Chapter 10

Malakai

The drive back from the abandoned Cathedral was dead silent. I sat in the rear of the armored SUV, my obsidian mask resting on the leather seat beside me, staring out at the blurred neon lights of the city bleeding through the downpour.

My hands were steady, but my mind was an absolute battlefield.

Vesper.

I pulled a silver lighter from my pocket, automatically rolling a cigarette between my fingers before bringing the flame to the tip. The acrid, burning smoke hit my lungs, harsh and heavy.

I hated the taste of it now. I had promised Aria —vowed to her on my knees while her soft fingers traced my jawline—that I was giving up the habit forever. She hated the scent of the tobacco on my clothes, and back then, making her smile had been more important than any vice I possessed. I had successfully quit for a year.

But for the last six months, ever since my penthouse became a graveyard, the cigarettes had returned. Without her warmth anchoring me, the icy void in my chest demanded to be filled with smoke and ash. It was a physical manifestation of my failure to keep her safe.

"Is the secondary perimeter team back in place at the tower, sir?" Marcus’s voice broke the silence from the front seat, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

"Yes," I rasped, my voice thick. "Double the guard on her penthouse. If anyone approaches the building, shoot to kill."

"Understood, sir. But... if I may ask, how did the meeting with Vesper go? Did she accept the encrypted drive?"

"She took it," I murmured, my gaze drifting back to the window. "She has twenty-four hours to prove she can break the Vance mainframe."

I fell silent again, my chest tightening with a suffocating, violent sense of cognitive dissonance. I couldn't shake it. The moment Vesper had stood before me, every predatory instinct I possessed had gone on high alert, but it wasn't the thrill of a new enemy. It was something else. Something buried so deep it made my soul ache.

There was something about her that felt entirely too familiar.

I closed my eyes, forcing myself to reconstruct the scene in the dark sanctuary. I had spent a year memorizing every single line, curve, and breath of Aria’s body. I knew the exact slope of her shoulders. I knew the way her waist tapered, the precise elegance of her stride, the way she held her ground when she was terrified but trying to look brave. I had seen Aria completely naked beneath me, illuminated by the moonlight in my bedroom, and I had seen her fully clothed, wrapped in the expensive silks I bought to shield her from the world.

Vesper’s body shape... it was a flawless, terrifying mirror of Aria’s.

When I had stepped close to her at the altar, closing the distance until I could feel the heat radiating off her small frame, the resemblance had been so sharp it had nearly brought me to my knees. The height was identical. The subtle, fluid shift of her weight when she lowered her weapon—it was a movement I had tracked a thousand times in my own home.

But the voice...

I opened my eyes, staring at the ceiling of the car. Vesper’s voice had been a flat, synthesized, freezing rasp. A mechanical nightmare stripped of any human warmth. My Aria’s voice was soft, sweet, a delicate melody that used to break into ragged, breathless gasps whenever I held her too tightly. Aria was a fragile bird I had tried to shelter from the storm. Vesper was a hardened underground warlord who didn't blink when a gun was leveled at her chest.

It didn't make sense. Aria had no tactical training. She didn't know how to code advanced double-encryption sequences. She didn't know how to drop a military-grade mercenary in a mud-slicked harbor.

Yet, as the SUV pulled into the subterranean garage of Thorne Tower, a tiny, dangerous spark of a hunch began to take root in the darkest corner of my mind.

It was insane.

It was completely impossible. But in my world, coincidences were just poorly hidden conspiracies.

If Aria had been extracted by a high-level dark-web broker... if she had been running from the Vances... what if she hadn't just hidden? What if the cage I built for her had driven her to become the very thing she needed to survive?

I stepped out of the car, grabbing my obsidian mask, my eyes narrowing into lethal slits as I walked toward the private elevator.

"Marcus," I called out, my voice dropping into a low, calculating growl.

"Sir?"

"I want a full biometric and skeletal-structure analysis run on the satellite footage of Vesper from the harbor heist and the church," I commanded, stepping into the elevator. "Compare her height, her shoulder-to-hip ratio, and her exact stride length against every file we have on Aria. I don't care if the voice doesn't match. I want to know if the bones do."

Marcus looked startled, but he bowed his head instantly. "Right away, boss."

The elevator doors slid shut, and as the machine carried me up to my empty, haunted palace, I gripped the obsidian mask until my knuckles turned white.

If you are playing a game with me behind that carbon fiber, little bird, I thought, a dark, possessive fire igniting in my chest, you better pray I don't catch you. Because the moment I rip that mask off and find your eyes behind it, I am never letting you go again.