But when I saw her tonight—when I heard that absolute certainty in her voice—it felt…wrong.
Ember Calloway shouldn’t have been capable of lying that cleanly. Not while her pulse was racing, not while her eyes were wide enough for me to see the tremor behind them. She believed every word she said.
Ash would call that manipulation. Vale would probably call it performance. Saint would argue that it’s grief.
I call it…inconvenient.
I pour a measure of whiskey, watch it catch the light. The glass trembles faintly in my hand, and I hate the way it reminds me of her hands when Wraith pushed her through the door—steady, defiant, blood still drying on her knuckles.
Owen’s file sits in the drawer to my left. I pull it out, thumb through the pages, and stop on the photograph—grainy, rain-soaked, body facedown near the pier. Ember’s name is scrawled in the margin in my own handwriting:Next of Kin – Untouched.
I’d written that note myself. A mercy at the time.
Mercy feels like a joke now.
I close the file, but the image lingers. Her face under the club lights, the way she met my stare without blinking—like she was daring me to see what I’d missed. I set the glass down and reach for the comm beside the desk. “Wraith.”
Static. Then his voice, low and steady. “Sir.”
“She’s secure?”
“Yes. At the townhouse. Locked room. Window barred.”
“Good. Keep the others out. No one talks to her until I say.”
A pause, then his reluctant voice filters through the line. “Understood.”
I almost end the call there. Almost.
“Wraith,” I add, quieter. “Did she say anything?”
He hesitates, which isn’t like him. “Just asked if we buried her brother.”
The silence stretches between us.
“And what did you tell her?”
“Nothing,” he says.
I kill the line.
The whiskey’s gone warm. I drain it anyway and stare at the skyline until the city’s lights smear into nothing but shadow and guilt.
For the first time in years, I find myself wondering if the truth I built my empire on was ever real.
And that thought, more than any bullet or blade, feelsdangerous.
Chapter 5
Ember
The first thing I register is warmth.
Not the cheap kind you get from blasting an old radiator and praying it doesn’t explode. Real warmth. Low, even, expensive. It sinks into my skin before my mind is fully online.
The second thing I register is that I’m not on concrete anymore.
My cheek is pressed to something soft. Smooth. High-thread-count sheets, probably stupidly overpriced. The air smells faintly of cedar and something darker underneath—bourbon, leather, the ghost of smoke. Male. Controlled. Intentional.
