Carefully, I shift. Inch by inch, I extract myself from the bed, every movement deliberate, controlled. She murmurs in her sleep, a small sound, barely there, and my chest tightens hard enough to hurt. I freeze until her breathing evens out again.
I dress in silence.
Shirt. Sweatpants.
I shouldn’t look back.
I do anyway.
She’s sprawled slightly now, one hand curled into the sheets where I was. The memory of her last night—nervous, trembling, brave—hits me with a force that borders on violent. I hadn’t intended to cross that line. Had sworn to myself I wouldn’t. But the moment she touched me, the moment she whispered that she had never belonged to anyone else, something old and territorial snapped awake inside me.
And it hasn’t gone quiet since.
She shifts again, brow creasing faintly, and instinct overrides reason. I step back to the bed, pull the sheets higher around her shoulders. My knuckles brush her cheek by accident. She leans into the touch in her sleep.
It nearly undoes me.
I straighten, turn away before I do something irreversible, and leave the room without a sound—carrying the weight of her trust with me like a loaded weapon.
I return to my room and don’t linger.
A quick shower. Cold. Efficient. I change into darker clothes—tailored, structured, the uniform of the man I am supposed to be. By the time I step into the hallway, whatever softness existed in me with Raelyn is sealed away.
Duty first.
My office lights up as I enter, screens coming alive one by one. Surveillance feeds. Encrypted files. Names that bleed into each other after years of war. I take my seat and let the chair settle beneath me.
Cold. Controlled. Calculated.
This is where I belong.
Raelyn’s father left devastation in his wake before he vanished. Double dealings. Stolen intelligence. Fragmented data hidden so well it took years to even realize it existed. I’ve been hunting the leak for a long time—long before Raelyn ever crossed my path.
I pull up the latest reports.
And there it is.
Confirmation.
The Antonov cartel made a mistake. They moved too early. Tried to use Raelyn as leverage before understanding what they were holding. In doing so, they exposed themselves—and something far more important.
Her father’s disappearance wasn’t clean.
No body. No closure. No confirmed kill.
Someone took him.
Someone hid him.
And someone is still using Raelyn as a pressure point.
My jaw tightens as I trace the connections across the screen. Offshore accounts reactivated months ago. Old ciphers reused. A ghost reaching out from the dark, testing boundaries, watching reactions.
The door opens.
Nik steps in without hesitation, a thin black file tucked under his arm.
“Boss,” he says, voice level.