Chapter 15
The Dead Girl’s Curse
Asher
The headline is already waiting when I sit down, stretched across the screen like a challenge.
Socialite Found Dead in Penthouse. Drug Overdose Suspected.
I don’t need to read past the first paragraph to feel it settle in my gut, heavy and wrong. Alessandra Moore. Twenty-three. Too much money, too much access, and too little sense. The article dances around specifics—unregulated substances, party rumors, and whispers of a designer drug—but the implication is loud enough to echo.
Z.
I close my hand around the paper copy Maverick left on my desk, the thin pages crumpling under my grip as heat coils low and vicious in my chest. I wasn’t at that party. I didn’t approve it. It wasn’t hosted by anyone under my direct oversight, and that was supposed to mean it didn’t matter.
That assumption is what burns.
This is my city. My territory. Nothing moves here without my knowledge for long, and nothing lethal moves without consequence. A body in a penthouse isn’t just a tragedy—it’s a failure of control, and failures invite scrutiny. Rivals. Law enforcement. Opportunists waiting for cracks.
I push from the desk and begin pacing, the polished floor reflecting the skyline outside the glass walls. New York looks orderly from this height—clean lines, predictable patterns, and obedience built into the grid. Inside my head, everything fractures.
Because I still can’t answer the one question that matters.
Was it Z?
My team hasn’t been able to duplicate it—not fully, not cleanly—not with unlimited resources and some of the best chemists money can buy. We’ve tried. Broken it down, rebuilt it, and chased its structure through dead ends and half-solutions. Whatever Violet created isn’t just clever—it’s precise in a way that refuses to be rushed.
IfZkilled her, then someone used it without my provision, without my safeguards, and without my oversight. If it was tampered with—cut, overdosed, and contaminated—then someone is sloppy enough to turn my city into a testing ground. And if it’s counterfeit, if a cheap imitation slipped into circulation under my nose, then I have a far uglier problem.
Either way, it ends the same.
A death on my territory, tied to a drug I don’t control.
My jaw tightens as I think of Cami, of her parties, her excess, and her refusal to understand that chaos isn’t the same thing as freedom. She had no right to moveZwithout clearance. No right to place it in hands I hadn’t vetted, at an event I hadn’t sanctioned. Her recklessness doesn’t just embarrass me—it destabilizes everything.
And then there’s Violet.
I don’t want to connect her to this. I push against the thought instinctively, because it doesn’t fit. She’s careful. Calculated. Every move measured and deliberate. She understands consequence in a way most people never bother to learn.
But she also doesn’t understand the stakes.
That’s the truth I keep circling, no matter how much I resist it. She knows chemistry. She knows systems. She doesn’t know territory, or power, or what happens when control slips just enough for someone else to take advantage.
The alternative—that she knowingly allowed this, that she created something capable of killing and let it loose anyway—sits heavy and poisonous in my chest. I hate it. Hate that the question exists at all.
My phone vibrates against the desk, sharp and insistent. A blocked number. I already know it won’t be nothing.
You built your empire on control. Now watch it rot from the inside. The Order is cracking. I’ll be there when it falls.
Cold replaces heat in an instant, the kind of calm that only comes when violence becomes inevitable. This isn’t posturing. This isn’t a desperate rival throwing threats into thedark.
This is someone paying attention.
A knock sounds at the door, measured and familiar. “You saw it,” Maverick says as he steps inside, his gaze flicking briefly to the ruined paper on my desk.
“Of course I saw it,” I reply, my voice steady even as my thoughts churn. “What I didn’t see coming wasZshowing up where it doesn’t belong.”
He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, eyes sharp. “You think it came from Violet?”
