Chapter 6
EIRA
I don’t bother with Maribel this time.
She doesn’t care for it.
‘Wait! Where are you going—?’
I walk straight past her desk, ignore the furious glare and waving arms, and keep going until I reach the corner office one rung above hers.
The door is closed.
I knock once, then open it without waiting.
Victor Hale looks up from his desk like he’s been expecting me.
He’s polished in the way men get when they’ve survived too long by knowing exactly when to bend. Early sixties, silver at the temples, expensive suit untouched by violence but well-versed in a thousand compromises.
He doesn’t invite me to sit, probably because of the sweat dotting my brow and trickling down my back from the power walk here.
I resisted the urge to run from Valentin’s tower because I refused to give the vampire the satisfaction, and I was too keyed up for a cab. Not with the memory of those last minutes replaying like an unwanted reel.
‘Tell me why,’ I say, planting my palms on his desk. ‘Tell me why my contract just turned into a fucking leash.’
He exhales slowly. ‘Close the door, Cross.’
I take three steps back and kick it shut with my boot, then lean against it, arms crossed.
He grimaces, realising he’s just locked himself in with a feral employee who can take him down with a single punch to the throat.
‘There’s pressure,’ he says, twirling his fountain pen before dropping it on the desk with a quiet huff. ‘From on high.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘It’s the only one I’m allowed to give.’ His gaze flicks to the walls, the ceiling, the corners where nothing should be listening. ‘This assignment is a drop-everything. Priority override. No substitutions and absolutely no delays.’
My skin prickles. ‘Why? What’s so special about—’ I swallow Lyra’s name before it escapes, because maybe Victor doesn’t know the full details. ‘About it?’
‘We don’t know,’ he says, and I believe him. ‘The request didn’t come with context. Just instructions. You take the job. You comply. We all enjoy the massive pay day. Or we all pay the price.’
My jaw tightens. ‘Do me a favour and define exactly what ‘pay the price’ means, please,’ I say, not without a heavy dose of snark.
His mouth flattens. ‘There’s talk of licences being revoked. Neutrality stripped. Protection withdrawn. Doors closing that don’t reopen for a very long time. If ever. And it’s been made clear that would be just the start.’
He snatches up his pen again, twirls it once, twice, then drops it.
‘Eira, look. Revenant might be the best, but it isn’t the only agency doing what we do. The last thing the higher-ups want is for men like Moretti to throw their weight behind our rivals.’
‘He’s not a man. He’s a vampire,’ I mutter.
A very hot, very intense vampire who was scenting me like his next meal less than twenty minutes ago. One who wants Lyra badly enough to threaten a decades-old institution employing thousands across the globe.
Victor sends me a droll look.
His point lands anyway.
This isn’t debt collection or pressure for a favour. This is a clear threat from a very powerful being who knows exactly which pulse points to press to achieve maximum oh shit.
‘And you’re just… fine with this?’ I ask, even as inevitability settles over me, cold and thin.
Hale may be the boss behind the desk, but he’s almost as powerless as I am.
No.
I’m not fucking powerless.
‘I’m not,’ he says quietly. ‘But I like keeping my people alive. Whoever this Hannigan girl is, she needs to be found. Yesterday.’
I straighten slowly, one thing answered as something cold settles in my chest.
‘If they have a connection, why hasn’t he looked for her in six years?’
Hale’s eyes flick back to me. ‘So you noticed.’
‘Yeah. So why now?’ I press. ‘Why summon me to find her now? Why the urgency and pressure?’
He shakes his head. ‘If I knew, I’d tell you. Or maybe not. Look, all I know is this came down hard and fast, and it came with names attached that don’t usually get spoken.’
‘Names like?’
Exasperation huffs out of his round chest. ‘What the fuck did I just say, Cross?’
‘You really expect me to solve this thing with both hands tied behind my back?’
I’ve done exactly that countless times, and it usually makes the chase more fun. Not this time. This has fuckery written all over it.
Victor stays tight-lipped. Stoic. And, fuck, a little terrified by what he’s already let slip.
Names that don’t get spoken. What the fuck does that mean?
Another thread slides into place. Maybe this isn’t about closure or collecting a debt.
Maybe it’s about timing.
I step back from the door, nod once, and leave without another word.
Maribel looks up when I pass. Her glare is still in place, but her face is tighter. Paler.
She already knows.
Come to think of it, everyone in the office looks on edge, casting me glances as I stride to the elevator, punch the button a few times, then call fuck it and hurtle down the stairs.
By the time I get home, my pulse has settled into something controlled and lethal.
I triple-lock the door. Check the cameras. Drop wards the way Selphine taught me to.
Then I sit at the table and open the file.
Lyra Hannigan stares back at me from the first page.
There’s no photograph because I paid a hefty fee to a dark web hacker to erase every last one before I disappeared, and from the look of it, I succeeded.
So this file is just data.
Precise. Clinical. Astonishingly complete.
There are birth records, school transcripts, medical notes. Psychological evaluations by people I’ve never met. Financial trails that luckily went cold. Addresses. Dates.
Everything.
I flip pages with shaking hands as my past is laid bare in ink and analysis.
Every alias I used before I knew how to erase myself.
Every scrap of jewellery I sold quietly, piece by piece, after my mother died.
The antique ring. The necklace she wore every day.
The earrings my father never noticed were gone.
Then I see a note about the mole on my upper thigh. The one I had lasered off with my third pay cheque.
I stare at it until my vision blurs.
He knew everything about me then, or has gathered every scrap since. Knows me down to the smallest, most intimate details.
The next section makes my stomach drop.
Subject’s father: Declan Hannigan.
A timeline follows, starting four months after Valentin’s visit. One month after I fled.
A week-long celebration binge at expensive hotels and casinos. Credit extended where it shouldn’t have been. Debts multiplied instead of paid. He bragged. Drank. Blabbed to anyone who would listen that he’d secured the deal of a lifetime.
By selling his daughter to the most powerful vampire in New York.
Four weeks later, Declan Hannigan was found dead in an alley behind a private club.
Cause: violent assault by several assailants.
I sit very still.
There’s no burial location. No picture of a grave. No marker.
I blink back tears before they can fall, anger and grief tangling too tightly to separate. I didn’t know where he was buried and I never dared ask. Never went back to my mother’s grave to find out if he lay beside her.
I was too afraid someone would be watching. Too afraid standing still long enough to grieve would get me caught.
I press my palm to the table and breathe through it.
He sold me. And I still loved him.
That’s the part that never stops hurting. The part I’ve spent years trying to cut out without killing everything else along with it.
He was sick.
Gambling wasn’t a vice for him. It was a disease he never learned to fight. I hated him for what he did. I loved him for the father he sometimes was when sobriety permitted.
And I ran from the consequences of both.
The file closes with a summary that makes my blood run cold.
Subject vanished successfully. No confirmed sightings since.
Search suspended at principal’s discretion.
It’s time stamped four years ago, then resumed six months ago.
So Valentin Moretti did come looking after I fled.
He let me go. Not out of mercy. By choice. And now, six years later, he’s decided it’s time to collect.
Why?
I lean back, the weight of it pressing hard against my chest. The agency pressure. The secrecy. The ten-million-dollar urgency. The way his silver eyes glinted when he spoke Lyra’s name.
The inkling I had in Hale’s office deepens.
Timing.
This is about something marching towards a deadline I know nothing about. Something big enough to rattle the one domineering being who shouldn’t rattle easily.
I close the file carefully and rest my hand on it, jaw tightening as a memory surfaces unbidden.
The heat of him at the door tonight.
The vicious threat in his eyes when he told me not to let him down.
Dread curls low and sharp.
Seven days.
I don’t know what he’s really hunting. But I know this much.
Whatever it is, it started with me.
I sit on the edge of the sofa and stare at my phone, thumb hovering as I scroll deeper into contacts I don’t like to use. It’s a last resort after three people hung up on me, one laughing outright and another warning me off my request.
I stop on one name, consider it, then call.
It rings twice.
‘What do you want, Cross?’ Jax Calder asks, voice rough, amused, and already suspicious.
He’s a bounty hunter the agency pretends doesn’t exist. Not rogue or unsanctioned, because he’s not stupid enough to get erased, but he specialises in off-book problems that don’t want to be solved cleanly and prides himself on surviving them anyway.
We’ve crossed paths twice. Neither time ended with blood on the floor, which counts as mutual respect.
‘I need information,’ I say. ‘On Valentin Moretti.’
Silence stretches, then he exhales. ‘That’s not information you ask for free. Or at all if you value keeping that sexy little ass of yours.’
I ignore the stupid sex jibe. ‘I didn’t say I was asking for free.’
‘And what makes you think I know anything?’
‘Because you don’t scare easily,’ I reply, playing him up despite the vomit building at the back of my throat. ‘And you haven’t hung up yet.’