Ballsy.
Most people wouldn’t meet my eyes on instinct.
Particularly if they knew who I was.
Not if they wanted to keep breathing.
But this girl?
She scrutinized me with unapologetic boldness.
I slid into my booth in the far corner—the one I’d claimed a few months ago when I’d decided to stay in Manhattan for a while. High leather back. No one behind me. Full view of the room.
I opened my laptop and unlocked it with one swipe of my finger. The custom OS booted without making a sound. It had military-grade encryption layered over a proprietary kernel, something I’d written myself. On the surface, the interface looked like a trading dashboard—something a hedge fund bro might use to monitor markets. Behind the mask? Access to data vaults most governments didn’t even know existed.
I started my morning the same way I always did—scanning offshore ledgers for abnormal fund movements and checking open channels across four continents for anything related to me or those most important to me. My name wasn’t on anything traceable, but my fingerprints were everywhere.
But with her in the room, I couldn’t focus on the screen in front of me. Something about her commanded my attention.
I told myself I had work to do.
Instead, I watched her out of the corner of my eye.
She wore black jeans today—clean, no holes this time. Up top, a soft pink sweater hugged her waist, the neckline dipping just low enough to tease the shape of her breasts. Feminine. A littleflirty without trying. It would have looked ridiculous on most of the jaded, hardened, too-tired-to-care women who worked in places like this. But on her? Somehow, it worked. Maybe because that softness wasn’t just in her clothes—it was in her. In the way she smiled at strangers, as if they might smile back. In the easy way she moved through the room. There was a kind of light in her, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Optimism like that didn’t exist where I came from.
I studied her more closely, noticing that she wore no makeup and that her blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue. That wasn’t the kind of tired you could fix with a nap. It was the kind of tired that came from hustling too hard and never getting a break. The messy blonde bun twisted up on top of her head was her golden crown. Despite her obvious exhaustion, she was stunning, though her cheeks were a little too hollow, like she skipped meals. That possibility gnawed at me.
She moved between tables with the kind of effortless grace that had to be either rehearsed or inborn. One hand balanced a tray, while the other gestured as she chatted with an older couple like she’d known them for years. Her laugh—light, unforced—carried above the low hum of the room. She was too upbeat for someone who hadn’t slept, too happy for someone running on fumes. Either she was the best actress in Manhattan, or that sunshine was genuine.
She passed by my booth, heading for a table by the window, and I let my eyes follow her. She must’ve sensed it. Her back stiffened. When she turned, her gaze met mine dead-on.
There it was again, that little flicker in her eyes—half challenge, half curiosity.
I wanted to know what the hell she was doing here, working morning shifts in a coffee shop where the mafia kept booths on reserve. There was no way she made enough to afford a decent place anywhere in Manhattan. What was her story?
She reached the table by the window and took an order. Then she wiped a table nearby. Her hands moved quickly, but she kept glancing my way, like she didn’t know whether to flip me off or flutter her lashes.
I clicked the trackpad of the laptop.
Let’s find out who you really are, sweetheart.
A few keystrokes later, I was inside Cipher’s internal network. Carmine’s security protocols were a joke—standard cloud-based CRM with an off-the-shelf point-of-sale plug-in. I tunneled in through a known backdoor, bypassed the admin credentials, and dumped the employee records. Took less than sixty seconds.
Found her file.
Lyla Laine Oakley.Tennessee driver’s license, issued eight months ago. Social Security number, date of birth, hire date. She’d been working here since April. Minimum wage with a tip share that would barely cover subway rides. When I saw what Carmine paid her each week, a flicker of violence stirred under my skin.
How the fuck was she surviving on that?
Another thirty seconds and I had access to her bank info and rental agreement.
And then I found something I hadn’t expected.
A second employer.
The Sacrifice.
My fingers stilled on the keyboard.
