CHAPTER TWENTY #3
I fucking knew it.
My eyes fall back to the card in my hand. My little ghost stares back at me, light dancing in her crystal blue eyes, a smile touching her lips that never should exist on something as final as a funeral notice. She looks alive in this picture. Hopeful. She looks…happy.
A bitter laugh catches in the back of my throat, growing tighter and tighter by the second.
Someone made sure no one would ever question where she’d gone.
My heart is beating a mile a minute, my breathing growing harder as I process this clusterfuck of a situation I’m in.
This wasn’t an assassination. It was an erasure.
How does a mafia princess end up here? With me.
I have to tell Ezekiel. This is bigger than we thought it was. Bigger than me. And now I'm standing right in the middle of it. My whole fucking world narrows. Everything is connected. Enzo, the doctor, Seraphine.
Winter.
She had once called herself Snow, and I didn’t believe it to be true.
To me, she was so much more than that. How right I had been.
And I’m a fucking fool for thinking that for just one moment.
One single moment I could have had it all.
I let myself believe she was a frightened woman who’d stumbled into my life by accident.
That fate had decided I’d suffered enough.
That she’d suffered enough. I should have known better because there are no accidents in my world.
Only carefully orchestrated moves made by people patient enough to wait for everyone else to mistake them for coincidence.
Which means one of two things. She knows far more than she’s telling me, she must do, because someone wanted to make sure that she was dead.
Or she’s the only person in this mess who’s just as much in the dark as I am.
Either way, I don’t have answers, and I don’t know which of those things terrifies me more.
My body moves before my mind catches up.
I fold the funeral notice with careful hands, sliding it back into the envelope before shoving it beneath my arm.
The bedroom door opens without a sound, and I cross the hallway in long, quiet strides, forcing every instinct screaming inside me to remain unnoticed.
She can’t know. Not yet. Not until I know who I can trust.
I test every latch twice, fingers lingering just long enough to make sure the timber won’t give if someone tries to force their way inside.
Deadbolts. Chains. Locks. My eyes sweep every room, every blind spot, every entrance I’d spent years memorizing until I could navigate them in complete darkness.
I go back up stairs stripping out of the clothes I’d spent the morning working in before pulling on a fresh black shirt and a pair of jeans, then tug on my jacket.
My hands move on instinct, muscle memory taking over where panic threatens to cloud my judgement.
I reach into the top drawer of my dresser, pushing aside neatly folded shirts until my fingers find the false bottom beneath them.
It gives with a quiet click. Cold steel greets my hand, and I wrap my fingers around the grip of my gun before checking the magazine out of habit, sliding it back into place with a practiced snap.
A spare disappears into my jacket pocket.
Then another. The crimson envelope tucked safely inside the lining of my coat.
No one sees this until Ezekiel does. No one knows anything until he does.
I move through the house in silence, every locked checked a second time, every window secured until the only way inside would be through me, or sheer fucking force.
The floorboards creak beneath my boots as I make my way to the front door, my hand lingering over the deadbolt for the briefest of moments before unlocking it just long enough to slip outside.
I don’t say goodbye. I can’t. If I look at her, I won’t leave.
If I hear her voice, I’ll stay. And if I stay…
I’ll choose her over the truth. I’ll stop asking questions that need answers.
Because that’s what she’s become. A reason to stop looking.
A reason to forget the world beyond these walls.
A reason to believe I could outrun the life that has spent decades reminding me who I am.
I slam the SUV into gear, gravel exploding beneath the tires as the cemetery disappears behind me.
Because somewhere along the way, I stopped protecting the mission, and started protecting the target.
The cruelest part isn’t that someone has betrayed us.
It’s that I’m no longer sure whether the betrayal began with this mission…
or the woman waiting for me to come home.
If I’m wrong, I’ll lose her. The woman I love.
Love.
Because I think I do.
If I’m right… she’ll lose everything else. And as the cemetery disappears into the rear-view mirror, one truth follows me into the afternoon light. I made the fatal mistake of believing in ghosts.
To be continued…