“Douglas Maclanden,” he said, each syllable a small death. “Or whoever the fuck he really was. You let him walk into our systems. Into our money. Into our goddamn souls.”
“I know.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I’ll find him.”
“You’ll do more than find him.” Vladimir leaned forward, and I saw something almost like paternal disappointment in his expression. He’d raised me after my parents died in that car crash when I was five. He’d been my father’s best friend, and he’d stepped in without hesitation, given me purpose when I had nothing. “You’ll bring him back. You’ll recover what was stolen. And then—”
“Then I’ll kill him,” I finished.
“No.” Vladimir’s hand slammed down on the desk. “That would be mercy. You’ll watch while we take everything from him. His identity. His freedom. His hope. You’ll learn what betrayal actually costs.”
I nodded, accepting the judgment I deserved.
“I’m sending you to Chicago,” Vladimir continued. “Bratva has operations there. You’ll have resources, but Kirill—”His voice softened fractionally. “You remember what happened during training? When you were thirteen?”
The memory flashed hot and red behind my eyes. Two men dead because I’d lost control. Because rage had consumed reason, and my hands had kept moving long after they should have stopped.
“I remember,” I whispered.
“That’s why I pushed you into tech. That’s why you’re behind screens instead of on the street. You have a darkness in you, boy. A beautiful, terrible darkness. But it has to stay controlled.” He fixed me with a look that could crack granite. “Chicago. Find him. But you don’t kill anyone. That’s the deal. You break it, you come home to consequences. Understand?”
“I understand.”
But even as I agreed, even as I walked out of Vladimir’s office with my life intact and a mission clear, I knew the truth.
I would find Douglas. I would recover what he’d stolen. And when I finally stood over him, when I finally had the man who’d made a fool of me at my mercy, I wasn’t sure if any promise would be strong enough to stop my hands from finishing what my rage demanded.
He’d played me. Used my loneliness, my need for intellectual connection, my desperate desire to be seen as more than just the Bratva’s pet hacker.
He’d taken my trust and turned it into a weapon against me.
Four years later, I still tasted that betrayal. It lived in me like radiation, poisoning everything it touched. Chicago had become my hunting ground. Every line of code I wrote, every system I infiltrated, every digital shadow I chased—all of it brought me closer to the ghost who’d destroyed my ability to trust anything or anyone.
Douglas, or whatever his real name was, had taught me the most valuable lesson I’d ever learn:
Everyone lies. Everyone leaves. And the only person you can truly trust is yourself.
That knowledge sat in my chest like a stone, cold and heavy.
I would find him. It was only a matter of time.
And when I did, promise or no promise, one of us wasn’t walking away.
Chapter 1 – Barbara
My eyes snapped open like a trap springing shut, seeing nothing but the ghost images burned into my retinas. Sweat clung to my brows, my temples, the hollow of my throat where my pulse hammered like it was trying to escape my body. My mouth tasted like ash and a particular flavor of misery that only nightmares could conjure.
Another dream.
No. Not another. The same dream. Always the same fucking dream.
I lay there in my king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling as my heart rate slowly, reluctantly returned to something approaching normal. Sunlight filtered through the sheer curtains of my bedroom, turning everything soft and golden and beautiful in that way that made my skin crawl because nothing in this house was beautiful. It was all just expensive camouflage.
The dream clung to me like cobwebs. I could still feel it, still see it.
I was two again. Small. Vulnerable. Sitting on a floor I didn’t recognize, looking up at a woman with honey brown eyes—the same shade as mine, the same shape, like looking into a mirror that showed me who I might become if I survived long enough. She knelt in front of me, her hands gentle as she tucked a strand of my baby-soft hair behind my ear.
“You know what happened to me,” she whispered.
Every time. The same words. The same gesture. The same eyes that held knowledge I was too young to understand but old enough to fear.
