Chapter 25
IRIS
I stand under the scalding spray of the bunker’s shower, letting it beat down on my shoulders. I watch the runoff swirl pink down the chrome drain until it finally runs clear. The mud from the garden, the grit from the copper pipe, and the dried blood—Cassian’s and my own—are all gone.
What remains is evidence of last night.
I trace my fingers over the dark, blooming bruises on my hips. I touch the purple mark on my neck. They throb with a dull ache, but it isn’t a pain I want to wash away. It’s an anchor. It’s proof that I survived the descent into the dark.
I turn the water off and step out into the chilled air, wrapping a thick towel around myself. I dry off quickly, avoiding my reflection in the mirror.
I dress in the clothes from the duffel bag Cassian brought down earlier—a fresh pair of dark jeans and a thick black sweater. They fit perfectly. I pull my damp hair back into a tight knot at the nape of my neck, clinging to the familiar, comforting routine of making myself presentable.
For the first time since I woke up in this concrete fortress, my heart isn’t racing.
The hammering in my chest has finally calmed. The gang war is paused. The men who tried to kill us are dead.
And Cassian...
I take a deep breath, the scent of his cedar soap clinging to my skin.
The line between captor and savior is gone, and the truth is that I don’t want it back.
I sit on the edge of the mattress, waiting for the door to open.
Earlier, I told Cassian I wanted to speak with my dad once things were clear.
Now, I need to get ready for the call. I run a hand over my jeans, my mind rehearsing the words.
He must be out of his mind with worry. I want to tell him that I’m safe, that the worst is over, and that I’ll be coming home soon to see him.
Hearing his voice will make the rest of this nightmare fade.
The lock engages with a loud clank.
The door swings outward.
I stand up, a tentative smile forming on my lips. “Cassian, I—”
The words die in my throat.
The Ghost stands in the doorway.
His posture is rigid, his shoulders squared, pulling his dark shirt taut across his chest. The white bandage is hidden, but his face is a mask carved from unforgiving stone.
My smile falters, my stomach twisting with sudden, sharp anxiety.
“Cassian?” I whisper. “What’s wrong? Did they come back?”
“No,” he says. “Follow me. We’re going upstairs.”
He doesn’t wait for my answer. He turns on his heel and walks out into the command center.
I hurry after him. We bypass the glowing server racks and the wall of monitors, stepping into the elevator. He swipes his palm on the biometric reader, hitting the button for the ground floor.
The doors slide shut, sealing us in the steel box.
“Cassian, you’re scaring me,” I say, wrapping my arms around my waist. “What happened?”
He stares straight ahead at the brushed steel doors.
“Varro finally cracked Elias’s flash drive,” he says, his jaw tight.
My brow furrows. “A flash drive?”
“It holds the blackmail files he was stealing.”
The realization clicks into place. That was the evidence they were willing to kill for. That was what Varro shoved into Cassian’s pocket at the elevator.
“Did you find out what the files are?”
“Yes.”
The elevator chimes, and the doors slide open. We’re on the main floor. The emergency shutters are still locked down tight over the massive windows, blocking out the morning storm. The house feels huge, empty, and hauntingly quiet.
As we walk out of the foyer, the physical reality of the siege hits me.
The Great Hall is destroyed. The marble pillars are chewed to pieces by heavy-caliber gunfire.
Shattered glass from the display cases crunches under Cassian’s boots.
The smell of bleach and harsh chemical cleaners drifts intensely through the air, fighting a losing battle against the lingering stench of cordite and copper.
Cassian doesn’t slow down. He leads me down the long, silent corridor and into his private office.
The door clicks shut behind us. The interior is miraculously untouched by the crossfire, but the thick steel plates covering the floor-to-ceiling glass turn the room into a dark, claustrophobic vault.
He walks behind his dark wood desk and doesn’t sit. He stands there, a dark monolith in the shadows, and gestures for me to step forward to the opposite side of the desk.
His demeanor is so grim, so devoid of light, that my hands start to shake. The danger hasn’t passed. It has moved inside the house.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sleek, matte-black tablet. He sets it on the leather blotter and slides it across the smooth wood until it stops inches from my hands.
“What is this?” I ask, staring at the blank screen.
“The truth,” he says.
He looks up, finally meeting my eyes. The intensity in his gaze pins me to the floor. He looks like an executioner delivering a final sentence.
“Elias wasn’t just stealing files,” he tells me plainly, his voice cutting through the silence. “He was a whistleblower. He found the ledger of the city’s corruption, and your father was right at the absolute center of it. Elias was going to expose him, so your father ordered the hit.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“Your father sent me to the museum,” he states. “He hired me to execute Elias and secure whatever evidence he was carrying.”
“No,” I say, taking a physical step back from the desk. I shake my head. “No. That’s a lie.”
He reaches across the desk and taps the screen of the tablet.
It flares to life and displays a series of documents. Scanned bank records. Offshore routing numbers. Wire transfer authorizations.
“Look at it,” he commands.
I drop my gaze to the glowing screen. The numbers blur together at first, a confusing, dense spreadsheet of international finance. But then my eyes catch a specific string of text at the top of the header.
The Vanguard Blind Trust. Cayman Islands.
I know that trust. I’ve seen that exact name printed on the cardstock of the estate planning documents sitting on my father’s desk at home. It’s the trust my father uses to manage his inherited family wealth outside of his judicial salary.
I reach out with a shaking finger and scroll down the document.
Attached to a wire transfer for two million dollars is a digital authorization signature.
It’s my father’s personal seal. The intricate, interlocking ‘WH’ monogram he uses for his private correspondence. The timestamp on the transfer is dated the day before the museum hit.
“No,” I whisper, snatching my hand back from the tablet like the glass burned me.
“He didn’t just hire me,” he says, battering down my defenses.
“Your father hired Kirill’s faction first as private mercenaries to kill Elias and take the evidence.
The money went straight to a Syndicate shell company.
But when Elias bypassed the drop point and broke into the museum instead, Kirill couldn’t get to him in time. So your father used me as his backup.”
“No,” I say again. “No, this is fake. You made this.”
“Iris—”
“You hacked this!” I shout, my voice cracking, echoing off the expensive wood-paneled walls. “You have servers downstairs! You have tech people! You manufactured this to manipulate me!”
“Why would I manufacture a hit on myself?” he asks, his logic razor-sharp. Merciless.
“Because... because he’s a judge!” I stammer, my mind racing to build a defense for the man who raised me. “He puts criminals in jail! People want to frame him! Elias probably stole his seal. Or... or Volkov hacked his trust to pay Kirill and make it look like my dad did it!”
“He wasn’t framed, Iris,” he says, entirely ignoring my rationalizations. He taps the screen again, swiping to a new document showing a second wire transfer. “And when I took you, he panicked. He paid Kirill again to wipe me out and burn the evidence.”
“Shut up!” I cover my ears with my hands, squeezing my eyes shut. My mind bucks. It won’t take it in.
He’s my father. He’s a Federal Judge. He demanded perfection because he wanted me to be exceptional. He protected me.
“He loves me,” I insist, my chest heaving, hot tears flooding my vision. “He wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t order a hit on Elias! He’s a good man!”
Cassian watches me break. He stands there like a stone wall.
“A good man would have called the police the second he realized you were gone,” he says, delivering the blow with brutal precision. “A good man wouldn’t have gone on television and smiled while telling the entire world you were at a yoga retreat in Bali.”
“He was buying time!” I sob, clinging desperately to the pathetic lie I’ve held onto. The one thing that’s kept me afloat. “He was stalling so he could find me! He was trying to protect me from the press!”
“He wasn’t stalling,” he says softly. “He didn’t report you missing, probably because he was waiting for the Syndicate to confirm the kill. You’re a loose end, Iris. You’re a witness.”
The words strike like physical blows to the stomach.
“You’re lying,” I weep, my knees buckling. I hit the floor hard, the thick, expensive rug burning my knees. “Please, Cassian. Tell me you’re lying.”
He comes around the desk and crouches down in front of me, bringing himself down to my level. He holds the tablet out, the screen glowing in the dim light of the vault.
“I wish I were,” he whispers.
He taps a final file on the screen. An audio file.
Rec_004_Intercept.wav.
“Listen,” he commands.
He hits play. A burst of digital static hisses from the tablet’s small speakers, followed by the hollow, echoing sound of a connected phone call.
I stop breathing. My lungs lock. I stare at the tablet, completely paralyzed, as I listen to the smooth, distinguished voice of my father furiously negotiating the price of a siege with a Russian mercenary. Five million dollars. Five million dollars to storm the compound.
Then, Kirill asks about me. He warns my father that I might not survive the crossfire.
The silence on the recording stretches. My heart stops beating. I wait for the man who raised me to tell the mercenary to call it off. I wait for him to demand my safe return. I wait for him to be a father.
Instead, he casually writes me off as a necessary casualty. He tells Kirill that a Supreme Court nominee who loses his only daughter to gang violence becomes an untouchable martyr.
“...it will be a devastating loss for this family,” my father states coldly.
The recording clicks off.
The silence in the office is suffocating.
I stare at the blank, black screen of the tablet. My stomach heaves.
He weaponized my murder. He planned to stand over my closed casket, wearing a black suit, weeping for the cameras, using my slaughtered, bullet-riddled body as a stepping stone to the highest court in the country.
I wasn’t a daughter. I was a prop, and when I became inconvenient, he threw me away.
A raw, ugly sound rips out of me.
I collapse forward, my hands hitting the carpet, my forehead pressing into the floor.
I scream.
I scream until my lungs burn and black spots dance in my vision. The pain in my chest is so vast that it feels like it has been cracked open with a pry bar. I can’t breathe. I can’t pull air into my lungs. The room spins. My hands claw at the rug, my fingers curling into tight, agonizing fists.
The world I knew is gone.
Strong hands grip my shoulders.
Cassian drags me from the floor. I fight him blindly, thrashing, sobbing, striking out at the only thing I can reach. My fists bounce off his chest, hitting his collarbone.
He absorbs it, taking every uncoordinated hit without flinching.
He pulls me flush against him, wrapping his arms around me in a vice grip, crushing me to his chest. He buries his face in my damp hair, pinning my arms down, physically holding me together while I shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Let it out,” he rumbles against my ear, his voice a low, steady anchor in the middle of the hurricane. “Burn it down, Iris. Let it burn.”
I sob into his shirt, my fingers digging desperately into the fabric of his back.
I cry until there are no tears left, until my body is nothing but a hollow, shaking shell.
Minutes pass.
Maybe hours.
Time loses its meaning entirely. The hyperventilation slows into a weak, shuddering rhythm.
The crying stops, and I go numb. The inferno of grief burns itself out, leaving freezing, razor-sharp clarity in my brain.
I pull my face away from his chest.
Cassian loosens his grip, letting me lean back, but he keeps his large hands firmly on my arms, steadying me.
All I can do is look up at him.
The world isn’t cut cleanly into black and white. Sometimes it’s a twisted, gray nightmare. The man I’ve been fighting to please my entire life, the saint who preaches about justice and the law—he’s the one who casually priced out my execution. He doesn’t even care if I’m alive.
And the man everyone thinks is a monster... the criminal with blood stained permanently into his hands... he’s the one who took a heavy-caliber bullet to keep my heart beating. He is the one who finally made me see the truth.
My father is the monster.
The roles have completely reversed. I stare into Cassian’s eyes. The forensic evidence on the tablet, the audio recording, the timeline—everything clicks at once, and it turns my stomach.
My father hired Cassian to kill Elias. He had Cassian’s direct line. He had his secure communication protocols. You don’t find a man like Cassian in the phonebook. You don’t summon the city’s most elusive, lethal Don with an anonymous text message unless you already own the leash.
The numbness recedes, replaced by a sharp, cold focus. The tears dry on my face.
“Cassian,” I whisper.
“I’m here,” he says softly.
I grip his forearms.
“How do you know him?” I ask, the words dropping like stones into the quiet room.
He looks away for a fraction of a second, the guilt he’s been hiding flashing across his face before he ruthlessly suppresses it.
“Iris...”
“Don’t lie to me,” I say, my grip tightening on his arms, my fingernails digging into his skin.
The last remaining shred of my innocence is gone, leaving only the brutal demand for the truth.
“You said you kill monsters. You said you don’t take political hits.
So why were you at the museum doing his dirty work? ”
I hold his gaze, refusing to let him look away from the wreckage he helped create.
“How does my father know the Ghost?” I demand.
He lets out a slow breath, finally surrendering the secret.
“Five years ago,” he says, his voice completely hollow, “your father saved my life. And in return, I gave him my soul.”