LARA'S POV
The inside of Ronnie's black Maybach is a tomb on wheels. The silence is thick, broken only by the whisper of the air conditioning and the hum of the engine.
I'm curled against the cool leather, my body back in this gilded cage, but my mind is still trapped in that alley.
'His eyes. God, his eyes. They're burned onto the back of my fucking eyelids. Not angry. Not panicked. Just… calm. Calculating. Like he was looking at a equation he needed to solve, and I was a variable he hadn't accounted for.'
I can still feel the weight of that stare. It felt like he was peeling me open, layer by layer, seeing the champagne numbness, the desperate thrill, the core of terrified ice that had formed in my gut.
He saw the witness, the loose end, but he saw me, too. Lara Vik-cross, the princess who wandered into the slaughterhouse.
Ronnie is driving, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He's not yelling. Ronnie never yells. That's Adam's specialty. Ronnie's anger is a silent, freezing pressure that slowly suffocates you.
"A little warning next time you decide to fund a small nation's GDP with my card, Medley," he says, his voice dangerously calm. "The fraud alert texts were… prolific."
Next to me, Medley just shrugs, tapping her nails against the window. She's buzzing with leftover energy, completely unrepentant. "You have it. We used it. Consider it my hazard pay for dealing with your… intensity."
'She has no idea. No idea that the real hazard was in a filthy alley behind XS. She's arguing over money, over pride, while my world has just been cracked down the middle by a man with stormy eyes and blood on his hands.'
"Hazard pay?" Ronnie's voice is a low whip. "You maxed out the secondary card on bottle service and what the receipt calls 'premium ambiance charges.' What the hell is a premium ambiance charge?"
"It means the DJ played my requests and the bouncers kept the creeps away," she fires back, a defiant smirk in her voice. "And I'd do it again. Your money is our community service, Ronnie."
'She would. She absolutely would. This is a game to her. A thrilling, power-play game. She doesn't live in the world of slit throats and assessing gazes. She just plays in its periphery.'
Their voices are just noise, a distant radio broadcast I can't tune into. My whole being is focused on the memory of that man.
Why did he look at me like that?
It wasn't the look of a man caught in a crime. It was the look of a king who'd found a strange, beautiful insect in his garden. A curiosity. Something to be examined before deciding whether to pin it to a board or simply crush it under his thumb.
Ronnie says something, pulling me from the abyss of that thought. "—had one of the boys bring your car back. It's in the garage. Don't ever take the Aventador without telling me again."
'The car. He's worried about the fucking Lamborghini. My brother, the strategist, is calculating the depreciation on a sports car while I'm calculating how long I have before the man from the alley decides I'm a liability that needs to be erased.'
Medley mutters something back, a fresh wave of defiance, but I don't hear the words. I just feel the tension radiating between them, a silent, bitter quarrel humming in the space around me.
The rest of the drive is a blur of neon lights smearing past the tinted windows, each one a streak of meaningless color.
The numbness from the club is gone, completely evaporated. In its place is a hyper-awareness, a chilling clarity.
'He saw everything. Every secret, every rebellion, every unsaid fear I've ever carried. Those eyes didn't just see a woman; they saw an opportunity. A weakness. A prize. And the most terrifying part? The most vile, shameful part? In that single, heart-stopping moment, part of me… the part that's sick of being a porcelain doll… liked it. Liked being seen by something that was real, something that was powerful enough to snuff out a life without a second thought.'
I close my eyes, but I don't see darkness. I only see him. And I know, with a certainty that coils deep in my soul, that this isn't over.
The devil saw me in the shadows tonight. And he's not the kind to forget a face.
– – –
The last 48 hours have been a blur of sleeplessness and frantic turning in my thousand-thread-count sheets.
Every time I close my eyes, I don't see the back of my eyelids. I see a flickering yellow light, a pool of black blood, and a pair of stormy, assessing eyes.
I'm in my corner office at Vik-cross Co., the morning sun glaring off the glass skyscrapers of the Strip, and I can't focus for shit. The quarterly financial report is open on my screen, a sea of black numbers on white.
I've probably read the same line about asset liquidity five hundred times, and it still hasn't penetrated the thick, cottony panic in my head.
'Asset liquidity. Who gives a fuck about liquid assets when I can still smell the iron-rich scent of a man's life bleeding out onto floor?'
To make it all worse, the hangover has decided to stage a fucking coup and last for two full days. A dull, persistent hammer is beating against the inside of my skull, a punishing reminder of my one night of freedom.
I run a frustrated, trembling hand over my eyes, pressing until I see stars. "Get it together, Lara," I whisper to the empty, opulent room.
The door opens with a soft click. Mirah, my assistant, glides in, her heels silent on the plush carpet. She's holding a large to-go cup of coffee—my usual, black as my current mood—and her other arm is wrapped around a bouquet.
Not just any bouquet.
This is a funeral arrangement. A massive, obscene burst of deep crimson roses and black calla lilies, wrapped in stark black paper. It's a thing of brutal, beautiful darkness.
"Your coffee, Ms. Vik-cross," Mirah says, her voice professionally neutral as she sets the cup on my desk. She places the bouquet beside it. "And these just arrived for you at the front desk. No card was given, according to the delivery driver. An anonymous sender."
My heart gives a single, hard thump against my ribs. Anonymous. In my world, anonymous is never good. It's a threat before the words are even spoken.
"Thank you, Mirah," I say, my voice miraculously steady.
She gives a curt nod and leaves, the door clicking shut, sealing me in with the flowers.
I stare at them. The roses are so dark they're almost black, velvety and perfect. The calla lilies look like sculpted obsidian. It's a bouquet you send to a widow. Or to a corpse.
'Who the hell sends this? Is it from the finance bro, trying to be edgy? Is it from Ronnie, a fucked-up apology for his silent treatment? No. Ronnie's threats are quieter. This is… this is something else.'
For a few minutes, I ignore it. I take a scalding sip of coffee and force my eyes back to the screen. Liquid assets. Market volatility. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
But the arrangement is a black hole in my peripheral vision, pulling all my attention. With a sigh of irritation, I reach for it, meaning to shove it off to the side of my desk.
That's when I see it.
A small, stark white card tucked deep within the thorny stems, almost hidden. I must have missed it before.
My fingers, stupidly clumsy, pluck it from its hiding place. There's no name, no florist's logo. Just 3 words, typed in a simple, bold font.
The words register in my brain.
"Found you, 'Princess'."
The air leaves my lungs in a silent whoosh. The world tilts on its axis.
The coffee cup slips from my numb fingers, hitting the Persian rug with a dull thud, splattering hot, black liquid like a stain of sin.
'Him. It's him. The man from the alley. He wasn't just a phantom, a nightmare my guilt conjured. He's real. He's here. And he knows exactly who I am. He knows my name. He knows where I work.'
The blood drains from my face so fast I feel lightheaded, the hangover nausea replaced by a pure, chilling terror. My skin is suddenly ice-cold. I can feel every single beat of my heart, a frantic, trapped bird slamming against my ribs.
''Princess.' He said it like a curse, a mocking taunt. He's not just telling me he found me. He's telling me my title, my protection, my gilded cage… it means nothing to him. I'm not a Vik-cross heiress to him. I'm a witness. I'm a toy. And the game he's playing is so much darker than anything I could have imagined.'
I stare at the card until the letters blur, my entire body frozen in a fear so profound it feels like my very soul has been iced over. He's not just in my memories anymore.
He's in my city. He's in my office.
He's in my life.