The girl I loved. The girl I was ready to walk away from everything for.
So why the act? Why pretend there was no connection at all?
I tell myself it had to be calculated. A smokescreen. Something meant to keep us blind, off balance because that version hurts less than the alternative. Even so, the explanation feels thin when I sit with it too long.
And yet… what am I supposed to think, when the evidence keeps stacking up against her, and loving her doesn’t make any of it disappear?
I slam the latest file shut harder than I intend to. The crack of it cuts through the room, sharp enough that Liam glances over but I don’t look up. I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose, hard enough to hurt, like I can stop my skull from splitting open under the mounting pressure that never seems to ease these days.
Because loving her doesn’t make the facts disappear. And doubting her doesn’t stop it from feeling like I’m tearing myself in half.
My thoughts keep looping, snagging, seizing on the same jagged fragments—the look of betrayal on Lily’s face, the leads that collapse into nothing, the answers that only seem to open into darker questions. Every path bends back on itself. Every conclusion frays the closer I get.
And at the centre of it all sits Orchis.
The email domain Jen and Benedict used. The same name surfacing again and again in buried ledgers, scrubbed transfers, payments laundered so thoroughly they might as well have never existed. A company that traces back to nothing but an offshore shell layered beneath another shell, and another beneath that—too neat, too deliberate to be innocent.
Orchis.
A pretty name for something rotten. A flower that feeds on decay.
If we could tie a real, living name to it—just one name—we might have the thread that pulls the whole operation apart. But every time we get close, the trail snaps, like someone is cutting it clean just seconds before we reach it.
What we originally thought was a somewhat contained sex trafficking ring we could dismantle has bled out into something sprawling, something feral, something that feels endless. And I’m already running on empty.
Logan and Alex have been working nonstop to rebuild the Clan ever since Logan took over, after killing his own father in the hope that it would end this shitshow. We all thought that when Logan pulled the trigger, Angus’s sick little ring would be shut down.
But Helen’s sudden reappearance last year blew everything wide open again, exposing the dark web chatter that never stops,and now Angus Graham feels like just a small part of a much bigger picture.
Girls are still disappearing, faster than ever, and it’s become glaringly obvious that while we might have cut off one head of the snake, another has already spawned. Or maybe we were always chasing the wrong one.
From the moment Helen pieced together Jen’s involvement, we all knew there wouldn’t be a clean solution to any of this. No tidy ending. No room for mercy when lives were already unravelling by the minute. And in the end, exile was the only kind choice Jonathan could make.
It was that, or death and some still argue letting Lily live was a mistake. My Da being the chief of that particular club.
But fucking hell.
Even knowing she used me, lied to me, twisted the truth until I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t tell what was real and what was just another performance.
Even knowing all that…
I still couldn’t have stood there and watched them put a bullet in her skull.
I would’ve burned the whole fucking organisation to the ground before I let them touch one hair on her perfect head.
And now… now I’m expected to play my role like we aren’t still up to our necks in this shit. Pack a bag. Board a jet. Fly to Italy in the morning and smile for the cameras. Honour my goddamn marriage contract and move to Turin like it’s business as usual when it’s anything but.
Like Lily Davis didn’t crack me open and crawl into the space where my heart used to be.
Like I haven’t spent every waking minute since, wondering if sheevermeant any of it. If even a single second of what we had was real.
Don Antonio Salvatore is a man I’ve only met a handful of times over the years. He’s old-school Italian Mafia royalty, and on paper this marriage is a great business decision—they get access to our ports, we get a cut of their wine and heroine exports.
But after how hard they negotiated to pull me into their territory, I’m not naïve enough to believe the Italians see this marriage as just business. And if they ever figure out who Lily really is—what she means to me—they won’t hesitate to use her.
She’d become leverage, a pressure point, a lesson.
And if they discover I’ve been watching her streams—if they see how far my control slips, how I’ve been chasing her through a screen like some addict while engaged to one of their own—they won’t wait for explanations. They’ll gut me before I get a single word out.
