The worst part—and this was what kept my head in my hands, what had me running through the implications like a man trying to solve an equation that didn’t have a solution—was that she hadn’t tried to hide it. Hadn’t put the armor back on the moment she hit vulnerable. Had just let herself fall apart, and the trust that required, the surrender that implied, made me want to burn the entire city down just to keep her safe.
Which was a problem. A massive, complicated, potentially catastrophic problem.
Because Cassandra was hiding something big. Something dangerous enough that she’d drunk nearly a bottle of whiskey trying to forget about it. Something that had Rafael noticing errors in her work—Rafael, who relied on her the way I relied onbreathing, who’d pulled her out of some Seattle club three years ago and made her indispensable.
And I couldn’t talk to Rafael about it. Couldn’t tell him that his trusted shadow was falling apart, that something was fundamentally wrong with the girl he’d treated like family for years. Because I’d known Rafael my entire life, had learned from him the cost of broken loyalty, the way betrayal festered inside an organization like gangrene.
But I also couldn’t leave her to handle this alone. Couldn’t watch her spiral into that kind of darkness without trying to pull her back.
I was stuck between two impossible choices, and the only thing I had access to was the truth.
Her phone was on the nightstand. I stared at it for two seconds—debating the ethics, the invasion of privacy, the violation it represented—before I picked it up anyway. Unlocked it with a code I shouldn’t have known but had memorized the night at my place just by watching her fingers move across the screen.
The texts I found made the picture clearer. Fractionally. Like looking at a photograph through frosted glass, you could see the outline but not the details.
Father Vincent:“You have to trust me and not think about it anymore. I know whatever has happened, it’s difficult to forget, but you have to, my child. This is life.”
I scrolled through their thread and found planning messages. Cassandra was going to Seattle. Meeting with the priest. Father Vincent, who ran the orphanage where she’d grown up.
She was digging into her past. Her lineage. Her history, the things she’d told me she had no interest in learning about, the personal details she’d always shut down with characteristic coldness whenever they came up.
But she was digging, and she was hiding it from Rafael, and that meant whatever she was finding was significant enough to be dangerous.
I set the phone back down gently, trying to put it exactly where it had been, and walked to my home office.
***
The Bratva’s internal surveillance and security logs were encrypted behind three different firewalls. I’d installed them myself, had designed them to be nearly impossible to breach without leaving a trace. It was one of the privileges that came with being related to Rafael, with having the skills to control information in ways that mattered.
I’d never used it on someone in the family before. Had made a point of maintaining that boundary, that wall between capability and action.
Until now.
I typed in her name: Cassandra Miller.
The files that came up made my blood run cold.
She’d been accessing security protocols she shouldn’t have access to. Had pulled records on archived cases from three years ago, before she’d joined the organization. Had searched through financial transactions and personnel files and something labeled “Internal Investigation - Confidential.”
The timestamps showed a pattern. Access that coincided with her being away from the office. Downloads that happened in the middle of the night. A systematic effort to understand something about her own history that was being kept from her.
My hands moved across the keyboard, pulling up the investigation file she’d been trying to access but apparently hadn’t been able to fully retrieve. The security on it was tighter than anything else in the system. Harder to crack. Someone had wanted this information locked down tight.
I hacked through the encryption layer by layer, feeling like I was peeling back skin to get to bone.
When the file finally opened, the first document was a photograph. A man I didn’t recognize.
The timestamp was from twenty-three years ago.
I kept reading.
David Miller. That was the man’s name. Cassandra’s father.
He’d started as an FBI asset, embedded deep in the Bratva’s ranks. The file showed his progression: the infiltration, the marriage to Elena, the birth of Cassandra five years later. For a moment, it seemed like he might have actually built a life there, might have created something real beneath the cover. But the organization had discovered his true allegiance. When they did, things fell apart.
The file classified it plainly: execution. Clean, professional, authorized at the highest levels. The reason listed was “Operational security compromise. Asset infiltration discovered. Termination sanctioned.” But the more I read, the more the details didn’t add up. There were gaps in the timeline, inconsistencies in the authorized signatures. And then I found the later notes—annotations that suggested something else entirely. David Miller had been found dead. Elena had been found dead. But neither death carried the Bratva’s signature. Both had been made to look like accidents, suicides, complications. The kind of deaths that disappeared quietly into the background noise.
Someone had wanted them gone, but they hadn’t wanted the organization to take the blame.
