Page 31

The night is slick with humidity and secrets.

I step outside the gala’s gilded hellscape, where the air is cooler but no less suffocating.

I need a minute. Away from her skin, her eyes, her fucking scent.

If I stay another second in that powder room, I’ll forget why I’m here, which is to protect her, not devour her.

I round a corner, my muscles tight, jaw tighter, and crash right into someone.

Someone with a big frame, tactical stance, and low center of gravity, like he’s ready to clear a room or take a hit. That posture never really goes away.

I look up, and for a second, the air just vacates my lungs like it knows better than to stick around.

It takes a hell of a lot to surprise me. I’ve walked into ambushes with steadier hands. But this one earns a pause. Because standing there, looking like he never left the battlefield, is a ghost I never expected to bump into in a place like this.

Of all the people in the world I could’ve run into tonight, it had to be him .

“Noah,” I breathe.

Noah McKnight.

He’s broader now, more grizzled than the sharp-jawed sniper I used to know. He still moves like a shadow, though. His eyes hit mine, and something shifts—recognition, maybe guilt.

“Creed.”

He just mutters my name. Flat and controlled. Like he isn’t surprised, but not exactly pleased either.

My heart knocks hard. I haven’t seen him in years. Not since France. Not since her .

The air between us is tight. Loaded. And just like that, I’m not in this overpriced coastal mansion anymore. I’m back in Paris.

She was the kind of woman people noticed in awe.

Isola Vane.

She moved with grace draped in restraint. The kind of woman who turned heads not because she demanded attention but because she carried the kind of sorrow people could feel in their bones.

She was Evander’s wife on paper, but never in spirit.

There was a quiet rebellion in her every breath, a refusal to be tamed by money or obligation.

Her red hair was always pinned in elegant coils, her flawless skin like porcelain, and her eyes so pale that they almost glowed under chandeliers.

She had eyes that rarely betrayed what she felt, but when they did, it was heartbreak and misery.

Evander hired me and Noah for his private security team—two ex-military dogs meant to look sharp and shut up. We were to protect the Vane name, no matter what secrets it bled. Most of our duties involved press blocks, paparazzi deterrence, and crowd control at glitzy galas.

But Isola… she needed something different.

She didn’t say it, but it was obvious. The bruises, the soft flinches when Evander’s voice rose, or his hand hovered too close. I never saw him strike her, but I saw the aftermath. The shift in her behavior. The shadows under her eyes.

She spent most of her time traveling. Lyra, barely a teenager then, was always back at the estate with rotating nannies and elite tutors.

Isola talked about her constantly and showed me pictures.

She told me little stories from phone calls.

“She’s stubborn like me,” she once said, a sad smile playing on her lips.

“But Evander will break her if she’s not careful. ”

I was assigned to protect Isola during a six-week diplomatic circuit through France.

Dinners with foreign dignitaries, art auctions, and appearances at embassies.

She called it “the pageant,” like it was some performance she couldn’t escape.

And it was. She smiled until her cheeks ached and wore gowns like they were armor.

Our conversations were brief. Professional. But I listened when she needed to vent and stood guard when she needed the peace.

She was never flirtatious. Not with me. And I never wanted that.

I respected her too much to imagine crossing that line.

I was attracted to Serena anyway. Serena, her younger sister, with whom I had shared a few nights.

But it didn’t last. Serena never wanted to be tied down, and I couldn’t imagine leaving my job.

What I wanted was to preserve whatever pieces of her were still unbroken.

Isola called me “the ghost with the sad eyes.”

One night at the Ritz, she caught me watching her and whispered, “If I ever vanish, remember, it wasn’t weakness. It was war.”

I didn’t understand then. But I do now.

It was early spring. Rain had swept through Paris all day, leaving the streets slick and glistening, a mirror for the city’s lights. The air outside the H?tel de Crillon was cool and clean, that rare breath of Paris when the tourists have gone to bed and the ghosts wake up.

Inside, Isola was supposed to be preparing for a gala at the Palais Garnier.

It was to be the final event of the circuit, the one with the most cameras and the most pressure.

Her dress had arrived, a gold satin marvel, custom Dior.

Her schedule was tight but clear. She’d excused herself for a final fitting and makeup touch-up, leaving her private suite under the watch of the interior team.

Noah and I were posted outside. Standard protocol. Our assignment was to secure transport and sweep the route while she got ready. We were the outer ring of a circle meant to close around her like protection.

The car pulled up. We stood at the ready. And waited. Five minutes. Ten.

Then one of the housekeepers stepped out, looking nervous, and said Mrs. Vane had complained of a migraine and asked not to be disturbed.

Evander didn’t even blink when he heard. He brushed it off, said she was tired, and that maybe she wouldn’t attend.

But my gut twisted. I felt it. That wrongness. The quiet before a disaster.

I looked at Noah. He looked at me. And we moved.

We split up, with me checking the hallway cameras, then her suite. Her room was empty. No signs of a struggle, no scent of perfume. The bed hadn’t been used, and the dress was still on its hanger.

I called her assistant. Her driver. Her stylist. No one had seen her.

Noah joined me as I swept the side streets. We called in favors from local authorities under the radar. We searched rooftops and alleys and every back entrance of that hotel like dogs chasing smoke.

That night, neither of us slept.

Two days later, her body surfaced in the Seine. Near Pont de l’Alma. There were no bruises, no wounds. She was just a ghost, her eyes closed like she was finally asleep.

The coroner ruled it complications from cancer and said she must’ve wandered off in a fugue. Quietly ill for years , the report said.

But we saw her body.

It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an illness.

It was something darker, calculated, and clean.

It was the kind of death that leaves no evidence but chills every instinct in your bones.

Isola wasn’t the type to quietly slip away into the night.

She was full of life, full of spite and beauty and defiance.

She had plans. She had love for her daughter, and a hatred for the gilded prison Evander kept her in.

Noah and I knew.

We didn’t say it out loud, but the truth lived in our stillness.

Someone wanted her gone. And they made sure it looked like she just… disappeared.

Closed casket, no press, a funeral conducted at dawn. There was no time to grieve.

Evander erased her like she never existed.

Closed casket, fast burial, no press, no mourning.

Evander made sure of that.

When I stormed into a board meeting to confront him, I grabbed his collar and slammed him against the glass wall of his penthouse office, my voice cracking from rage. “What did you do?”

He didn’t even flinch.

He just looked me in the eye and said, “You want to protect something, Creed? Protect the daughter. That’s all that matters now.”

And then he fired me, clean and clinical, with just a signed NDA, a fat severance, and a line in the sand.

I left, and I didn’t look back.

Until years later.

Evander suddenly reached out again, out of the blue, through encrypted channels, like he always does. He offered me triple my old rate and said Lyra needed protection. He said the past needed closure.

I almost didn’t answer. But then I remembered my promise to Isola to always protect her. Lyra was a part of her, so naturally, I had to do what was right.

I started looking into her even more than I already was. She was all grown up now, with hair wild like her mother’s, and eyes full of mischief and fire. The resemblance was more than uncanny; it was surgical.

And in that moment, I knew I’d take the job. Because if I couldn’t save Isola… I’d damn well save her daughter.

Noah and I never spoke again. Not until tonight. Not until now.

He stands in front of me like a walking guilt trip with the same squared jaw and deadpan eyes. “You’re her detail again,” he says.

“I never stopped being,” I answer.

His jaw ticks. “You think he brought you back for Lyra?”

“I think he brought me back because he knows what I lost the last time.”

Noah crosses his arms. “You’re not the only one who lost her, Creed.”

We stand there for a beat, years of memories coiled like a bomb between us.

“I wasn’t fast enough to save her,” I say quietly. “But I won’t make that mistake with Lyra.”

He nods once. “Then we’re on the same side.”

For now.

I stand just inside the doorway, surveying the room and taking in the crowd like a hawk scanning its territory.

This isn’t my usual scene. Hell, this is more chaotic than a warzone, but I’ve learned to adapt to the battlefield of luxury and power.

The air smells like expensive wine and overpriced perfume, like something you could taste and still feel filthy afterward.

The glow of chandeliers above catches every polished surface, and I swear, if I squint hard enough, I can almost see the desperation reflected in their faces.