Everything Rafael trusted me with.
Everything I’d just betrayed.
I wanted to throw up. Wanted to scream. Wanted to rewind time and take back the last five minutes, the last two years, the last lifetime.
But I couldn’t.
So I sat back down at my desk, closed the ledger, shut my laptop, and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars.
The nausea surged again. Worse this time.
I bolted to the bathroom down the hall, barely making it before my stomach emptied itself. I gripped the porcelain, gasping, my whole body shaking.
When it finally stopped, I rinsed my mouth, splashed cold water on my face, stared at myself in the mirror.
I looked like a stranger. Hollow. Haunted.
Maybe I was.
I straightened, smoothed my hair, fixed my expression into something resembling normal.
Then I walked back to my office, sat down, and opened my laptop again.
Because what else was I supposed to do?
I’d made my choice. Pulled the trigger. And now I had to live with the fallout.
Even if it killed me.
Even if it killed everyone I cared about.
I pulled up a new document, started typing, pretending like I was working. Pretending like my hands weren’t shaking. Pretending like I wasn’t falling apart from the inside out.
But deep down, I knew the truth.
I was already broken.
And there was no putting me back together.
Chapter 15 – Drew
Gunfire shattered the silence of the docks like glass exploding in slow motion.
I ducked behind a shipping container, the cold metal biting into my shoulder as bullets pinged off steel around me. My Glock was steady in my hand, but my heart was pounding like a war drum in my chest.
“Stay down!” I shouted to the three Bratva men crouched behind crates to my left.
They returned fire, muzzle flashes lighting up the night like lightning strikes. The arms deal had turned into chaos in under thirty seconds—one moment we were watching the cargo offload, the next we were drowning in bullets and blood.
This wasn’t random. It couldn’t be.
Whoever sold us out knew the exact minute the cargo would arrive. Knew the route. Knew the security rotation down to the last man and the last second.
I fired twice, dropped one of the attackers, then pressed my back against the container and reloaded. My mind was already racing, already calculating, already looping through every possibility.
And every loop landed on one person.
Cassandra.
