“You can sleep in my room to the right.” I step back before I do something irrevocable. “You’ll stay there until I decide what happens next.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, and there’s iron under the words this time. A will to understand and survive whatever this is.
“No,” I agree, my voice low. “But you were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and in my world, that’s just as bad.”
“I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Those eyes of hers, so impossibly deep blue they look purple in the artificial light, flash with offense that I could ever believe she would tell anyone about what she saw downstairs.
But people do talk. They will say anything to survive and then they will tell everyone what happened. They can’t help it. It’s human nature. Relief mixed with shock equals confession.
“I’m keeping you alive because you saw something you shouldn’t have. That doesn’t make you safe. It just makes you mine to handle. Don’t forget it.”
Her lips part, but no sound comes out, a protest strangled by confusion.
I turn away before she sees too much in my eyes. The conflict, the restraint, the urge to touch and destroy and claim all in the same breath.
I need distance. I need clarity.
But all I can see when I close my eyes is the way she stood in front of a gun and asked me to take care of her grandmother. Theway she didn’t beg for herself. The way she looked at death, like she’d already made peace with it. A woman who values everyone except herself.
It fractured something inside me.
The wave of lust that hit me when I turned and found her staring at the body on the floor…The way her eyes met mine with shock, yes, but something else too. Curiosity, maybe? The way she gasped when I pressed the length of the silencer against her thigh because I knew that if I touched her with my hands again, I wouldn’t be able to stop what followed. The way she leaned into my touch and refused to close her eyes in the face of imminent death…
I’m already fucking done for, and I know it.
I leave her in the penthouse, door closing with a soft click that feels far too final for a temporary measure. My steps down the private corridor are measured, controlled… but inside, I’m a storm ripping free of its cage. This shouldn’t be affecting me like this. She shouldn’t be affecting me like this.
I pull out my phone, navigate to my brother’s name.
I need you in the back, room 4, something has come up.
The reply comes almost instantly, because Adrik is always close when trouble breathes.
I saw her head down. I’m on my way.
The elevator sinks, the sensation barely noticeable compared to the pressure building behind my ribs. I replay the moment again, her lips parting, her eyes going wide, the way she only wanted her grandmother safe and looked after. That innocence is a dangerous resource in my line of work. It can turn ruthless men into fools.
The basement corridor stretches out like a tunnel of decisions I haven’t made yet. The metallic tang of gunpowder still hangs inthe air when I re-enter the room. The body lies where it fell, the stain spreading beneath him already drying. I’ve seen thousands like this. I’ve caused hundreds. But for the first time, the cleanup feels like an inconvenience rather than a necessity.
I crouch beside the corpse, gloved hands already assessing what needs to be done. But my mind is upstairs, wrapped in soft curves and violet eyes and a pulse too brave for a girl who’s had to survive all her life already.
“If she had begged,” I murmur to myself, “this would have been simpler.”
But she didn’t beg. Not for herself. She fought quietly. She challenged me.
That makes her the most dangerous kind of witness, the most dangerous kind of woman.
Bootsteps behind me. Adrik’s signal knock.
He doesn’t enter fully, doesn’t need to. He pushes the door open and leans against the frame. His voice, smooth as smoke, slides into the room.
“You didn’t kill her, did you?”
Callie
The door shuts behind him with a soft click, and suddenly the silence in this penthouse is louder than the sound of rain on the casino floor.
For a long moment, I just sit there, staring at the place where he had been. Where he’d looked at me like he was already cataloguing every possible use for my existence. When I finally stand, my knees almost buckle, but I force myself toward the bedroom he pointed to, every muscle shaking like my body can’t decide if I’m still alive or already dead.
