Chapter 8
Cassius
Iwake to empty sheets and the ghost of her perfume on my pillow.
The note she left is brief, written in her precise handwriting.
Couldn't sleep. Gone home to review Michelle's files. See you tomorrow.
No endearment. No signature. Just information delivered like a business memo.
Something about it sits wrong.
After the way she melted in my arms last night, after whispering that she loves me with tears in her eyes, she should have stayed. Curled against me until dawn. Lazy kisses. Quiet plans about how we’ll dismantle the people trying to destroy us.
Instead, she left.
I reach for my phone and send a quick message.
Everything okay?
The text shows as delivered.
No reply.
Selene usually answers within minutes.
Her silence settles in my chest like a stone.
The shower runs cold while I think, letting the water punish me for whatever I've done wrong.
But I can't identify the mistake.
Last night was perfect—her confession of love, my own admission that she's everything to me, the tender way we moved together like we were sealing some unspoken vow.
Unless that's exactly the problem.
I call building security while getting dressed. "Ms. Deveraux—when did she arrive this morning?"
"Ms. Deveraux left a little after one last night, then returned this morning at seven-thirty. Seemed distracted when she came back—didn't return my greeting, which isn't like her. She went upstairs, then changed and Lionel escorted her to your office building."
Seven-thirty.
After staying up all night reading files.
Something in those documents spooked her, sent her running from my bed to her old apartment like she needed distance from me.
She could have reviewed them here, but went to her place instead.
The realization makes my jaw clench.
Distance from me means she's thinking clearly instead of being clouded by desire and devotion.
Clear thinking is dangerous when you're sleeping with your parents' killer.
I finish dressing in record time—charcoal suit, silver tie, the armor of respectability that lets me move through the legitimate world without suspicion.
But my hands shake slightly as I knot the tie, and I have to start over twice.
A knock interrupts my spiraling thoughts.
Lionel enters without waiting for permission, his massive frame filling the doorway.
He takes one look at my face and his expression hardens.
"Report," I order.
“Your overnight security detail kept eyes on her after she left the penthouse,” he says. “She went straight to her apartment. Spent a few hours going through files on her laptop. Could see her through the window.”
His dead eyes flick back to me.
“She looked upset, boss. Agitated.”
A pause.
“But she came here at seven-thirty like usual. Been in her office since. Door closed.”
"Different how?"
"Cold. Distant. Kept touching that collar like it was bothering her." He pauses, choosing his words carefully. "She looked at it in the hallway mirror before coming up here."
My blood turns to ice. "She’s been in her office all day?"
"Yes.Sent her assistant to the morning meeting instead of coming herself." Lionel's expression darkens. "She's avoiding you."
The words hit like slaps to the face.
Selene doesn't avoid me.
She seeks me out, gravitates toward my presence like a moth to flame.
If she's hiding, it's because she's learned something that's changed everything.
She knows.
Somehow, Michelle's research gave her the pieces she needed to put it together.
The timeline, the connections, the truth that's been hiding in plain sight for nine years now.
"Keep watching her," I tell Lionel. "I want to know everyone she talks to, everywhere she goes. If she so much as looks at her phone wrong, I want to know about it."
He nods and leaves. I'm alone with the crushing weight of inevitability.
Vincent arrives twenty minutes later, his usually immaculate appearance marred by tension around his eyes.
He's been my father's consigliere, then mine, for over three decades.
I've never seen him look this worried.
"We have a problem," he says before I can get a word out, settling into the chair across from my desk like a man preparing to deliver a terminal diagnosis. "The Russians have been digging into your past operations. Specifically, the Judge Deveraux situation."
I pour myself whiskey, my hands steadier now that I'm dealing with external threats instead of internal demons. "How deep?"
"Deep enough to know about the connection.
Zhukhov has been asking very specific questions about that night.
" Vincent pulls out a tablet, shows me surveillance photos of Russians meeting with low-level criminals who worked the cleanup.
Men I thought were long dead or disappeared.
"They're planning to use it against you. "
"Use it how?"
"The usual bit. They could expose the truth to Selene, watch your empire crumble from the inside while you're distracted by the fallout.
" He leans forward, voice dropping. "There's more.
That DA contact of hers—Michelle Dravens—she's been pulling files on judge murders going back a decade.
Someone tipped her that the Russian connections don't add up. "
My grip tightens on the glass. "You think the Russians fed her the information?"
"It's possible. Or she's just good at her job and stumbled onto something she wasn't supposed to find.
" Vincent's expression hardens. "Either way, she's getting too close to the truth.
I could handle her—make it look like an accident.
Car crash, mugging gone wrong, sudden heart attack. Clean and untraceable."
"No." The word comes out sharp, final. "Killing Michelle would devastate Selene. She'd know it wasn't a coincidence."
"Better a devastated girlfriend than a dead empire."
"Don't." I set the glass down with deliberate control, fighting the urge to throw it against the wall. "Selene is not just a girlfriend. She's—"
"What? Your weakness? Your blind spot?" Vincent stands, pacing to the window that overlooks the city we control.
"Cassius, I've been with this family for thirty years.
I watched your father build this empire from nothing, watched him make the hard choices that kept us alive and in power.
You're about to throw it all away for a woman who'll try to kill you the moment she learns the truth. "
"She already knows."
The words hang between us like a death sentence.
Vincent goes completely still, his reflection in the glass suddenly looking every one of his sixty-plus years. "How?"
"The files Michelle sent her. The timeline.
She spent all night putting pieces together and then ran from my bed like I was poison.
" I move to stand beside him, looking out at the empire that suddenly feels fragile as glass.
"She won't come to me directly. She's too smart for that.
She'll plan, prepare, wait for the perfect moment to destroy me. "
"Then we end this now. Before she can move against you."
"You want me to kill the woman I love?"
"I want you to survive." Vincent turns to face me, his eyes holding decades of loyalty and hard-earned wisdom. "Your father would have eliminated this threat the moment it appeared."
"My father never loved anyone."
"And that kept him alive for seventy-three years, in control until the day he chose to step down." Vincent's voice gentles slightly. "Love is a luxury men like us can't afford, Cassius. It makes us weak, gives our enemies weapons to use against us."
I think about her last night—the way she whispered my name like a prayer, how she fit perfectly in my arms, the absolute trust in her eyes when she said she loved me.
Then I think about her this morning, pulling away, creating distance, probably planning my death.
"She's not the same broken girl from nine years ago," I say finally. "She's become something else. Someone who could stand beside me or destroy me completely."
"Which do you think she'll choose?"
I don't answer because I don't know, and not knowing is killing me.
Vincent leaves me with my thoughts and my whiskey.
I try to focus on the surveillance monitors, checking various operations throughout the city.
The docks where tonight's shipment will arrive. The gallery where we launder money through overpriced art sales. The restaurant that serves as a front for high-stakes poker games.
All of it feels distant, unimportant.
My empire means nothing if I lose her, but my empire is also the only thing keeping us both alive.
My computer chimes with an encrypted message.
Security footage from her apartment building, compiled by the team I have monitoring her.
I click open the files with hands that want to shake.
The timestamps line up with what Lionel told me.
I watch her enter her apartment, moving with the exhausted grace of someone who's been thoroughly loved.
She looks content, satisfied, still glowing from our evening together.
Then I watch her settle at her laptop with a glass of wine and Michelle's files.
The change is gradual.
A frown as she reads something unexpected.
A pause to cross-reference information.
Her body language shifting from relaxed to tense to increasingly agitated.
A little before three-thirty, she opens what looks like a newspaper article.
Even through the grainy footage, I can see the exact moment of recognition.
Her face goes pale, her hand flies to her mouth, and the wine glass slips from her fingers to shatter on the floor.
She's found the photo.
The article about my taking control of the organization.
The timeline that puts me in the perfect position to have killed her parents.
I watch her stare at the screen for seven minutes without moving.
Just staring at my younger self's photograph while her world reshapes itself around the truth.
Then she runs to the bathroom and vomits.