he wears his suits with a lot of humanity too, which I didn't expect either. I had assumed that Dante Berardi would have suits made out of human hair, eyes a darker black than an endless void, eyes that could cut glass with a glare. Tattoos staining his face, hands covered in scars from all of the fighting he does. He only speaks words of threats and murder. Frown lines worse than his father's.

I wasn't expecting a human man who wears slightly gray suits with red ties, a man who eats salad instead of human guts, a man who looks like a man and not like the monster that I know he is.

"You're staring at me," Dante points out after I've unintentionally spent a few minutes just blankly staring at him in astonishment. I open my mouth to apologize but I choke on the words and just turn away, looking back at my computer screen where the website code is still displayed. He may be expecting an explanation for why I was staring at him but he's not going to get one. Elisa doesn't know that Dante is a monster so I can't explain to him that I'm just so astonished at his humanness. The only way that I could justify me staring at him without getting shot is by hitting on him, telling him that I was staring at him for his beauty, which I will not do.

"Why do you come up here?" I ask him after another few awkward minutes of silence when I realize that I had given him my explanation for being up here but he never gave me his. I don't want to talk to this guy but I can't go back downstairs until the progress finishes and I get access to the server so I'm stuck sitting here with Dante for probably another ten minutes and I have to make it seem like I want to be up here with him.

He glances over at me and takes another bite of his salad, taking his sweet time in answering me. "It is the only place that my father cannot reach me."

Every word that comes out of his mouth surprises me even more. Every word he says, every move he makes is destroying his big, mean and nasty image I have of him inside of my head. "Not a fan of the casino business?" I prod curiously, unable to stop asking him questions.

"I'm not a fan of living in my family's shadow," He finally responds, taking his sweet time again to reply. 'Tell me about it', I think to myself. "But it was the life that I was given and so I will take my victories where I can get them."

"Like eating salad on top of a building," I add, trying not to laugh at the irony. I always lock myself in an empty office down the hall from mine and I draw when I feel like I need to get away and I think it's the same thing as Dante eating salad on the roof. We were both born into this life, we've both blindly killed for our fathers. We've probably killed each other's friends, family, neighbors. I've never really met somebody who understands so intensely to what my life is like.

"Exactly," He takes another bite of his lettuce. "My father hates salad, he thinks that it's for the rabbits. I'm really sticking it to the fucking man."

"I know what you mean," I find myself saying and when he looks over at me for an explanation, I have to think on my feet to tell him how I know what he means. I don't know why I said that, I guess that I just relate to him so much and I want him to know that he's not the only one living like this. I know that I shouldn't take pity on him, he is the enemy. As we sit here, I am working to destroy everything that he stands for. And yet, I cannot hate this man who is desperately eating salad to feel like a real person just like me. "My dad doesn't own a casino but he is a... a salesman. It's not my thing but he isn't really interested in what I want."

"But you got out," He points out to me. "I assume, since you are here in Vegas and not a salesman in Kentucky."

"Yeah," I agree with him quickly, realizing that my parallel doesn't really work considering I am not a salesman right now. "Yeah, I learned something new and I crossed the country. Free from my father's reign." Oh, how nice that would be if it were true.

"You seem to be doing alright for yourself," Dante tells me.

I can see at the bottom of my screen a little flashing green icon that tells me that I successfully hacked into the server and so I don't need to be up here anymore. I shut my laptop immediately and slide it into my tote bag. "I'm doing alright. Anyway, that's the end of my lunch."

"You spent your lunchtime working?" He wonders with raised eyebrows as he takes another bite of his salad, his strong jaw moving slowly around the lettuce.

"I'm the newbie, I have to prove that I'm worth keeping, right?" I explain easily as I stand up from the floor and slip my feet back into my black pumps. I understand that I relate to Dante because we live similar lives but that doesn't make me too fond of him. If I wasn't undercover, I would call him a krysa as I walk away which means 'rat' in Russian and it's what we always call the Berardis. But I am not Vera right now and I can't do that and so I think of a way that I can both piss him off but also be so subtle about it that he isn't even sure if I've insulted him or not.

As I walk away, I wait until I'm at the door that descends back into the building before I turn to look at him with a small smile that I know looks friendly so that he thinks that I mean absolutely well by my departure. "It was nice talking to you, bunny."

He may think that I meant it as a term of endearment, a little joke because he said that his dad thinks that lettuce is for the rabbits. I know, however, that it will upset him just a little bit because it threatens his tough and masculine image.

Dante Berardi does look incredibly scary, maybe even more so than his graying father, but I will not let him get to me. As Vera or as Elisa, Dante does not scare me and I want him to know that.