For me? Not so much.
While I waited for Henri’s update, the silence pressed in, pulling me inward to the part I kept carefully guarded.
The whispers had begun when I was still a child. People had noticed something different about me.
“Too smart for his own good,” they had murmured, often casting me wary glances, as if my intellect itself was a loaded weapon.
And in a way, it was.
When I’d been growing up under Viktor’s iron fist, I’d found the blatant stupidity I witnessed daily irritating—but I’d also realized it was a strategic weakness I could instinctively exploit.Soon, it became second nature to see the world not as it was presented to me but as it truly was at its core.
It wasn’t arrogance to recognize the disparity between my own mind and the minds of those around me. It was simply an observation.
That clarity, coupled with the ingrained violence of my upbringing, created a potent—and often tedious—reality for me. The predictable reactions of thugs, the transparent motivations of the bratva—it all became a monotonous script.
And the boredom…that was the real catalyst for who I’d become.
When the world around me moved in slow motion, mired in its own predictable patterns, the urge to introduce a little chaos—a novel variable—became almost unbearable.
Manipulation wasn’t deliberate malice. It was often just the most efficient way to alleviate a problem.
A nudge here, a carefully worded suggestion there, and suddenly the stagnant pond of a person’s existence would ripple with unexpected consequences.
It was…diverting.
And in a world painted in shades of brutal simplicity, diversion was a rare and valuable commodity.
Lyla was my diversion.
Was I willing to slaughter the lamb…consume her soul, forever redirecting her life?
Perhaps I was.
But first, I had to find her before Delgado did.
It was simple really.
At this point, she either belonged to him or to me.
I learned forward, frowning at the screen. I had pored over the video feeds, one after the other, and come up empty-handed. Then, it occurred to me that I should review her banking activity.
Sure enough, I found something new. Around the same time she’d turned her phone on, there was a charge at a burger joint only a half block away from the theater where she was working.
There you are, my darling.
She was cleverer than I’d ever given her credit for, but now the jig was up. It was time to get some coffee and take a trip to West 42nd Street.
It was three in the morning by the time Rory pulled the SUV up to the front of Playwrights Haven. Two of my newly initiated men were already there along with Henri. Lucian approached me first, shaking his head as Julian and Henri secured their weapons beside a parked car down the block.
“The theater’s locked up,” Lucian said. “Most of the businesses around here are shut for the night, and no one remembers seeing a girl who looks anything like Lyla.”
I scrubbed a hand over my chin. “Yeah, well, I picked her up her trail when she swiped her card at a burger joint just down the street. But the camera angles are shit—half of them are blocked by construction scaffolding, and the rest are too low-res to help. No idea where she went after she left.”
I glanced toward the dark building, irritation clawing at the inside of my chest. Then I dragged my hand through my hair and exhaled hard.
“She’s holed up somewhere in there. I can feel it.”
What I couldn’t understand was how the hell she’d slipped past both Henri and Delgado’s men and managed to stay out of sight this long. That kind of evasion took more than luck. It took instinct. And maybe desperation.
