Jamie
Back at the apartment,I sat in the armchair, my laptop open, scrolling the chaotic mess of transactions, fake accounts, and offshore names Mitchell controlled. I tried to focus on the trails I was finding, but everything inside me buzzed as though I’d mainlined adrenaline. Killian had a point—I knew he did. I needed to back off and let other people finesse their way through the minefield of connections. But my skin felt too tight, every part of me restless and wired. And that itch, that constant itch, I couldn’t ignore.
I wanted to make Kessler and Lassiter squirm. One of the bottom feeders for cash both men benefited from, whatever they had going on, was a club called The Bonehook, run by RP, who I soonfound out was Ricardo Price, a small-time player who’d been paying Mitchell like clockwork. The accounts showed steady payments up the ladder toward Lassiter, but there was no apparent connection to Kessler.
So Lassiter was my first target.
Not him, but the world that kept him rich.
The way I saw it, with Mitchell off-grid—aka completely fucking dead—he’d be pissed. Money gone dark tends to make powerful people very nervous. And angry.
The Bonehook and Ricardo were part of a Ponzi scheme with the center snapped—what did that make Ricardo? Desperate. Exposed. Probably scrabbling to pull cash together before someone noticed?
I flicked open my lighter, watched the flame dance, then snapped it shut. The sharp sound, the flick of metal on metal, the smell of gas—the only rhythm that brought any order to my brain. Light. Shut. Breathe. I stared into the flame every time it caught, hypnotized by the flicker, the illusion of control. The flame didn’t ask questions. It didn’t care that everything in my head was chaos and red flags and warning bells. It burned—steady, obedient, and gone on command. Rinse and repeat. It helped me sort through the mess.
The front door opened, the sound sharp in the quiet.
Rio stepped inside, unwrapping his hands slowly, methodically. His knuckles were bruised, his face flushed, a cut from his temple to his left eye with butterfly bandages holding it closed. He didn’t say a word as he tossed an envelope thick with cash onto the counter.
I raised a brow. “You fighting at The Pit?”
He snorted, heading for the fridge. “Yep.”
I glanced at the envelope, then at him. “Enzo’s not gonna like you being down there again.”
“Nothing he needs to know about,” he shrugged. “I needed the cash.”
“You needed to make someone bleed,” I corrected him, and he shrugged. He had as many demons riding him as I did. “I can get you cash if you need it.”
“I earn my money.”
“You get beaten up for your money,” I corrected.
He pulled out a carton of eggs and glanced over his shoulder. “You want something to eat?”
Rio was a master of deflection, but I nodded, suddenly aware of how empty my stomach felt. “I could eat.”
He set the carton down and started cracking eggslike any other night. Like none of it—bruised fists, dirty money, our unraveling web of lies—mattered.
Rio slid a pan onto the stove, then nodded toward the laptop still on my knees. “So, what’d you find out?”
I sighed, tapping a few keys. “Names. Places. Shell companies. Clubs with untraceable ownership that somehow loop back to a foundation supposedly set up for inner city kids. Which is cute if it wasn’t so fucking disgusting. Here—” I tilted the screen so he could see. “These five accounts? All tied to Mitchell’s laundering scheme. This one here? Dubai. This one—Macau. Cayman Islands, obviously. But this?” I tapped the screen, anger rising. “There are clubs with money moving out of them faster than it’s coming in, which means someone’s panicking.”
Rio stared at the screen, then at me. “You gonna burn them all down? Should I be worried?”
I snorted, then closed the laptop, tension radiating through my shoulders. “Killian wants us to back off.”
Rio raised a brow and gestured at the laptop. “And this is you backing off?”
“Yep, backing off,” I lied to my best friend.
Rio leaned against the counter, flipping the eggs with exaggerated care. “What was it with you andKillian today?” he asked, his tone too casual to be anything but deliberate.
Of course, he’d noticed. How could he not? The way I’d gotten too close to Killian when we argued. Voices low, sharp, like knives being drawn. We never backed down. That tension—it wasn’t a fight. It was a fuse, lit and burning fast.
Killian was under my skin before I’d even realized it. He saw too much. Read me too well. And he’d never looked away.
Calling me Pretty? That smug little nickname? It lit me up. Mocking and intimate at the same time, as if he knew how to twist the knife. He hadn’t flinched when I snapped. Hadn’t blinked. Just stood there—calm, still, in control. And I’d fucking hated it, because some part of me wanted to shove him against a wall. Wipe that calm off his face to feel something that made sense. Not tension. Not heat. Something real. I’d been hard. Turned on. Furious. Wrecked.
