I glanced up from the screen. She was wiping down a nearby table, but her eyes kept darting my way. She pursed her lips as a flicker of uncertainty crossed her face, just enough to betray that tension I’d seen before.
She’d noticed me watching her.
Good.
Because I wasn’t going to stop.
Not until I knew every goddamn thing about her.
By the time I hit Central Park South, the tension had crawled up my neck and settled behind my eyes like a pressure headache that wouldn’t quit. With every step I took, my curiosity and bafflement about Lyla’s situation grew.
What the fuck was a girl like that doing working in a place like The Sacrifice?
She didn’t belong in a world that chewed girls up and spat out corpses. She had no place in those rooms full of men who lasciviously tracked a dancer’s every move, their mouths agape, cash at the ready. The men that frequented those places didn’t care if the women ended up trafficked, as long as they got their rocks off.
Did she even understand how fast a girl like her could disappear in this city?
They’d steal her name, wipe her record, and ship her off to some foreign shit-pit with no extradition. She’d be sold. Used. Broken. Over and over until there was nothing left.
The more I thought about it, the faster I walked.
I didn’t slow down even after reaching my building. My boots struck polished stone as I crossed the quiet lobby. A scan of my palm triggered the security panel, and I entered a passcodebefore leaning in for the iris scan. Only then did the private elevator recognize me and open with a soft chime.
This place was a luxury fortress perfect for someone like me, a man with myriad secrets and money to burn.
The view from the penthouse was postcard-perfect—Central Park lay sprawled out before me under a clear noon sky—but I didn’t stop to admire it. I walked past the chef’s kitchen. The scent of last night’s chili con carne still wafting faintly in the air. I moved past the gallery-lit walls lined with large-scale Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky prints—landscapes, rivers running like veins through canyons, mountain ridges carved in light and shadow. Stark, natural, and violent in their stillness. Just like the world I lived in.
I headed straight into my hacker’s nest.
The glass doors frosted behind me after I entered, ensuring my privacy. I dropped into the leather chair at the main desk and hit a sequence of keys to activate the array. The screens flickered to life. Six panels. Global intel feeds. Live surveillance in Moscow, Manhattan, and the Maldives.
But right now all I needed was her.
Lacey Grace Oakley.
I pulled the file I’d created for her at Cipher and started digging once again.
The girl wasn’t a ghost—she was just buried beneath the identity she’d stolen.
Two years ago, Lyla Laine Oakley had been pronounced dead at the scene of a car crash in Cosby, Tennessee. Her parents too. The only survivor listed on the estate transfer was Lacey Grace Oakley. Younger sister. Eighteen at the time.
I followed the trail.
Bank account activity flatlined after the funeral. A new checking account had been opened earlier this year, in March, using her sister’s ID. A quiet switch, subtle enough that mostbanks wouldn’t flag it unless someone was looking. There had been minimal deposits since then, just enough to get by. She had a small nest egg from the sale of her family’s home—more money than most people her age had—but she hadn’t touched it. Not a cent. The girl was disciplined—either too proud to use it or too scared that she might need it to survive one day. The last transaction on the account was a single bus ticket to New York in April of this year.
I found images next.
Not current. Not posted on any social media sites.
Just cached fragments caught by search engines before the originals had disappeared. A pair of smiling girls on horseback. A video of Lacey singing at some mountain fair. A few clips from an aerial routine at a place called The Dixie Stampede. In all of them, her blonde hair was shiny and bouncing, her blue-green eyes full of joy and passion. She had no idea what life was about to throw her way. Lacey had her arms around her sister’s neck in many of the photos, like she’d never imagined life without her.
Now she hadbecomeher sister.
There were some current images on new social media accounts—Lyla Laine reborn. I scrolled through profiles filled with footage of her aerial routines, studio headshots, and tagged photos from open-call auditions here in the city. There were a handful of group shots with the same two people in them. One was a lean guy who was often pictured without a shirt, displaying his sculpted torso and an array of tattoos. The other was a woman who could’ve passed for a big sister. Lyla clung to them in many of the pictures, laughing with that easy closeness people like me didn’t understand. She seemed especially friendly with the guy—in a lot of the photos, he had his arms around her waist, with his cheek resting against her temple. It was affectionate in a way that didn’t read as platonic. My jaw tightened.
I didn’t find any sort of images or videos of her from The Sacrifice, but I could envision her there anyway.
That tiny, strong body spinning over the heads of monsters.
