Chapter 16
IRIS
He leaves me standing in the gray wash of morning light, the door clicking shut behind him. The silence is thick, clogged with the smell of stale coffee and the bitter hit of Cassian’s lie.
A thief.
Studying the blueprints spread across the mahogany table, the Red Xs stare back at me—the acoustic vent, the hollow column. I trace the lines with a trembling fingertip.
He claims Elias was a thief trying to steal blackmail files. That the marks were for infiltration. It makes sense on the surface. It’s logical. It explains why a man would break into a museum in the middle of the night.
But it doesn’t explain the look in Cassian’s eyes when I mentioned the vents.
For a split second, the mask slipped. The cold, tactical “Ghost” vanished, and I saw shock. And then... rage.
He looked like a man who’d realized the weapon he was holding was pointed at his own chest.
I killed a man I thought was a terrorist. Turns out, I was misinformed.
I wrap my arms around my waist, shivering despite the fabric of the black button-down shirt I’m wearing. It hangs to the middle of my thighs, smelling of gun oil and expensive detergent.
Owns.
The word echoes in my head, dragging up the memory of last night. The wall. The tearing of the silk. The way he filled me, possessed me, broke me.
I close my eyes, and my body betrays me instantly. My core clenches, my nipples hardening against the cotton as a flush of heat travels up my neck.
I’m alive. And he made me feel alive. When he pinned me against that wall, I wasn’t powerless. I was furious and wrecked, and I demanded it anyway. That’s the part that scares me. I hate that I wanted it.
Get dressed, he had said. Real clothes.
I open my eyes.
I need to focus. I can’t let the lust—or whatever this sick, chemical tether is between us—distract me from the reality.
I don’t have the hard proof yet, but I grew up around men who turned guesses into certainty with a robe and a gavel. I know what a pattern looks like, and every thread points back to the men who want to destroy my father.
Leaving the dining room, I take the elevator back up to the Tower. The sprawling, open-concept fortress feels empty without Cassian filling the space.
Finding a door that’s ajar down the hall, I push it open.
It’s a vast walk-in closet, larger than my entire apartment in the city, filled with rows of black suits, tactical gear, and pristine white shirts.
On a center island sits an unzipped duffel bag.
Inside, I find women’s clothes. Jeans. Sweaters. Boots. Underwear still in the packaging.
Did he buy these? When? He hasn’t left the estate.
I check the tag on the jeans. My size. Exactly. I check the sweater. Cashmere, dove gray—my color.
It wasn’t a rush job. His men didn’t need to leave the estate to shop; they just needed a phone and a runner. Money moves faster than gates, I guess. He had my dossier. My measurements, my habits, my life—reduced to a shopping list. It feels curated, like I was an inevitability.
I reach in and pull out the dark wash jeans and a gray cashmere sweater—cheaper than the one Cassian cut off me, but soft.
I strip off Cassian’s shirt and catch my reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall. The sight freezes me. My body is a map of violence.
There are dark bruises on my hips where his hands gripped me, and a dark, purple mark on my neck from his chokehold.
I touch the mark on my neck. It throbs under my fingers.
I dress quickly, pulling on the tight, stiff jeans and dragging the sweater over my head to hide the marks. After pulling on thick wool socks, I step into the leather boots sitting next to the bag, lacing them tight to make up for them being a little big.
My reflection in the mirror doesn’t look like Iris Hale, the debutante florist. She isn’t a girl who worries about petal symmetry. She looks like a fugitive.
“Good,” I whisper.
I turn and leave the closet to find him. The gray morning has reduced the storm to a steady drizzle. I find a door at the end of the hall that was locked yesterday. Today, it opens.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Following the sound, I step into a gym. Mats cover the floor, with racks of free weights and a boxing ring in the corners. At the center, a bag hangs from a steel beam.
Cassian is destroying it.
He’s shirtless, wearing low-slung black sweatpants, his feet bare on the mat. His hands are wrapped in black tape.
Every strike is calculated, brutal, and devoid of wasted energy.
A low kick snaps into the bottom quadrant, followed instantly by a driving elbow to the center.
The canvas bag groans, swinging wildly, but he steps into the arc and stops it dead with a knee.
He unleashes a combination of strikes that are too fast to track.
Jab-cross-hook. The bag shudders and bends under the force.
I stop in the doorway. His back is to me.
I trace the muscles shifting under his skin. The broad expanse of his shoulders, the taper of his waist. He’s built like a weapon—lean, hard, scarred.
There’s a network of white lines crisscrossing his back. Old scars. Too straight to be an accident. Too old to be last night. And there, on his left shoulder, is a fresh bandage. Shrapnel from the crash. Or glass from the windshield.
Either way, it happened because he came for me.
He hits the bag again. A roundhouse kick that sounds like a gunshot.
WHAM.
He stops, catching the swinging bag with one hand to steady it without turning around. I glance at the corner of the ceiling. A pinprick of red light. He watched me walk in.
“I found the clothes,” I say, stepping onto the mats. The rubber yields under my boots.
“Good.”
He walks to a mini fridge in the corner, pulling out a bottle of water and downing half of it in one swallow. He reeks of sweat and adrenaline. It shouldn’t be attractive, but it is.
“You said I’m not going back in the box,” I say, keeping my distance.
He caps the water bottle, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
“You aren’t,” he says. “But there are rules.”
“What rules?”
“You have the run of the main house,” he clarifies. “The library. The kitchen. The gym. But you don’t leave the estate walls. And you don’t touch the comms.”
Turning, he walks back to the bag, wrapping his hands around the chain to steady it.
“That’s the deal,” he says. “You stop trying to escape. You stop throwing crystal decanters at my head. And I keep you alive.”
“And if I break the rules?”
“Then the deal is off, and I lock you back in the bedroom,” he says simply. “And you spend the next week staring at the wall.”
I weigh his words. He’s giving me a leash. A long one, but still a leash. But it’s better than the alternative.
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
“Good.”
He turns his head, glancing at me over his shoulder. “There’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“If the alarms go off,” he says, “you run to me. You don’t hide. You don’t try to be a hero. You find me.”
“Why?”
“Because if they take you again,” he says, “I’ll have to burn the city down to get you back. And I’m tired of cleaning up ashes.”
“Now go eat,” he commands. “I have work to do.”
I watch him for a second longer before turning and walking out of the gym.
The mezzanine hallway outside is silent and cold.
At the far end are floor-to-ceiling windows.
I walk to them and stare out at the grounds.
Even from here, I can make out the deep gouges in the earth near the service road where the crash happened, and the black scorch marks on the asphalt where the cars burned.
They wanted to see if your father would pay the bill, Cassian had said.
I press my forehead against the glass. He lied.
If the Syndicate wanted me for ransom, they wouldn’t have sent a heavily armed hit squad to idle outside a fortified compound. You don’t bring a private army to a fortress to wait for a hostage to walk out. You bring an army to wipe out the king.
And Elias.
Cassian said Elias was a blackmailer. But why would a blackmailer mark the acoustic vents? Why would he care about listening to the archives? If you want digital files, you hack the server. You don’t plant bugs in the walls.
He was trying to catch someone on tape. That’s what Cassian said in the dining room. My father, the Senator, or another VIP.
Taking a bribe? Giving an order? That was his excuse. But why is he protecting the identity of the target?
I close my eyes. The pieces are there, floating in the dark, but they don’t fit the picture he is painting. He’s hiding something. He’s protecting a secret that’s bigger than me
I’m a pawn in a war I don’t understand.
“Fine,” I whisper to the empty room. “You want to play games, Cassian? Let’s play.”
He gave me the run of the house. He said Don’t touch the comms.
He didn’t say Don’t touch the files.
The blueprints on the dining room table only told me how Elias broke in, not why. But a man like Cassian doesn’t kill someone without doing background checks. He has to have a dossier.
I head back toward the stairs. If I’m going to survive the wolves, I need to know what they are hunting.
First stop, the library. I’m going to find Cassian’s paper trail on the dead man.