MasukChapter 76Kegan✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦To the ordinary eye, this place was just an abandoned dream slowly being reclaimed by nature.To anyone passing by, it was just another failed business venture, unremarkable and forgettable.Which was exactly why it was perfect for storing millions in product.I’d arrived two hours early, positioned my car six blocks away, and approached on foot through the service entrance that only five people knew existed. The security system showed green across all channels. No breaches, no unauthorized access since I’d been here earlier disposing of bodies.I moved through the underground bunkers with practiced silence, checking each storage room, each corridor, looking for anything out of place. The product was exactly where it should be, undisturbed since Marco’s team had cleaned and reorganized everything.But in the main storage room—the one where I’d killed three men just hours ago—someone had left a gift.A single emerald dress, hanging from a support beam like
Chapter 75 Estelle✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦I tried not to think about Oliver’s implied threat or the way Carrie’s face had gone white when she saw that call.The afternoon crawled by. Marco brought me coffee at regular intervals, each cup accompanied by a look that said *I know something’s wrong and I’m ready to extract you at any moment.*But nothing happened. Oliver stayed in his corner of the office, typing away at his computer like he hadn’t just implied he knew I was lying about my identity. Carrie remained locked in her office for hours, only emerging once to snap at Barbara about something inconsequential.By seven PM, most of the staff had cleared out. By eight, it was just me, Marco somewhere in the building, and the skeleton crew that handled security and essential functions.By eight-thirty, I was starting to think maybe the summit wouldn’t be so bad after all.Then Carrie’s office door flew open.She looked like she’d been really stressed in the last few hours, her hair was even sligh
Chapter 74 Estelle✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦I’d barely slept the previous night, but when I opened my eyes, it was Wednesday morning.I stared at the dress hanging in my closet like a ghost waiting to be worn. The dress I was supposed to wear tonight. To Gold Golf. At midnight.Except I had no intention of going. Kegan had made that abundantly clear last night between kisses. “You’re not going anywhere near that place. I’ll handle it.”But the text message was still there on my phone when I woke up, a reminder that someone expected me: *Wear the green dress tonight.*I deleted it for the third time, as if that would make the sender disappear.“Good morning sunshine," Kegan greeted from the doorway, already dressed in one of those perfectly tailored suits that made him look like he owned the world. “I think you should sleep some more.”“I just woke up and I have work.” I pulled on the conservative navy dress I’d chosen for today’s office marathon—last-minute summit prep that would probably keep me
Chapter 73 Kegan ✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦ I pulled into my building’s private garage, exhaustion finally hitting me like a physical weight. It had been a long day—starting with Estelle’s panic about the baby blanket, progressing through five corpses at Gold Golf that I’d had to create, and ending with breaking into a stalker’s apartment and jumping between buildings like I was twenty-five instead of thirty-two. My ribs were definitely going to remind me of that last part for days. And Wednesday was still hours away. The elevator ride up to my penthouse stretched out for what seemed like an eternity. When the doors finally opened, I found Estelle exactly where Marco had described—pacing my bedroom, phone in one hand, tablet in the other, papers spread across the bed in what looked like a pattern of an overzealous detective from a TV show. She spun when she heard me enter, relief and frustration warring on her face. “Finally. Do you have any idea how—” She stopped mid-sentence, taking in my
Chapter 72Kegan✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦I took photos of the entire conversation, my jaw clenching tighter with each screenshot. Then I clicked through to other chats, there I found more evidence of planning and surveillance. I moved to his closet, looking for anything else that might be useful. What I found made me actually laugh, a sound that was more disbelief than humor, echoing in the too-quiet apartment.Photographs. Hundreds of them. But not of Carrie this time.These were trophies. Different women, different locations, all clearly taken without their knowledge or consent. Some were relatively innocent, ranging from women at coffee shops, in parks, going about their daily lives, completely unaware they were being documented. Others were far more invasive, shots through windows, in changing rooms, intimate moments captured and preserved like specimens in a collection.This idiot wasn’t just obsessed with Carrie. He was obsessed with documenting, creeping, stalking, and keeping souvenirs.
Chapter 71Kegan✦༺⚜︎☠︎⚜︎༻✦My hands weren’t shaking. They never did, even after violence. Years of training and experience had taught me to compartmentalize, to separate the necessary evil of killing from my emotional response to it.But I hated it. God, I hated it.Hated the waste. Hated the bodies that would need disposing. Hated the fact that three men were dead because they’d been stupid enough to threaten me and stubborn enough not to walk away when given the chance.This wasn’t who I wanted to be. The man who killed without blinking, who could stand in a room full of corpses and feel nothing but irritation at the cleanup required.But it was who I needed to be to survive in this world. To protect the people I cared about. To keep Estelle safe.Marco arrived with the cleanup team exactly twenty minutes later. They worked with efficient silence, documenting everything, bagging bodies, sanitizing surfaces. Professional death dealers who’d done this a hundred times.“Boss,” one of







