LOGINNADIAI wasn’t supposed to open the file.That’s the thing I kept telling myself afterward, as if the order of events mattered more than what I’d found. As if I didn’t mean to could undo the numbers on the screen—wire transfers routed through shell companies in Cyprus and the Caymans, property acquisitions that didn’t match any public records, payment schedules to names I didn’t recognize but that made my stomach turn when I searched them.It was my fourth day as executive assistant to Viktor Kain, and I’d already stumbled into the kind of information that got people buried.The job had been a miracle. Six months of unemployment, a master’s degree collecting dust, and a savings account bleeding out one rent payment at a time. When the recruiter called about a position at Kain Capital—six figures, full benefits, direct report to the CEO—I’d said yes before she finished the sen
He let me go on a Tuesday.It was anticlimactic, the way freedom arrived. No dramatic standoff. No last-minute rescue. Just Cas standing by the door of the loft at dawn, holding a burner phone and a set of car keys that weren’t his.“Osei’s out of the country for the week,” he said. “His men will pull back. You have a window.”I stood in the middle of the room I’d lived in for twelve days, wearing his shirt and holding a bag of my things that he’d packed while I slept, and I felt something crack down the centre of my chest.“What about you?”“I’ll be fine.”“That’s not what I asked.”He looked at me, and for a moment, the mask slipped entirely. I saw the boy who’d been pulled into this world at eighteen. The man who’d been trying to claw his way out of it ever since. The person who’d held me in the dark and whispered thing
A week in, and I’d stopped pretending I wanted to leave.That was the part I couldn’t reconcile—the fact that somewhere between the second and seventh day, the fear had dissolved and something else had bloomed in its place. Something warm and terrifying that had nothing to do with captivity and everything to do with the man who’d been peeling back his own armour, layer by quiet layer, every night he came upstairs from the ring.He told me things in the dark. That was when it happened—after, when our bodies were still intertwined and the noise from below had faded to a low hum. His voice would go soft, almost fragile, and the words would come out like he’d been holding them for years.He’d been eighteen when he was pulled into the ring. A kid from a neighbourhood that ate its young. He’d fought because it was the only currency he had—his body, his willingness to bleed. The man who ran the operation, a ghost na
Three days. That’s how long I’d been in Cas’s loft above the ring.He didn’t lock the door. He didn’t have to. He’d shown me the feed from the security cameras on the first night—the men who lingered outside the building, smoking, watching. He’d pointed to one of them, a thick-necked man with a tattoo crawling up his throat.“That one already knows you were here. If you walk out, he’ll follow you. And he won’t be as polite as I am.”So I stayed. And I started to learn the strange rhythms of this place. Cas rose before dawn. He trained alone in a cleared space near the windows, his body moving through brutal sequences with a discipline that bordered on meditation—fists, elbows, knees. Every strike was precise. Controlled. I’d sit on the bed with my knees drawn up and watch him, telling myself it was observation. Research. That I was cataloguing details for the story I’d even
SOLANE Ares didn’t knock.It was the fourth night. Matteo had left an hour ago after bringing me dinner—a ritual that had become uncomfortably domestic, the two of us eating in silence while something electric hummed beneath the surface. He’d kissed my forehead before leaving, which had confused me more than anything else he’d done, and I was lying in bed replaying it when the door swung open and Ares walked in like he owned the room. Which, technically, he did.He was different from his brother in every way that mattered in the dark. Where Matteo was restrained, Ares was uncontained. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, his hair dishevelled, and there was a bruise on his jaw that looked fresh. His eyes found me in the dim light and the look in them made my stomach flip—not fear, not exactly. Anticipation.“Matteo’s been hogging you,” he said, dropping onto the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under him in a way it never did under his brother, like even furniture responded differently
The first rule of investigative journalism is to never go alone. The second is to always tell someone where you’re going. I broke both.The warehouse on Grover Street had been on my radar for three weeks. Anonymous tips. Redacted police reports. Four men missing from the same neighbourhood in under a year, all linked to an underground fighting ring that the city pretended didn’t exist. I’d pitched the story to my editor twice. Twice, he’d told me to drop it.So I went at night. Alone. With nothing but my press badge tucked into my bra and a voice recorder in the pocket of my jacket.The building was a beast—corrugated metal walls bleeding rust, the bass of music vibrating through the concrete before I even reached the door. I slipped in through a side entrance that reeked of sweat and iron, and followed the sound down a narrow corridor until it opened into a cavernous space packed with bodies. A pit sat at the centre, sunken into the ground like a grave, and two men circled each other
CARLAI park my beat-up Honda next to where David's Audi will eventually sit and take a moment to breathe.My hands are shaking.I tell myself it's the cold, but that's a lie. I'm terrified. Excited. Aroused. All of it tangled together in a knot I couldn't untie if I tried.I've been wet since I go
CARLAI sit on the edge of the bed and spread my legs, letting them see how wet I am, how much their submission has affected me."David. You've had your mouth on me before. Show your wife what you've learned."He moves forward on his knees, positions himself between my thighs, and looks up at me wi
HELENI'm standing in our shitty little kitchen slicing limes for the gin and tonic I desperately need when Ethan walks in looking like he's about to vomit on the tile.He can't even meet my eyes. His hands are shaking so hard he drops his keys twice before they clatter onto the counter."Babe," he
CARLAMy name is Carla Valentina Reyes.I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx where the walls were so thin I could hear my mother crying after every sixteen-hour nursing shift. I learned to sleep through the sirens, the fights next door, the cockroaches skittering across the kitchen cou







