And he’s watching.
Maybe he never really stopped.
Chapter 25
Aheadache has been grinding behind my eyes for three straight days—dull and relentless, the kind that makes you blink slow, and hard like maybe the dark will ease it. It doesn’t. Nothing does. Not the vodka. Not the phone calls I half-hear. Not the work I keep drowning in because it’s easier than thinking about how fucked up everything is.
I’ve been avoiding Lily’s streams like they might drag me under and never let me surface. Missing even one leaves me feeling anxious but I won’t gamble with her safety.
Not when I don’t have a plan. Not when she’s already on Antonio’s radar and every sign points to him being at least complicit in the trafficking.
I have more fucking questions than answers, and that’s exactly why I need to get my head in the game and off her. But then again… I’ve never been good at forgetting Lily Davis. She’s always there, no more than half a thought away, crawling into every corner of my mind at the most inconvenient times.
Behind my eyelids when I blink.
In the shadowed corners of my room that feel too empty without her, too silent.
In my dreams and nightmares, taunting me with all that I’ll never have.
Every memory, every flicker of her in my mind, sharpens the ache I’ve been trying to bury.
No matter how much I try to focus on work, on obligations, on anything that isn’t her, it’s futile. Lily exists in every pause, every silence, every moment my mind refuses to surrender and all roads lead back to her. The more I dig into Jen, the more my thoughts circle back to the girl who used to look at me with hearts in her eyes, until I shattered everything good between us.
Sending her coffee isn’t enough, so… I cracked. I sent her the lingerie I’ve been imagining tearing off with my teeth. I want her in silk and lace. I want her moaning my name. I want every secret she’s buried to spill across me like confession, like absolution. I want the past rewritten, every fracture mended, every wound undone.
Wanting her might be wrong. But I want her anyway.
When she didn’t come for me after BegForMe disappeared—when she let me vanish without chasing—I splintered. A darker part of me wanted her to fold, to prove I still lived inside her in some small, ruined way. I wanted proof that I mattered, even in my absence. Anything I could use to keep breathing.
Maybe that makes me a coward. Maybe it makes me something worse. All I know is that with every day that passes, the silence eats me alive. The need to see her grows heavier, sharper, until it feels less like wanting and more like suffocating.
That last stream—her chin lifted, her gaze steady, every curve of her body screaming unbothered, unclaimed. She’s not the Lily who used to hide behind me when the world turned sharp. She’s this new version, steel threaded into her spine like a crown she forged herself.
And fuck… I couldn’t be prouder of her.
The ache behind my eyes spikes. I drag a hand down my face, press my palm into the sockets until stars burst, but it’s useless. This tension is rooted deeper than bone.
My phone buzzes on the table, snapping me from the cloud of self-pity. Liam’s name flashes on the screen, and the ever-familiar dread curls tight in my gut.
I let it vibrate twice before answering, leaning back hard in the chair. “Tell me you’ve got something good.”
“You’re dreaming if you think there’s any good left in this mess,” Liam rasps, sounding as wrecked as I feel. “Aidan’s been at the docks all morning. You’re going to want to hear this.”
My body goes rigid. “What did he find?”
There’s a pause, dead air, heavy enough to taste. “Some cargo came in from Napoli last week, but the manifests were scrubbed. Apparently, they were offloaded to some private trucking company with false plates.”
Heat crawls up my neck. “Human?”
“That’s the problem, we don’t know. I looked back through the camera logs but they’re blank. Between that and the empty logs, it's a dead end.”
Blood roars in my ears. “They’re moving them through our ports?”
“We don’t know who,” Liam repeats, careful now. “But someone is. And they’ve got help on the inside.”
Aidan cuts in, his voice sharp enough to split glass, fury threaded through every syllable. “Micky spotted one of Salvatore’s guys leaving with the truck.”
The words hit like a fist to the sternum. My vision goes hot around the edges, red and pulsing, because of course it’s them. It’s always the ones we trust, and I am sick to death of these bastards thinking they can pull one over on us.
