I frowned and fired off a quick message to Luca:
You ever heard of The Sacrifice club? 11th Avenue and West 45th, Hell’s Kitchen. Looks like high-level tech on the backend of their site. I need intel about a girl who works there and a sitrep yesterday.
I didn’t wait for an answer but dove right back into analyzing her digital footprint, peeling back layers one by one.
But something felt off.
Lyla Laine Oakley.
“Hmm.”
I continued my search, pulling up local news archives, anything with her name. Then I found it—an obituary from two years ago. Drunk tourist. Head-on collision on a winding Tennessee road. Three dead.
Including Lyla.
The real Lyla.
My eyes narrowed.
The photo beside the obituary showed a girl who looked like the one in front of me—but not exactly. Standing beside her in the photo was a younger version of her. Same eyes, same mischievous mouth. Identified in the caption as Lacey Grace Oakley.
Not Lyla.
Lacey.
I scraped Tennessee’s vehicle registration database. Lacey Grace Oakley was twenty. Barely.
Too young to be living in this city alone.
Too naïve for the kind of men who lurked around clubs like The Sacrifice.
Too untarnished to be tangled up in a world of pole routines, private rooms, and men who just wanted to take whatever they could get from her.
It didn’t line up—that fresh-faced wholesomeness, the easy way she smiled, the way she brightened a room. None of it belonged in the same sentence as “strip club and stolen identity.”
Not unless she was hiding something.
Not unless it was all an act—and if it was, I wanted to know who had taught her to lie that well.
In my world, twenty wasn’t too young for a woman to be claimed. Arranged marriages happened all the time. But innocence like hers? That was rare.
If she really was untouched—if no one else had gotten to her first—that would change everything.
And now I had to know just how far that innocence really went.
She did have her secrets, though. This woman serving coffee and breakfast across the room from me was living under her dead sister’s name, and she was way out of her depth.
What the fuck?
My attention snapped back to the image in the obituary—two sisters, their arms wrapped around each other, smiling with abandon. Pure joy. Now one of them was buried under a headstone, and the other was here, living halfway across the country, lying about who she was.
Had she come to Manhattan chasing something?
Or escaping it?
Had some asshole promised her the world and left her broken and alone?
I didn’t know. But I wanted to.
