Page 15 of A Forbidden Arrangement

The engine grumbles, the bus lurching forward. The hotel, the alley, the men. They all start shrinking in the rearview as the city slides by. Less than twenty-four hours, and my life is already unrecognizable.

I turn to the woman across the aisle. “Where are we headed?”

She stares at me like I’ve grown another head. “Houlton.”

I must look blank, because she adds, “It’s in Maine.”

Relief rushes through me, loosening my shoulders a fraction. It’s far.

The man in the alley’s clothes hung expensive on his frame, the quiet certainty in his voice when he promised he’d find me. He’s the type with connections. The type who can make good on his threats.

My hand dives into my purse. I pull my phone out and use a paperclip to pop the SIM card free. It’s a tiny thing, lighter than it should be for how much trouble it can bring. I shove it into my pocket, deciding that giving in to paranoia is better than pretending I’m safe.

The hum of the road fills the space around me as New York City slips away. I’d chased after Bradley, believing it would be ours. Now, I’m leaving it behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, watching it vanish like every promise he ever made.

I rest my forehead against the window. My breath fogs the glass.

Maybe the woman across from me was right. Maybe I am losing it, but starting over doesn’t sound so bad.

Chapter 8

Xander

Two months.

That’show long since she vanished.

Two months of hunting for the woman who’ll be my wife.

She’d left me with nothing. No ID. No records. No digital trail. As if she never existed.

I sit in my office, a watch worth more than most men’s yearly salary ticking on my wrist, useless against time I can’t control.

My hand rakes through my hair, elbows digging into the desk. The silence weighs heavily, broken only by the faint hum of the city twenty floors below.

I came to New York and built empires, turned billions into more billions. I bend governments, industries, men. None of it matters. Not the Order. Not the money. Not the power. Nothing matters when she’s out there without me.

So I built an entire network around her shadow. Hospital alerts. Credit flagging. Facial recognition buried in systems people don’t even know they use. I hacked, bribed, threatened, and burned through every resource the Order of Saints could put its hands on.

I pried her name from Bradley’s mouth.

Dahlia Sinclair.

He’d given it easily, too easily, the instant I leaned on him, desperate to save his skin. I barely had to touch him before he started running his mouth, spilling everything he knew. Her name. Her habits. Then he called her nothing special. Shrugged, said she was just a good lay.

My fist connected with his face before the words finished leaving his mouth. By the time my brothers dragged me off, he was broken on the floor with blood pooling beneath him. My brothers stepping in was the only reason he was still breathing.

I’ve buried men for less.

That name allowed me to access her past. I thought she was soft, too trusting. The reports made me see the rest. Tenacity wired so tight it kept her alive. Not innocent. Not soft enough to break.

Her dad had never been in the picture, and her mom had married three times before she was six years old, each one shorter than the previous. I nearly lost it as I read through the police reports.

My Dahlia was scared, alone. Abandoned before she even knew what that meant. Her mom would come back just long enough so that she didn’t lose custody, then disappear again.

When a marriage finally stuck, she never came back. It didn’t take me long to track her down. New family, two daughters and a son. Middle class in the suburbs. Her mother had traded her daughter for a new life.

The only thing stopping me from tracking that bitch down and tearing the pristine life she created apart is that all of my energy is channeled into finding Dahlia.