LOGINMilaThe string of coincidences was so impossible it felt like a sick joke the universe had played on me. The man I had drawn that broken crayon picture for, the boy who had promised me an empire, had been standing in the shadows of my entire life, watching me stumble, watching me fall and watching me marry a man who would eventually break my spirit."You knew." I whispered as I yanked my wrist out of his grip. "You watched Caleb hit me? You watched me walk into that emergency room with a bruised rib and you did nothing? You were the CEO of his company! You could have fired him! You could have stopped it!"Aaron shook his head. "I didn't know the extent of it at first, Mila. He was careful. But when I finally realized what he was doing... I was going to end him. I promise." He paused."But then Ryan stepped in." Aaron said as his voice registered into a dangerous, icy tone. "Ryan found you. And despite everything I felt, despite every instinct screaming at me to take you from him...
Mila Aaron’s entire body went perfectly still. The dark, empty void in his eyes completely vanished, replaced by a storm of raw, painful memories. He slowly lowered his head, staring at the floor for a long second before looking back up at me."Nobody has called me that in years.” He said softly. My back was pressed hard against the bookshelf. My hands were shaking so much that I had to drop the drawing onto the floor. I couldn't breathe. My mind was breaking under the weight of the truth."Why?" The word ripped out of my throat. "Why me, Aaron? Why keep all these pictures? Why watch me?"Aaron didn't step closer, sensing my fear. Instead, he slowly knelt down on the floor right across from me. It was the exact same way he used to sit in the corner of the playroom all those years ago."Because you were the only real thing in that house." He said. "Everyone else was broken, crying, or mean. But you... you were this tiny, brave thing. You were so cool, Mila. You never let the warden b
MilaThe sound of his voice triggered a violent memory in my mind.I wasn't looking at Aaron Allison anymore. I was looking at a Little boy.Twenty Three years agoSt. Jude's basement…I was six years old.The foster home was a purgatory of peeling wallpaper, the perpetual smell of bleach, and the cries of abandoned children. It was a place where you learned to shrink yourself to survive. But there was one boy who didn't shrink. He simply existed outside of the chaos.He was four or five years older than me maybe ten or eleven but his eyes were ancient. He moved through the drafty, miserable halls like a phantom, utterly detached from the brutality around him. He never joined the games in the yard. He never spoke to the wardens, not even when they withheld his meals as punishment for his silence. He never spoke to the other kids.There were only two exceptions.He would occasionally tolerate Jude, whose relentless, stubborn chatter was the only thing capable of piercing the boy's armo
ReaperSeven days.One hundred and sixty-eight hours of suffocating dead ends.The servers we had ripped from the wall at Pier 4 were sitting in the basement with our best tech guys but the encryption was military-grade. We were brute-forcing our way through firewalls while Mila was still somewhere far away.I was sitting behind my oak desk in my office, staring at the corkboard I had mounted to the wall. It was a chaotic web of maps, shipping manifests, and dead Aegis contractors.But my eyes kept falling to the center of the desk.The photograph.I had smoothed out the crumpled edges and placed it under the harsh glare of my desk lamp. The little girl in the red dress, smiling on the steps of that brick building. It was the only tangible link between Aaron Allison’s penthouse safe and Silas's mercenary hub. I had stared at it so long the colors were burning into my retinas, trying to force the image to give up its secrets.The door to my office groaned open, breaking the silence.I
MilaI picked up the first photo. It was grainy, taken from a distance. It was a girl sitting on a swing set in a park I remembered from the foster. She was wearing a tattered yellow dress, her hair in messy braids.It was me. I was ten years old.I grabbed another. Me at twelve, walking on the foster lawn with a bruised knee. Me at fourteen, sitting on a bench, staring at the tallest tree with a look of hollow exhaustion I remembered all too well.There were dozens of them. Hundreds.Every milestone. Every moment of my miserable, lonely childhood. There were photos of me eating a stolen apple. Photos of me crying behind a dumpster after my mother died.I flipped through them and my breath came in jagged, terrified gasps. This wasn't just a surveillance. This was a life. He had been watching me.At the very bottom of the folder, I found a small, yellowed scrap of paper. It was a drawing. A child’s drawing of a silver serpent and a golden anchor. My heart stopped. Mine. It was my
AriaThe rest of the day, I played the part of the breaking woman, the one who had finally traded her fire for the comfort of a cashmere blanket and a leather-bound book. Elena was relieved. I could see it in the way her posture loosened. She wanted to believe I was settling in because it eased the rot of her own conscience.But as the sun dipped below the horizon, I began.I needed something to turn the screws. The grate in the library was secured by four heavy-duty flathead screws. Aaron’s house was a minimalist's dream, which meant there were no stray tools, no junk drawers, nothing out of place.I found my solution at 7:00 PM in the library. Elena had stepped out to take a call from the central hub in the basement, leaving me alone with the thousands of silent books. On the desk there was a silver-weighted bookmark. It was a thin blade of polished metal meant to hold the place of rare manuscripts.I picked it up. The edge was blunt but the tip was tapered and strong. I tested
Havoc’s POVThe sound of Ryan’s fist crushing Caleb’s face was the sweetest thing I had heard in years.But the sight of my sister wiped it from my mind instantly.“Mila.” I knelt before her on the floor. My heart was bleeding.I was the VP of the Night Reapers. I had broken bones, stabbed men and w
MilaThe line went dead. The tiny screen went black.My hand slipped from my ear, and the phone felll onto the carpet inches from my face. I didn't know if he heard me. I didn't even know who he was. The voice had been deep, dark and nothing like Justin. I was certain it wasn’t Justin. It wasn’t m
RyanJustin barked a genuine, rough laugh. "A vegan bakery. Terrifying. I bet you have even been to a board meeting. Did you use a laser pointer? Please tell me you used a laser pointer.""I threatened to throw a VP out of a sixtieth-floor window if he didn't restructure the supply chain." I replie
Caleb’s POVThe numbers swam before my eyes on the monitor: $400 million.That was the estimated worth of my company. That was the initial stock price. That was my ticket out, the way to pay off the massive debt I had saddled Sterling Industries with.I was sitting in my office, the glittering Manha







