Chapter 28
I Know You’re Hiding Something
Mira
The room stayed quiet except for the sound of our breathing slowly evening out around each other.
I lay half across Aiden’s chest, my fingertips moving lazily over skin I used to know better than my own.
The tattoos beneath my hand told their own timeline if you looked closely enough.
Some I recognized instantly, even after two years.
The roses that spread across the upper part of his chest, dark ink curling around the faded playing cards near his collarbone; those had been there before everything fell apart.
Before Ghost. Before Ironhand. Before death became something he wore like another layer of skin.
The newer ones were different.
Sharper somehow.
Harder.
My fingers drifted lower until they brushed over the words inked above the skull with spread wings on his pec—King of Hell.
The design sat darker than the others, the lines newer, cleaner, like whatever version of him chose that tattoo wasn’t the same man who used to kiss me slow in tiny apartments and talk about futures we never got to have.
Aiden’s chest rose beneath my cheek in a slow breath as my fingers traced the edge of the skull absently.
“When did you get this one?” I asked quietly.
His hand, resting low against my bare back, flexed once before relaxing again. “About eight months after I disappeared.”
The answer settled heavily between us. Not because of what he said. Because of how he said it. Flat. Controlled. Like, even now, he still thought of it as disappearing instead of dying to everyone who loved him.
My jaw tightened slightly, but I didn’t push the point. Not yet.
Instead, I tilted my head enough to look up at him properly in the dim light spilling through the cracked bathroom door. His eyes were already on me, focused in that quiet, intense way that always made me feel like he was halfway through saying something he never actually let himself finish.
And there it was again—that look.
I’d been catching pieces of it for days now. The slight hesitation before he spoke. The way his mouth would open like he was about to finally tell me whatever the hell he’d been carrying around since he came back into my life, only to shut himself down at the last second.
Even tonight, after everything between us softened enough to feel almost honest, I could see it sitting there behind his eyes.
Words he wasn’t saying. Truths he kept swallowing.
My fingers stilled against his chest as the realization finally clicked fully into place. This wasn’t just about us. Not entirely.
At first, I thought his distance came from guilt.
Fear. The unresolved wreckage of what he’d done when he left me behind.
And some of it probably was that. But the more time passed, the more obvious it became that something else lay beneath it all, something heavier than our relationship or whatever broken thing we were trying to rebuild inside Ironhand.
He was scared.
Not of me. For me.
That distinction landed cold in my stomach.
Aiden’s hand slid slowly up my back, grounded and careful. Still, it didn’t distract me from the way his eyes shifted briefly toward the ceiling afterward, like he was recalculating something internally all over again.
“You keep doing that,” I murmured.
His gaze dropped back to mine immediately. “Doing what?”
“Almost telling me something.”
Silence. Not defensive or confused. Caught.
There it was again. That nearly imperceptible tightening in his jaw before he smoothed it away.
And suddenly, lying there against him with his heartbeat steady beneath my hand, I realized something that scared me almost as much as Ironhand itself.
Whatever Aiden was hiding? It was bigger than us.
I couldn’t let it go after that. Once the thought rooted itself in my head, it spread through everything else, threading together moments that hadn’t fully made sense before.
Aiden’s constant hesitation. The way his focus sharpened anytime external movement got mentioned.
The look on his face after the transport run was like he’d recognized something far worse than what I’d already seen inside that truck.
He knew more than he was saying.
And if he wouldn’t tell me, I’d find it myself.
Three nights later, I sat alone in one of the lower archive terminals tucked beneath the logistics floor, the monitor’s dim glow the only light in the cramped room.
Most of Ironhand’s upper operations ran through isolated systems, intentionally fragmented so that no one below a certain clearance level ever saw the whole picture.
But fragmentation created patterns if you stared at it long enough.
And patterns were my specialty.
I pulled up the routing manifests from the transport first, cross-referencing shipment codes against external transfer logs while my fingers moved quickly across the keyboard.
At first, it looked exactly as Ironhand wanted it to: generic shipping fronts, warehouse distributions, medical supply transfers routed through shell operations too boring to attract attention.
Except the timelines didn’t line up.
Certain shipments moved too frequently without maintaining inventory records.
Storage facilities listed active deliveries despite the absence of employee rosters.
Offshore accounts tied to the transfers cycled money through three or four holding companies before disappearing entirely into accounts registered abroad.
Laundering. Not just localized either. Organized.
My pulse slowed as the picture sharpened.
The deeper I dug, the uglier it became.
One shell company tied to freight movement out of the Gulf had partial route overlaps with three separate missing persons cases from six months earlier.
Another connected through offshore payments to a medical transport service that, according to public records, no longer existed. But Ironhand was still using it.
I leaned forward slowly, eyes scanning line after line while something cold settled more heavily in my stomach.
This wasn’t a fight ring funding side operations … this was infrastructure. A network large enough to bury people inside paperwork and financial reroutes so thoroughly that they vanished before anyone realized they were gone.
And suddenly Aiden’s silence made a terrifying amount of sense. Because if he already knew how deep this went, then whatever he was protecting me from wasn’t just Ironhand. It was something much larger. Something with enough reach that even he looked worried.
The more useful I became, the closer Silas kept me.
At first, it was subtle enough to write off as operational convenience—more direct assignments.
More time spent reviewing routes beside him instead of being buried downstairs with lower-level logistics.
He started requesting me specifically for external briefings, positioning me near him during movement discussions, as if he trusted my input more than the others at the table.
But after a while, it stopped feeling professional. It felt personal.
Not flirtation exactly. Silas didn’t strike me as the type to blur the line between business and desire carelessly.
Everything about him was controlled too tightly for that.
But there was interest there now, sharp and focused …
in a way that made my skin stay constantly aware whenever he stepped into a room.
He watched me differently, less like he was trying to catch me slipping, more like he was trying to figure me out. That shift somehow felt worse.
I noticed it fully during a late-night routing meeting in one of the upper offices overlooking the secondary loading docks.
Half the room sat crowded around terminals and shipment projections while Silas stood beside me reviewing outbound transfers.
Close enough that the heat from his body lingered against my shoulder every time he leaned over the screen.
“Adjust this route,” he said quietly, one hand bracing against the desk behind me as he pointed toward the monitor. “The checkpoint overlap creates unnecessary visibility.”
I nodded once, typing in the correction while forcing myself not to tense at the proximity. “This pushes transport time higher.”
“Still safer,” he replied.
His arm brushed mine as he shifted slightly—intentional this time.
I felt it immediately.
Across the room, movement stilled for half a second before continuing again. I didn’t need to look up to know exactly who noticed.
Aiden.
The awareness of him settled instantly against my skin, heavier than Silas standing beside me. I kept my attention locked on the monitor, anyway. I refused to acknowledge either of them directly, even as tension coiled tighter through the room.
Silas noticed it, too.
That was the dangerous part. Not the touch itself. The reaction.
His gaze flicked briefly across the office before returning to me, thoughtful in a way that made warning bells ring quietly in the back of my head.
Interesting, that look said. Very interesting.
“You adapt quickly,” Silas murmured beside me after a moment. “Most people either panic when they see the scale of this operation… or they get sentimental.”
“I’m neither,” I replied evenly.
One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “No,” he agreed softly. “You’re not.”
The praise should’ve felt like progress. Instead, it made my stomach turn.
Because I could feel Aiden watching from the other side of the room without ever directly looking at him, I felt the way tension radiated off him every time Silas leaned too close or let his attention linger on me a second longer than necessary.
And worse? Silas was beginning to notice that, too.
By the end of the meeting, the air felt so tight with unspoken hostility that I thought someone else in the room would finally catch onto it. But nobody did. Or if they did, they were smart enough not to react.
As the terminals shut down and people started filtering toward the exit, Silas rested his hand lightly against the small of my back to guide me toward the door first.
A small gesture. Professional on the surface, but possessive underneath it.
Across the room, I caught Aiden’s jaw tighten hard enough to flex before he looked away visibly. And in that moment, I realized something dangerous had shifted again.
Silas wasn’t just interested in my usefulness anymore. He was starting to enjoy keeping me close.
And Aiden? Aiden looked one second away from killing him over it.
I found the file by accident. At least, I think it was an accident.
The routing system lagged while I was cross-checking offshore transfers against one of the shell company databases that Silas had given me partial access to earlier that night.
The terminal froze for a second before kicking me sideways into an archived operations directory that definitely wasn’t supposed to be visible from my clearance level.
Most people probably would’ve backed out immediately. I clicked deeper instead.
The folder structure was messy, indicating that someone with authority had accessed it frequently enough to stop maintaining organization. Syndicate movement. Rival operations. External assets. Surveillance pulls. Half the file names were coded strings that meant nothing without context.
Then one caught my eye.
HAVOC.
My pulse slowed instantly.
I opened it.
The first pages loaded slowly, grainy surveillance captures and fragmented operational summaries tied to The Sanctuary. Not detailed enough to suggest full infiltration, but enough to confirm Ironhand had been tracking them for a while.
Saint’s file appeared first: Elijah Mercer.
Even after all these years, the name still looked strange attached to the massive fighter Ironhand described as “the public face of Havoc operations.” There were photos, too, mostly fight captures or low-quality shots from public movement around Sanctuary territory.
Cold blue eyes. Massive frame. Expression unreadable in every image.
Saint. The man Aiden trusted enough to answer when he disappeared for over a month.
My stomach tightened.
Reaper’s file came next: Maddox Calder.
Less public than Saint but still visible enough that Ironhand had pieced together more than they should’ve. The Cleaner. Operational management. Enforcement. Several redacted sections are tied to external disappearances and retaliatory actions.
Maddox.
Jesus Christ.
I stared at the screen for a second too long as memories surfaced hard and sudden.
Aiden laughed with them years ago before everything turned violent and dark and unbearable.
Maddox sprawled across our couch and complained about beer brands.
Elijah stood silently in the kitchen doorway and looked intimidating even then.
And now they were Reaper and Saint.
The realization settled cold in my chest.
But Ghost’s file was the one that really made my blood run cold. Because there almost wasn’t one. No photo. No confirmed identity listed. Just fragments.
Ghost. Strategic operations. Founder-level authority inside Havoc. Embedded movement specialist. Suspected cartel ties. No verified visual confirmation. Operates through proxies and shadow channels—extremely limited exposure footprint.
A ghost even to Ironhand.
Except buried halfway through the report sat one line that made my pulse stumble hard enough to hurt. Ghost emerged following Aiden’s disappearance.
I stopped breathing for a second.
My eyes moved slowly back toward Saint and Reaper’s files again, piecing everything together in brutal clarity.
And if Ironhand already knew enough to link Aiden Vega’s disappearance to Ghost’s emergence, then the situation inside these walls was even more dangerous than I thought.
Because it meant Ironhand wasn’t just watching Havoc anymore. They were studying it.