Chapter 7
Chapter seven
My penthouse opened into cool order and clean lines: white floors, steel and glass accents, and a far wall of two-story windows facing the Hudson, a cathedral built for light. The river stretched out below, dark and winding, splitting Manhattan from the Jersey shore.
Everything was deliberate. Uncluttered.
But it wasn’t cold. There were angles and edges, sure, but there were also soft fabrics and places to sit with a drink and watch the city below, or to invite someone in and let the skyline carry half the conversation. I was never a man of many words.
I’d spent most of my life making do with whatever I had, never expecting more. This place was different. A retreat. A far cry from where I’d grown up. This place was one hell of a reward, and I wasn’t naive enough to believe it came without a price.
The door shut behind me with a thud, and I stood there for half a heartbeat, appreciating the silence before shrugging off my coat and dropping it onto the first chair in the foyer.
Blood and failure coated my tongue.
I headed straight for the kitchen.
I yanked open a cabinet and grabbed the whiskey, not bothering with a glass. I tipped it back and took a long pull.
Its fire stung my split lip and burned its way down my throat.
Good.
I welcomed it.
After swallowing, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and caught my reflection in the darkened window.
I’d had her.
“Fuck!”
But this was no time to wallow in my frustration. I wasn’t a pussy, and I was damn well determined to get my hands on that girl and prove to the men of The Syndicate just how valuable she was to us—how having her could control Delgado and the political machine around Hayes.
I took another swig, set the bottle down, and headed for my office on this side of the condo, opposite the guest wing. The door closed behind me with a quiet click.
The setup was Nik’s doing. He’d outfitted the office with multiple monitors, a high-end machine, and encrypted drives for me, Lachlan, Gabriel, and Julian after the initiation—because Nik Volkov didn’t just build empires with guns.
He built them with information. DarkMatter, the private-security monster he ran, was only the public face of what he really controlled.
He’d taught us the basics—enough to exploit a system, to get access, pull feeds, and watch patterns without tripping alarms or drawing attention. Enough to get eyes where we needed them, enough to be competent without pretending we were him.
I sat and brought the system online. The screens woke one by one, bathing the room in a cool blue glow. I entered my credentials and cleared the security checks, my fingers moving faster now than they had a month ago. The learning curve had been steep, but repetition had done its job.
I started with city infrastructure. Public systems first—traffic cameras, street cameras, municipal feeds tied to transportation and zoning. The kind of networks designed for oversight, not secrecy. I routed everything near Gracie Mansion and the surrounding streets into a single workspace.
A city map filled one screen as the feeds populated. Live indicators blinked on and off as connections locked in. One by one, video windows opened across the other monitors.
Fence lines. Gate entries. East End Avenue running past the park. Intersections feeding into the mayor’s security perimeter. Exterior coverage from multiple angles.
No interior feeds.
Exactly what I expected.
I leaned back and focused on the main gate’s activity. Snow drifted through the frame, softening the image. One guard paced along the fence, bundled in black, his posture rigid. Another stood near a security booth, posture bored.
I set two monitors to rotate through the relevant feeds on a timed rotation, locking them into a constant watch. If she stepped outside, if a car pulled up, if security shifted even slightly, I’d see it.
This was the waiting part.
And I hated it.
Then I opened a new window and typed her name.
Scarlett Hayes.
With a few keystrokes, the system began pulling up what it could—public records, internet mentions, social media—sufficient data to start building a picture.
Her birth certificate came first.
New York City hospital. January 1. Born minutes after midnight on New Year’s Day.
Her twenty-second birthday was days away.
Christ. That put nearly a decade between us.
Long enough that I had no business thinking about her mouth the way I had—no business imagining ruining it.
Nik and I had talked about her abduction in practical terms, the way men like us did.
The plan had been simple: find a Syndicate husband and lock her into a marriage that kept Hayes and Delgado on a short leash.
But that plan had assumed she was a simple, meek, church mouse. Not this girl. And suddenly the question wasn’t if she’d be married off—it was to whom because Scarlett Hayes was worth far more than handing her to some Syndicate lackey with a pulse and a ring.
Next up were her school records.
Early childhood in Manhattan. Elite private education. Tuition always paid on time, teachers’ notes, and attendance logs. There was nothing unusual. She was a privileged city kid—clubs, trips, the kind of life that led to a professional future.
Midway through her sophomore year, everything shifted. She was transferred to a Catholic boarding school outside Madrid—Colegio Sagrado Corazón de Madrid—without explanation. No disciplinary record. No public announcement. Just a quiet move overseas and a sharp drop in available information.
She finished high school there.
And then, immediately after, she entered a cloistered Carmelite monastery just beyond the city—Monasterio de San Juan de la Cruz.
No gap year. No university applications. No internships. No volunteer work. No attempt at a life of her own. Just vows of poverty, silence, and isolation. The world shut out permanently.
Hmm, it sounded less like devotion and more like a burial.
A tragedy for someone who’d just proven she was a little hellcat.
The girl who fought me in that church showed no inclination towards silence or obedience.
And it made no sense that a teenager who’d looked so ordinary before Spain, on a normal trajectory with a life full of options, would suddenly choose to disappear behind stone walls and locked gates.
Unless it hadn’t been a choice at all.
After the monastery, she vanished from the public record almost completely.
No social media under her own name or any obvious alias.
No digital footprint a girl her age should’ve left behind.
Just a handful of carefully staged appearances tied to her father—holiday services, religious events, a few approved photos released through official channels.
It wasn’t the absence that bothered me the most; it was its deliberateness that struck me.
I pulled up articles about her mother next.
Shannon Hayes. Architect. Irish-American. Died in a car wreck in midtown Manhattan.
Every article said the same thing using the same phrasing. A tragic accident. A grieving father who sent his only child abroad “to recover from her grief.”
The language was polished to a shine.
No investigative follow-ups. No inconsistencies acknowledged. No secondary reporting. Just a story handed to the press and repeated without deviation.
I leaned back and stared at the screen.
My instincts bristled. Politicians didn’t allow chaos into their narratives. They buried trouble. Sanitized it and replaced it with something palatable.
And whatever really happened to Scarlett Hayes—whatever happened to her mother—it wasn’t the version anyone was being told.
Someone had erased the rough edges of her life.
And people only did that when the truth was dangerous.
I leaned forward, elbows on the desk, eyes flicking between the feeds of Gracie’s perimeter and the data on my other screen.
Scarlett was a ghost in the public record.
A ghost with a mouth like sin and fists like fire—my mind slid, unbidden, back to our altercation at Our Lady of Lourdes.
The night had been a disaster for me. I pressed my tongue to the split in my lip, and my cock twitched, remembering the way she’d ground herself against me, knowing exactly what she was doing.
It pissed me off that my body had reacted. Not because sex rattled me—it never had—but because she’d used it to distract me, and I’d let it happen. Desire itself wasn’t the problem. Being played was.
Hell, I loved to fuck. Always had. For me, it was simple—nothing more than physical release, hunger satisfied, nothing owed. No lies about forever. I didn’t do love, and I’d learned young never to give my heart to anyone.
By no means was I pretentious about how people played, either.
As long as sex was consensual and among adults, it didn’t matter if it was one-on-one or in a room full of the willing.
It didn’t matter the label—bi, gay, straight, monogamous, or many—who cared, as long as everyone got what they came for.
Hell, I’d shared Anastasia with Conan so she could clear her mind about what she wanted.
It hadn’t made me less of a man. It hadn’t made me want men.
It had just made me open-minded about what women wanted and how far they’d go when they trusted you not to judge them for it.
But Scarlett—
She was a puzzle.
A demon in a holy sister’s skin.
A girl who fought as if she’d rather die than be taken.
And she’d gotten under my skin in one night.
I stared at the grainy feed of Gracie’s gate again, snow drifting, guards pacing, everything calm on the surface.
On another screen, her name glowed beside her birth date and her scrubbed past.
I sat back in my chair, jaw tight, eyes burning.
Saint, sinner, hellcat—whatever she was…
She was mine.