Chapter 23 #3
The line goes quiet. Not the empty kind but the kind that hums with danger. The kind that makes the air feel heavier in your lungs. I can almost hear Jonathan calculating, stripping emotion from the facts, mapping consequences, deciding who lives and who burns.
Finally, he speaks, low and steady. “Are you certain it traces back?”
“Positive.” My knuckles whiten around the edge of the desk. “Every name on that list went missing after an audition at a modelling agency Salvatore’s been funding. There are dozens of photos from their auditions, but not one legitimate modelling job to show for it.”
I swallow hard. “If it’s not tied to the ring, then what the hell is funding it? And why hide it?”
Jonathan exhales, the sound like steel scraping against stone. “Fuck. All right. Encrypt everything you have and send it over. I’ll get Brennan on it immediately. This—this betrayal cuts deep, especially after Helen. But panic won’t fix it.”
His voice firms, controlled, absolute. “We need to be careful. If they catch you digging, they won’t hesitate to retaliate, but that won’t happen. Not on my watch. I refuse to lose anyone else to this bullshit. We’ve lost too much as it is.”
“What’s next?” My throat burns as adrenaline tastes like copper. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing. Girls are being stolen right now. The longer we wait, the more they suffer. You can’t expect me to play happy families, pretending in a few months I’m going to marry into these bastards.”
“We’re not doing nothing,” Jonathan snaps down the line, the words landing like orders even through the crackle of the call. “You’ll stay invisible and feed us everything you uncover—every name, every transfer, every shadow connection. No cowboy shit.”
There’s a brief pause, the low hum of movement on his end. I picture him pacing his office, already ten steps ahead.
“All we know right now is that the girls were being funnelled through a modelling agency he’s backing,” he summarises. “That’s a thread, not a target. And we don’t pull threads until we know what’s tied to the other end.”
His voice sharpens. “Bren and Liam will dig deeper, quietly. Because if we do this wrong, we’ll trigger a war we don’t need. Make no mistake, we will rip this network apart. But understand this, Matt—those girls need to come out alive. Every single one.” A beat of silence stretches between us.
“That’s not a strategy,” Jonathan continues finally. “That’s Points law. If their safety isn’t the priority, then we’re no better than the men we’re hunting and we may as well torch the Points ourselves.”
He pauses, the air tightening before he delivers the final blow. “The wedding’s off.”
Silence hangs for half a breath, then the weight of his words lands—no recovery, no bargaining.
Relief should follow. It almost does.
But as the certainty of never having to marry a woman I’ll never love lifts from my chest, it’s replaced by something far worse. Something heavier. Something that tells me war is just around the corner, despite Jonathan's careful manoeuvring.
“But Matt,” Jonathan continues, his voice lowering, steel wrapped in restraint, “this goes deeper than we thought. After what they did to Helen—to Cora and Cole—this isn’t business. It's a bone-deep betrayal.”
My grip tightens on the phone.
“It’s going to get messy,” he says. “And if Salvatore so much as suspects you, he won’t hesitate. So listen to me carefully. The fewer people who know the full scope of this—who know what you’ve found—the better. Until we know exactly what we’re dealing with, you stay quiet. You stay clean.”
“Yeah.” The word tears out of me, rough and fractured. “I know.”
The call ends, and I drop the phone like it’s burned me.
Rain traces across the window, the city a blurred smear of light and threat.
I stand in the dark and make a vow to myself, low and certain and terrible—we will save every single one of those girls, no matter the cost. And if they ever touch Lily there will be no bargaining left.
I’ll burn everything until there’s nothing left to stand on.
For better or worse, in every secret, in every truth, she’s mine, I’m hers, and the wreckage we’ve made is ours to survive alone.
My fingers hover over the laptop. I should get to work on sending everything over to Jonathan but instead, I pull up another window. The one I swore I’d stop using, but I need to see her. In light of everything, I need to know she's safe.
The feed is dark now, her bedroom lit only by the glow of the city outside. Clothes are scattered across the bed. A black dress draped over a chair, heels kicked under the desk. Lipstick tubes rolled to the floor like she didn’t care what they cost.
I rewind the footage. Watch her rush from the shower, hair dripping, cheeks flushed.
Watch her pull on her dress, adjust the straps, swipe colour onto her lips.
She checks herself in the mirror three times before grabbing her bag and heading out.
I fast-forward. Hours disappear in seconds.
And then—she’s back. Stumbling, kicking her shoes off before the doors even closed behind her.
Her makeup smudged, her shoulders sagging like someone unplugged her.
She drops her bag on the floor and sinks down beside it, just… folds. Like her own bones won’t hold her up. Her head tips back against the door. She presses the heel of her hand to her chest, eyes glassy.
I can’t move. I can’t look away. Every shallow breath she takes sends a spike of panic through me. My fists clench so tight my nails dig crescent moons into my palms. Two hundred miles, and I might as well be on the other side of the world. She’s right there, and I can’t reach her.
Her shoulders shiver, though it might just be exhaustion. She buries her face into her hands for a long, ragged moment, and I feel it in my chest like someone’s shoved a knife between my ribs.
I want to call her. I want to drive there, burst into her flat, and hash out all the half-truths and lies that sit between us. But I can’t. Not yet. Not without tipping off Salvatore, not without risking her more than she already is.
So instead, I watch her. I watch her shoulders shake, the quiet desperation of her body screaming what her words never could. I taste bile and copper, my stomach knotting like a fist. My chest feels like it’s been hammered from the inside.
And then something shifts. She raises her head just slightly, sniffing, blinking, as if she’s trying to remember how to breathe without carrying the world on her back.
My chest tightens so hard I can’t think straight.
I hate that I can’t be there. I hate that she’s out there like this and I’m not.
I hate Salvatore more than I’ve ever hated anything in my life.
I press my palms against the desk, leaning forward until my face is inches from the screen, willing her to look up, willing her to show me that she’s alive, that she’s okay, that she’s still the same girl who once laughed in hotel sheets and let me trace promises onto her skin.
But she doesn’t. She just sits there. Silent and fragile in a world I can feel closing in around her.
And that’s when it hits me like a fist to the chest, not just the gnawing fear, not just the helplessness, but a white-hot, blistering rage at everything keeping us apart.
My Da, Jonathan, Salvatore. This goddamn contract.
Every rule, every expectation, every damn law they think can chain me.
They don’t know me. They don’t know what it means to stand between me and her, to feel every second of distance like it’s burning me alive.
I can feel it raging in my veins, a fire that refuses to be ignored. My jaw tightens, my hands clench, and I know the decision I’m about to make isn’t just bold, it’s reckless and bordering on self-destructive.
But fuck it. I can’t stay two hundred miles away forever. The contract is ash, and I won’t let the world keep spinning while I rot in uncertainty.
I need answers. I need to see her, to read her, to know if she’s guilty, innocent, a victim of circumstance… or the enemy.
And dammit, I need her. Not just for closure, not just for clarity but because the thought of anyone else touching her, of anyone else seeing her fire, makes my blood boil.
It’s time. Time to move. Time to find her. Time to claim what’s mine, one way or another.