Chapter 14 – Lukyan
That morning, I’m deep into my work, staring at a mountain of supply manifests, when the heavy doors of my study swing open. Ben walks in, carrying a small, unmarked cardboard package.
I hook my brows at him, pausing my pen over the paper. Without a word, he crosses the room and sets the box down on the corner of my desk.
“The phone you wanted me to get,” Ben says shortly, giving me a brief nod.
“Good. Thanks,” I reply.
He turns on his heel and walks out, the door clicking shut firmly behind him.
The second the room is quiet again, I reach for the package and slice it open.
I pull out the sleek, brand-new device. On the surface, it looks like a standard, high-end smartphone anyone could buy at a store.
But underneath the commercial glass, it’s heavily encrypted with custom software my tech guys loaded onto it.
It’s completely secure, but to the untrained eye, no one would ever know.
It’s for my wife.
Sofia.
After our wedding, I restricted her to a basic feature phone—a burner with no internet access—because I was incredibly wary about Karl trying to reach out to her or track her location.
I couldn’t risk him finding a backdoor into my estate through her device.
But it’s been weeks now, and it’s like that bastard has completely fallen off the face of the earth.
I’m tired of curbing her freedom because of a ghost, and I think it’s finally time she had a proper phone.
The crazy thing is, Sofia has never once complained about not having an internet-capable phone.
She just spends all her time buried in her books, completely content in her own world.
But lately, I’ve noticed her heading down to the library to use the desktop computer there a few times.
It’ll just be easier if she has her own device to do whatever she wants.
I turn the sleek phone over in my hands, feeling the weight of it, and a small smile touches my lips. I rise to my feet, pocketing the device, and head out of the office to find her in the library.
I find her curled up on one of the large leather couches, completely buried in a book. She looks up and smiles the second she sees me, and the sight of it hits my chest harder than it should. I lean down, placing one hand on the back of the sofa, and press a soft, lingering kiss to her forehead.
Lately, we’ve been… close. Ever since the night she gave me the greatest gift I could ever ask for—her virginity—everything has shifted. She’s been incredibly soft with me, and in return, I’ve treated her like she’s my fucking queen.
My feelings for her have completely changed.
I’m not exactly ready to confront whatever the hell is happening inside my chest yet, but I know it’s something else entirely.
We haven’t actually had sex since that first time five days ago, giving her body time to heal, but we sleep in the same bed every single night, with her tucked securely in my arms.
“What’s that?” she asks, her blue eyes sliding down to eye the package in my hand.
“A phone,” I say simply. I slide the sleek, custom device out of the box and hand it over to her.
She narrows her eyes at me, looking suspicious, and sets her book down on the cushion beside her. She takes the phone tentatively, holding it like it might explode, and looks up at me. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to restrict you anymore,” I tell her honestly, sitting down on the edge of the couch near her feet. I look her straight in the eye, letting the weight of my words sink in. “You have access to everything you might need now, Sofia.”
It’s a massive shift in how I’m approaching this relationship, and we both know it. By handing her this device, I’m making it clear that I’ll no longer keep her confined within the boundaries of the estate.
The underlying risks—the fact that Karl is still out there somewhere, and that my world is inherently blood-soaked—remain in my chest, but she doesn’t know that. It’s up to me to take care of that for her. The leash is officially off.
Sofia receives the news with cautious optimism. I can see the wheels turning in her head; she doesn’t fully trust the absolute freedom being offered to her just yet, but she clearly recognizes it as a significant, undeniable shift in my trust.
She looks down at the screen, then back up at me, testing the waters.
“If I really have my freedom…” she starts carefully, her voice quiet. “I want to visit Ashley. I want to reconnect with her. It feels like that part of my life is so distant now.”
“When do you want to visit?”
“Today. Now. Immediately,” she says, the words rushing out of her. The sheer hope and brightness in her eyes is so fucking beautiful that I couldn’t say no to her even if I wanted to.
“All right,” I agree, giving in completely. “But you have to go with security. No arguments.”
“I don’t mind,” she says. Before I can even process the words, she moves. Sofia jumps right into my arms, throwing her arms around my neck, and presses a sweet, enthusiastic kiss to my cheek.
Fuck. If I knew giving her a damn phone and a trip to see her friend would make her this happy, I would have done it weeks ago.
I tell her to go get ready, and once she scurries off, I head down the stairs to find Ben. I get him to organize a driver and a heavy security escort for her, making sure the men know that if so much as a hair on her head is touched, I’ll bury them alive.
By the next hour, I’m walking Sofia out to the driveway and escorting her into the back of the sleek black car.
Her eyes are literally shining with glee, and she’s already on her new phone with Ashley, talking excitedly about how they’re going to go shopping.
I can’t help the small smile that tugs at my lips. I’m just happy she’s happy.
I lean into the car, press a final kiss to her cheek, and murmur, “I’ll see you later. Stay safe.”
“I will,” she beams.
I step back, shutting the door, and watch as the car drives off down the long estate driveway, taking a piece of my peace of mind with it.
The second the taillights of her car disappear past the iron gates, the lighter atmosphere completely evaporates. The warmth drops out of the air, and the cold reality of my world settles right back onto my shoulders.
Alone with my thoughts, my mind locks instantly onto the problem that has been eating away at me for weeks. The unresolved puzzle. The hidden code and the terrifying, definitive knowledge that Sofia is Creed’s daughter.
I turn on my heel, ignoring the stack of business manifests waiting on my desk, and hurry back up the grand staircase.
I stride straight into the quiet library.
This time, I’m not just looking around passively to see what kind of stories my wife likes to read.
I am looking with raw, calculated intent.
I walk up to the massive floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, my eyes scanning the leather-bound spines.
Sofia’s system.
It’s subtle. Books arranged and rearranged, not randomly. To anyone else, it would look like a reader’s comfort ritual.
But I’ve seen patterns like this before.
Creed’s patterns.
And now I can see the echo of him in her.
This isn’t conscious coding. It’s muscle memory. Learned structure. The kind a child absorbs in the background of a life she doesn’t fully understand.
Creed didn’t just build systems. He trained instincts. He must have done it with his daughter. The answer has to be here somewhere.
I pull one book out. Nothing unusual. I slide it back.
Still nothing. But then I notice something small—almost invisible unless you’re looking for it the way I am.
A spacing inconsistency. Three shelves down, second row.
A pattern that repeats, but only when viewed across different categories instead of within them.
Fiction on one shelf, philosophy on another, biographies somewhere else entirely.
I move across the room slowly now, scanning instead of reading.
And then it clicks in small fragments.
It isn’t the books themselves.
It’s the order of movement.
She isn’t just arranging books.
She’s rotating them.
Repositioning them across a cycle only makes sense if you’re tracking something across time.
A ledger.
A key.
Or a map disguised as domestic routine.
I exhale slowly through my nose and step back. I don’t understand it fully, and something tells me I will not completely understand until I involve Sofia. She’s the only one who can decode this.
But how do I tell her without risking this fragile life we’ve built?