Chapter 7
Despite the countless hours we’ve spent poring over everything we’ve managed to dig up, the connections between Jen, Benedict, Lily, and Angus still refuse to line up. No matter how many times I circle back, something always slips through my fingers.
Side by side, the birth certificates tell part of the story.
The one Jen used to enrol Lily at St. Theresa’s was fake.
The real one—listing Benedict as her father—had been locked away in his house in Belfast all along.
That much is undeniable. What isn’t is whether Lily knew and lied to us…
or if—like Abbie, Cora, and Helen swear—she was just as blindsided as the rest of us.
I want to believe them. God help me, I do.
But then there are Jen’s emails.
One stack went to Angus and Peter, drip-feeding them everything she pulled from my Da, along with neat little updates about when the next batch of girls she’d secured would be ready.
That part is ugly, but it makes a sick kind of sense.
The other stack—the one I keep coming back to—went to Benedict.
Emails calling Lily an asset. Emails cataloguing her life in unsettling detail: school events, social updates, photos.
And when I put them alongside the faded hospital pictures of Benedict holding a newborn Lily, something in my chest tightens.
It’s hard to reconcile all of it with the girl who looked me in the eye and swore she’d never met him.
The girl I loved. The girl I was ready to walk away from everything for.
So why the act? Why pretend there was no connection at all?
I tell myself it had to be calculated. A smokescreen. Something meant to keep us blind, off balance because that version hurts less than the alternative. Even so, the explanation feels thin when I sit with it too long.
And yet… what am I supposed to think, when the evidence keeps stacking up against her, and loving her doesn’t make any of it disappear?
I slam the latest file shut harder than I intend to.
The crack of it cuts through the room, sharp enough that Liam glances over but I don’t look up.
I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose, hard enough to hurt, like I can stop my skull from splitting open under the mounting pressure that never seems to ease these days.
Because loving her doesn’t make the facts disappear. And doubting her doesn’t stop it from feeling like I’m tearing myself in half.
My thoughts keep looping, snagging, seizing on the same jagged fragments—the look of betrayal on Lily’s face, the leads that collapse into nothing, the answers that only seem to open into darker questions. Every path bends back on itself. Every conclusion frays the closer I get.
And at the centre of it all sits Orchis.
The email domain Jen and Benedict used. The same name surfacing again and again in buried ledgers, scrubbed transfers, payments laundered so thoroughly they might as well have never existed.
A company that traces back to nothing but an offshore shell layered beneath another shell, and another beneath that—too neat, too deliberate to be innocent.
Orchis.
A pretty name for something rotten. A flower that feeds on decay.
If we could tie a real, living name to it—just one name—we might have the thread that pulls the whole operation apart. But every time we get close, the trail snaps, like someone is cutting it clean just seconds before we reach it.
What we originally thought was a somewhat contained sex trafficking ring we could dismantle has bled out into something sprawling, something feral, something that feels endless. And I’m already running on empty.
Logan and Alex have been working nonstop to rebuild the Clan ever since Logan took over, after killing his own father in the hope that it would end this shitshow. We all thought that when Logan pulled the trigger, Angus’s sick little ring would be shut down.
But Helen’s sudden reappearance last year blew everything wide open again, exposing the dark web chatter that never stops, and now Angus Graham feels like just a small part of a much bigger picture.
Girls are still disappearing, faster than ever, and it’s become glaringly obvious that while we might have cut off one head of the snake, another has already spawned. Or maybe we were always chasing the wrong one.
From the moment Helen pieced together Jen’s involvement, we all knew there wouldn’t be a clean solution to any of this. No tidy ending. No room for mercy when lives were already unravelling by the minute. And in the end, exile was the only kind choice Jonathan could make.
It was that, or death and some still argue letting Lily live was a mistake. My Da being the chief of that particular club.
But fucking hell.
Even knowing she used me, lied to me, twisted the truth until I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t tell what was real and what was just another performance.
Even knowing all that…
I still couldn’t have stood there and watched them put a bullet in her skull.
I would’ve burned the whole fucking organisation to the ground before I let them touch one hair on her perfect head.
And now… now I’m expected to play my role like we aren’t still up to our necks in this shit. Pack a bag. Board a jet. Fly to Italy in the morning and smile for the cameras. Honour my goddamn marriage contract and move to Turin like it’s business as usual when it’s anything but.
Like Lily Davis didn’t crack me open and crawl into the space where my heart used to be.
Like I haven’t spent every waking minute since, wondering if she ever meant any of it. If even a single second of what we had was real.
Don Antonio Salvatore is a man I’ve only met a handful of times over the years. He’s old-school Italian Mafia royalty, and on paper this marriage is a great business decision—they get access to our ports, we get a cut of their wine and heroine exports.
But after how hard they negotiated to pull me into their territory, I’m not na?ve enough to believe the Italians see this marriage as just business. And if they ever figure out who Lily really is—what she means to me—they won’t hesitate to use her.
She’d become leverage, a pressure point, a lesson.
And if they discover I’ve been watching her streams—if they see how far my control slips, how I’ve been chasing her through a screen like some addict while engaged to one of their own—they won’t wait for explanations. They’ll gut me before I get a single word out.
My jaw clenches. The idea of anyone else seeing her like I do—of anyone owning even a fraction of her—is unbearable. Because despite all the lies and betrayal that exists between us now, she still owns every piece of my black heart.
I remember the nights Lily showed up in my room, tears in her eyes, heartbreak written across her face. I’d believed every look, every sob. I’d believed her. Every goddamn time. And now?
Now I don’t know what was real and what was a lie. I fell for her hook, line, and sinker but did I ever mean more to her than a means to an end?
With the only people we know connected to this thing dead and buried, we’re at a standstill. A void. A wall we keep crashing into with bloodied fists and nothing to show for it.
Liam and Aidan have been with me every night, backs bent over encrypted servers, hunting shadows in endless lines of code while grief sharpens their focus like a blade.
Seeing two where there was always three serves as a permanent reminder of what we’ve lost. Nearly two years on, Cole’s death isn’t something any of us can just move past. He was barely nineteen—the same age as Lily at the time—wide-eyed, a cocky little shit, and still figuring out how to be a man.
And yeah, the bastard who killed him is six feet under, rotting where he belongs, but somehow that doesn’t feel like justice. Not to his brothers, and not to me.
“I’m sick of running in circles,” Aidan mutters, cracking his neck like he’s trying to loosen the weight dragging him down. His voice is low, raw at the edges—sleep-starved and stretched thin.
He looks it, too.
The dark circles under his eyes have their own shadows by now, bruised deep into his skin. His usually sharp, meticulously kept fade has grown out into something rougher, the blonde strands falling over his forehead every time he lifts his head to look at another useless lead.
“There’s something we’re missing,” Liam sighs, pacing like a caged animal. Every movement is tight, coiled, like he’s one wrong word away from snapping.
His hair—normally tied back in a neat, low ponytail that never slips—has completely given up. Half of it falls around his face, sticking to the sheen of stress on his skin, the rest is half-tied, half-loose like he ran his hands through it too many times and couldn’t be bothered fixing it.
His eyes flick to the wall, then to me, then back to the screen—sharp, frantic, hungry—like he’s trying to force the answer into existence by sheer will.
And the worst part? He might be the only one who still believes an answer can be forced.
Aidan watches him, and for half a second—just a blink—there’s something softer behind the steel. Concern, maybe. Guilt, as if he blames himself for Liam's unravelling and Cole’s death. Then it’s gone, buried so deeply if I didn't know better I’d think I imagined it.
“Come on,” Aidan sighs, pushing off the desk. “Matt’s got packing to do, and Cora needs us first thing.”
The mention of Cora shifts something in Liam.
The edge dulls, just slightly. She’s the closest thing to family they’ve got left.
Something about being by her side from when she first set foot in this world to now, has them bonded so deeply I don’t think Jonathan himself could force them to stop being her guards.
Liam grunts, still pacing. “Just because this bastard’s flying off to Italy doesn’t mean we’re done.”
“As if you could get rid of me that easily,” I say, half a smile tugging at my mouth as I watch them head for the door.