I stood and moved closer to the display, cycling through everything I’d found. She was petite but strong. Unscarred. Untouched. Not even one tattoo.
My pulse thudded in my neck.
She didn’t even know she was mine yet.
I’d never stalked a woman.
Didn’t need to. Didn’t care enough.
But she’d changed that.
And now I would follow her anywhere. No hesitation. No shame. Just the gnawing need to know where she was going—and who might be waiting there.
I had meetings lined up all afternoon—one with a Cypriot company laundering money for the Volkovi Notchi, another with a group of Turks moving arms through eastern ports for us—but I didn’t give a fuck.
I picked up my phone and canceled them all.
I glanced at the time. She’d be clocking out at Cipher soon.
I scanned the employee schedule again to confirm, then shut down the monitors. The lights dimmed around me, the room going still.
I wasn’t done with Lacey Grace Oakley.
Not even close.
Chapter six
Istood across the street from Cipher, leaning against a brick wall, cigarette burning between my fingers. The city air had a bite to it as it flowed in from the north, but I didn’t feel it.
Not when I was this focused.
I had one target.
A sudden obsession, like an itch I had to scratch.
I was determined to find out if this little ball of sunshine was anything like the rest of the women I’d known—save my sister. Did her warmth only go skin deep, or was there more to her? If it was all an act, if it was just superficial, it wouldn’t take long for me to unearth what lived at the core of her.
So here I was. Waiting. Watching.
She came out at 12:07, laughing. Some other girl walked beside her, saying something about Halloween, but her words were just background noise.
All I heard was the sound of her laughter—soft, unguarded. It cracked open something I’d always kept locked down tight. Only she existed at that moment. Bright and smiling.
Which didn’t make a damn bit of sense. How could she be that happy?
It was hard to believe she was this chipper at the end of her shift, especially since her job at The Sacrifice would’ve kept her out late last night. And according to her Cipher schedule, she had clocked in at 4:30 this morning. At most, she could’ve only grabbed an hour or two of sleep.
Maybe she was like me—able to run on fumes for a long time before crashing.
She seemed good to go for the rest of the day, her hair still pinned up in that messy bun, her cheeks flushed. Sunlight in human form, radiating genuine warmth, so unlike the women in my world, who hid behind their expensive illusions. Botox. Filters. Contoured cheekbones. Lips puffed as if they’d been stung by a bee. Those women played games for leverage, traded sex like currency, and took power any way they could get it. Even my mother—especiallymy mother—was nothing but violence wrapped in a pretty package.
But not Lyla.
This girl smiled like she thought the world was still decent enough to deserve her trust.
And it made me fucking insane.
A girl like this shouldn’t have ended up in a hellhole like The Sacrifice. She wasn’t built for that kind of filth. It was like watching a saint walk through the gates of hell, like watching a calf wander blindly into a butcher’s arms.
