Slowly, the palpitations subsided and she lay there listening to Sharon snoring softly beneath her, apparently deep in peaceful slumber. Lucky her.

The worst thing about the dreams was their inevitability. It instilled in her a sense of dreadful anticipation each night before she went to sleep. The dreams were really just one dream, recurring in different permutations of the same scenario, but always with the same awful outcome.

Her fingertips semi-consciously traced the latticework of scars across her body. Unable to get back to sleep, all she could do was lie there and try not to think too hard about how badly that last job had turned out.

It hadn’t always been this way, of course. It had all started out just fine…

The undercover training course – that’s where it had started. That’s where she had first met Alice.

The course had been an incredibly challenging undertaking, going from 7 a.m. to 4 a.m. for two full weeks. It had a notoriously high drop-out rate and, out of the original twelve students who had enrolled on the course, only five had made it through to the end. She and Alice had been among them.

They’d learnt everything about working undercover, from the basic stuff like how to interpret body language and how to dress in the right way, through to the more advanced things like how to do drug deals, how to run informants and how to conduct surveillance.

They’d subsequently worked together in Frank’s undercover unit, sometimes on the same jobs, more often on separate jobs, growing ever closer as they did so. Nobody but another undercover understood the unique stresses of the job, the constant peril within which you operated. It wasn’t always easy to cope with, so they’d relied upon each other for emotional support. They’d even gone to jiu-jitsu classes together, figuring that a bit of self-defence training could be helpful in a tight corner.

Bailey remembered how much they’d both revelled in the maverick glamour of working undercover and the satisfaction they’d gained in taking down dangerous and powerful villains…

…but then it had all gone so horribly wrong.

After the trauma of that last operation, Bailey had quit undercover work, had moved out of the flat she’d shared with Alice and had temporarily moved back in with her parents. She had almost quit the police force completely, only deciding against it after realising that there was nothing else she felt inclined to do. So she had retreated back to her safe, boring desk job, doing paperwork, transcribing recordings of interviews, checking witness statements, and numerous other tasks which kept the past at bay.

She had decided to concentrate on passing her sergeant’s exams in order to work her way up the police hierarchy, something she hadn’t had much opportunity to do when working undercover. Her plan was to try to get promoted and put it all behind her. But normal life had proved harder than she’d bargained on.

Alice had reached out to her, offering the kind of understanding, as a fellow undercover, and as a friend, that no one else would have been able to. But in her messed-up state, Bailey had shunned her help, not wanting to have anything more to do with any of them. She’d eventually relented and tried to contact her, hoping to heal the rift, but Alice had been incommunicado, working undercover in this prison as it turned out. And then all of a sudden Alice was dead. Bailey had been too late in trying to make up with her friend and she would always regret it. But she was here now and determined to make amends. If there was one last thing she could do for Alice it would be to find her killer and make them pay.