“She’s been with you for three years,” I heard myself say. “Trusted with your life. You really think she’d betray you like this?”
“I think loyalty is a luxury,” Rafael replied calmly, “and luxury is something we can’t afford when our survival is on the line. She’ll be watched. If she does anything suspicious, we’ll know.”
I nodded, as if I agreed. As if I wasn’t already calculating how to warn her, how to help her, how to keep her one step ahead of the surveillance that was about to make her life exponentially harder.
When the meeting ended, I walked out with Damir and managed to catch him at the elevators.
“Did you know about Cassandra?” I asked quietly.
He looked at me like I’d asked him to explain quantum physics in Russian. “Know what?”
“That she’s been the subject of operational interest. That something in her past might make her a liability.”
Damir’s expression shifted into something harder. “No. Should I?”
“Just asking.” I kept my voice neutral. “Seemed like the kind of thing you’d notice.”
“I notice what matters,” he said, stepping into the elevator. “Right now, what matters is that if she is compromised, we handle it cleanly. Family or not, loyalty matters. You know that.”
The doors slid shut before I could respond, leaving me standing alone in the hallway with the weight of everything I now knew pressing down on my shoulders.
I pulled out my phone and typed a message to Cassandra: “Don’t go to your apartment. Don’t access anything. Don’t do anything that could be traced or monitored. We need to talk.”
I hit send and waited for her response, knowing that time was running out. That Rafael was already spinning his web, setting his traps, preparing to move against the person I was increasingly certain I would choose over the family I’d been born into.
The question was whether she’d trust me enough to let me help her.
Chapter 8 – Cassandra
I woke up feeling like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my skull and decided to keep swinging for good measure.
My eyes cracked open slowly, reluctantly, like they knew better than to face whatever fresh hell awaited me. The light streaming through unfamiliar windows stabbed straight through my retinas, and I groaned, pressing my palms against my temples in a futile attempt to hold my brain together.
Where the fuck was I?
I blinked hard, forcing my vision to focus, and found Drew sitting in a chair beside the bed. Not lounging. Not relaxed. Just watching me with those steel-gray eyes, like I was a bomb he was trying to figure out how to defuse.
His arms were folded across his chest, his expression unreadable, and for a second, I wondered if I’d hallucinated the entire night. The whiskey. The tears. The way he’d held me like I was something worth protecting instead of something that needed to be contained.
But no. The ache in my chest told me it had been real. Too fucking real.
“Morning,” he said, and his voice was careful. Controlled. Like he was trying not to spook a wild animal.
I looked down at myself, and my heart slammed against my ribs hard enough to bruise. The sheet was pooled around my waist, covering my bare legs but not much else. I was still wearing my dress from last night—wrinkled, twisted, hiked up to my thighs—but the way the fabric clung to me made it clear I’d been sleeping hard.
Vulnerable.
Exposed.
I launched myself out of the bed too fast, driven by pure panic and the desperate need to reclaim some semblance of control. The room tilted violently, my knees buckled, and I would’ve hit the floor if Drew hadn’t moved.
He was fast. Faster than I’d expected. His hands caught me before I could collapse, one wrapping around my waist and the other pressing against my back, steadying me with a grip that was firm but not restrictive.
We stood there, frozen, his chest against mine, his breath warm on my face. A breath-stealing pull sparked between us like static electricity waiting to ignite. His hand on my waist burned through the thin fabric of my dress, and I could feel the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my own erratic pulse.
My lips parted. His eyes flicked down to my mouth. He leaned in—just a fraction, just enough that I could feel the shift in the air between us—and then he stopped.
Pulled back.
