Page 109 of Fractured Allegiance

My pulse ticks once behind my temple.

“You’re still greenlit for the drop, right?” she asks.

“Two weeks. Maybe less.”

“Then listen carefully. Drazen falls soon. And when he does, anyone inside that room when the walls come down? They don’t walk out clean. If you want her alive, get her out of his reach. Quietly. No grand gestures. No mess.”

“She won’t leave.”

“Then find a way to make her.”

“She doesn’t trust me like that yet.”

“Then give her a reason to.”

I shut my eyes again.

Naomi’s voice comes quieter. Not gentle. Just controlled.

“I don’t care if you like her,” she says. “I care whether that gets her killed.”

I say nothing.

Because there’s nothing left to say.

She ends the call.

The line clicks out.

And I’m left standing in the alley behind a bodega that sells bootleg cigarettes and fake IDs to kids who already know better.

I look up at the skyline. The club roof is half-visible past the next building.

I’ve crossed the fucking line.

Chapter 13 – Lydia - Masks Don’t Slip

I stand in the center of the loft, arms hanging limp, gaze drifting from the monitor to the table and back again.

The envelope’s still there. Open. Facedown. Like even it doesn’t want to be looked at anymore.

You don’t belong to him.

The ink wasn’t smudged. Whoever wrote it had a steady hand. Too steady. And they didn’t write it for me. They wrote it for him. For Silas.

He read it without blinking.

He said it wasn’t Drazen.

And I believed him.

That’s what terrifies me most.

I should’ve torn it up. Burned it. Spit on it. But I didn’t. I let it sit there like a conversation I’m still trying not to finish.

I look across the loft.

The burner Silas gave me is on the counter. Still turned off. I left it there on purpose, like a dare to myself, to him, to whatever this thing is that keeps pulling us back into each other’s gravity.