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LEONA

“ C iel?” I whispered as I poked my head into his room.

It was already noon, but I had no idea when he went to sleep or woke up. His room was soundproofed, plus with the blackout curtains, you could never quite tell what time it was.

“I should have known,” I said, stepping inside. He was awake, sitting at his desk, and working.

“Hey,” he responded, barely looking up. Screens lit up the darkness, but I turned his light on.

“Sitting in the dark will make your eyes worse.”

“Excuse you,” he groaned as he rubbed them. “Too bright.”

I laughed. “It’s on the lowest setting of the dimmer. You’re being dramatic.”

He scoffed, but he pushed back his computer chair and turned to face me. “Out of all of us, that’s what I’m known for. Drama.”

“So right.” I smiled and then sat on his lap, my arms going around his neck. My heart leaped as his hands rested on my hips. It wasn’t too long ago that he’d pushed me away. This was much better. “Speaking of drama queens, I want to get a crown made for Ryuji.”

He snorted. “I’ll have one made immediately.”

I took his cheeks in my hands to plant a firm kiss on his lips. Home. I should have said so on the phone—God knows I was thinking it—but he was my home. They all were.

“What are you working on?”

“Well, I was just about to send you and Obi an update about your father’s account numbers.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah?”

He pulled up a few documents. “I’m not through all of them yet, but you’ll be interested to know there are payments to Don Sandrini and Don Lucchese on here, too.”

I scanned through the data. “Seriously? The other Dons were involved, too?”

“All the Dons except Don Rossi. Not sure why. But there are outgoing payments to Sandrini and Lucchese. No incoming payments.”

I blew a breath through my nose. “So the other Dons were involved. Maybe they were all helping him, the same as Don Vincenzo was. Or maybe my father was paying them to look the other way.”

“It’s possible.” He tightened his grip on my hips. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. Whether blackmail or something else, the pieces will come together.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to make it make sense. “You sent this to Obi?”

“Just did. I’m still looking through the rest of them. They’re getting harder to trace.”

“Okay,” I murmured. “Let’s keep looking. There has to be more.”

“I’ll find it.”

Maybe the rest of the accounts would tie everything together. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the other Dons were involved in the same shady shit my father was—and Max knew it, too. If we got more answers, we’d hopefully be able to understand his goals.

“What else are you doing?” Ciel’s desk was a total wreck, with papers, and empty energy drinks crumbled behind his keyboard. He was a master multi-tasker. I’d never known someone who could keep track of different projects like he did.

“Two things at once.” He nodded at the screens on the left. “That’s everything I can find about the board meeting and the restaurant.” Then he nodded to the right. “That’s everything I have on the Alacrán Cartel.”

Something about his voice seemed off. Tense, or maybe frustrated. I studied everything I could see about the Alacrán. “You seem stuck. Disappointed. What am I missing?”

He chuckled, nuzzling his nose into my hair. “As always, you notice everything. It’s not so much what you’re missing, but what I’m missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve always suspected that the Alacrán Cartel killed my parents.”

I sucked in a breath. His earlier reaction to hearing about them finally made sense. “Seriously?”

One of his hands let go of my hip to double-click an image to enlarge it. The grainy image of a man with brown hair shaved on both sides while keeping it long on top filled the screen. His face was so obscured that I couldn’t get a good look at him.

“That’s the leader, Rafael Arboleda. He’s a phantom. I can’t get any other clues where he is currently or whether they have connections to when my parents died.”

“What happened?” I asked. “When they were killed?”

He exhaled a long breath. “I was just a kid. We lived on the edge of the cartel compound. Since my mother wasn’t Colombian, and I had a speech disorder, our family was often ostracized, so we felt most comfortable on the outside. It was the middle of the night when men broke into our home. I was sleeping in my parent’s bed. We heard glass break, and they pushed me inside the hole in the floorboards underneath their bed.” He paused, throat bobbing. I grabbed his hand and rubbed my thumb across the back of it. “I listened as my father was overpowered. My parents begged for their lives, my mother screaming at me in French to stay put, before their throats were cut.”

“Holy shit, Ciel,” I breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t come out from under the bed until morning and by then, they were long gone.” He slowed down, like he needed to consider each word before he spoke. “They had hit our house and another house before our cartel chased them off. Our leader never told me who attacked us, and by the time I was old enough to look, he was dead, and the trail was cold. I’m not even sure if he knew who attacked us.”

“But you still think it was the Alacrán?”

“It was the only opposing cartel at the same time. They’re aggressive, pushing north over the span of the last fifteen years. Arboleda is known to be incredibly cruel, and he frequently targets women. When I heard the stories of what he does to his victims, it lined up almost perfectly with what happened to my parents. I just don’t have proof.”

“I hope we find him and do the same fucking thing to him, then,” I said, cupping his cheek. Ciel deserved the truth. He deserved peace. I’d already promised him I would do everything I could to help him get it. “Can we use your facial recognition software with that image you have?”

He shook his head. “This image isn’t the best, so I don’t have a lot of markers to work with. I’d also guess he’s doing something to beat the software, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got two main suspicions right now. One, Volpe’s hacker is covering his tracks. Two, he’s taking physical preventive measures, like hats, glasses, or even makeup.”

“Hmm.”

Max allied with the Alacrán to stand against my connection with the Russians. Their focus was drugs; the Russian focus was drugs. So far, they’d been targeting the Russian drug business.

Was Max in charge, telling them what to do? Or had he released them on the city, with only a directive to cause chaos and wear us down?

Regardless of what Max was doing or not, my gut said if we followed the drugs, we’d be able to locate them and take them out. But obviously, it wasn’t that easy, or Ciel would have done it already.

“If we find him, do you think we can tie him back to your parents?”

Ciel exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. I just have a gut feeling.”

Ciel was brilliant. I trusted his gut.

We needed to find this guy, not just for our war against Max. But for Ciel.

“All right,” I said as I stood from his lap. “Catch me up on everything and let me help. Tell me what to do.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You ready to help?”

I nodded, a smile pulling up one corner of my mouth. “I’m your tech trainee. Put me to work.”

Ciel’s desk was covered in papers to the point I couldn’t see the wood anymore.

After diving through everything, we’d printed images of every cartel member we could, along with maps of the city. Any piece of data we had—sightings, run-ins with the Russians, and more—we were marking it down on the maps.

Ciel stood next to me, arms crossed over his chest.

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. His hair was extra fluffy, curling at the back of his neck. My head barely came to the top of his shoulders. He stared at the papers with a crease between his eyebrows and oh , how I wanted to reach over to smooth it.

He needed answers.

It was apparent in the way he poured over this problem without rest. I’d barely gotten him to agree to a snack break, but he was instantly right back at it.

The death of his parents had burdened him since he was a boy. If answers were hiding in the papers in front of us, we’d find them.

I promised him peace and closure. I would stop at nothing until he got it.

Gazing at all the maps we’d printed, something caught my eye. An idea formed.

I picked up a pen and circled a cluster of piers on the Hudson, near Hell’s Kitchen. “What if they’re hiding somewhere around here?”

Ciel pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. I’d finally convinced him to take his contacts out after the twelfth time he rubbed them. “What’s your reasoning?”

I pursed my lips. “After all the tracking we’ve done, Rafael Arboleda keeps disappearing—so do any other cartel members that cross into Manhattan. They hit the Russians, then fade away like smoke. It could be because of Max’s hacker. Maybe it is. But I’m looking at this map of where our cameras are” —I handed him a piece of paper that showed a dot for each place where we could either hack a security system or we had our own cameras placed—“and this map of where they’ve hit the Russian businesses. The closest dark spots outside of our cameras are the river.”

“The Hudson?” He sat down in his chair, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“Yeah.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I think they’re on the river. If they filter into the city with the cruise terminal or boathouse traffic, maybe that’s how they’re avoiding all the facial recognition. Big crowds, lots of hats, lots of glasses. Easy to move product.”

“Fuck me,” he said, sitting forward, and typing on his computer. Satellite images of the piers and the surrounding area popped up. “Maybe they’re living on boats? Or using them to travel?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.” I pointed to the circle I drew. “But there seems to be where they’re most likely to disappear. Maybe if we watch the river area more closely, any place where large amounts of boats can land, and passengers can disembark, maybe we’ll catch better images.”

“And if we catch better images, we can follow. Ryuji said that Alec mentioned a lot of their dealers hang out by the piers.” Code flew across the screen as he typed. Screen after screen appeared. Obviously, I was still really new at this, but whatever commands he was inputting were way outside of my comprehension. “We’ll watch the other side of the Hudson, too. If they’re navigating up and down the river, they’re likely in New Jersey as well.”

“Watch the Bronx, too,” I added. “A lot of Tommaso territory is there.”

He nodded, typing even more commands. One day, maybe I’d be able to read and write the kind of code he did. But for now, I quite enjoyed our joint problem-solving. I sat in my chair, spinning around while he worked.

We felt like an inseparable team. Two halves of one brain. All my men were starting to feel like that. Pieces of my heart, pieces of my soul.

“When we find them, wherever they’re hiding, we can get answers about your parents,” I said quietly. I looked down at my hands, imagining they were covered in blood. Absentmindedly, I rubbed them on my leggings. “We’ll do whatever is necessary to get the truth.”

He paused, tilting his head to look at me. “Did you really kill Kofler?”

I nodded, one arm grabbing my other elbow as I glanced away. “I stabbed him in the heart.”

I had felt confident about it. A little proud, even. But then Cas looked at me like I was tainted…exactly like Obi said. Ever since, I’d been second-guessing that decision.

I’d been trying so hard to prove myself, but what if it amounted to nothing? What if I was still just as weak as they all thought I was?

Ciel grabbed my hands and brought them to his lips for a brief kiss on each of my palms. Then he released them and went back to typing.

I laughed softly. “What was that for?”

He shrugged, then smiled. “I think the world of you, baby girl. Nothing will change that.”

My heart clenched as I realized those were the exact words I was looking for yesterday on the way back to the penthouse.

I had told Obi I wanted to live in the shadows with them, but I was afraid the deeper I stepped into darkness, their opinions of me might change. With two kisses and a smile, Ciel erased those fears.

Ciel made me feel like I belonged.

“You sure know the way to a girl’s heart,” I mused with a grin.

“ Te veo. ” His cheeks reddened, the blush extending to his ears, but he didn’t turn to look at me again.

“I see you and I like you.” I blew him a kiss. “Also, thanks for not saying anything about the board meeting yet. I need to decide whether I even want to show up before I scare Cas half to death.”

Chiara had sent me that text for a reason, but was it a trap, a warning, or a clue? I needed to get my foot into my father’s businesses to pave the path to our empire, but at the same time, it felt terrifying to show up there. That was Max’s battlefield, not mine. He had homefield advantage at those meetings.

He nodded. “You’re welcome. If you decide to go, I’d like to go with you.”

“You would?”

“Yeah. I’m sure you’d rather have Wynn or Cas go, probably even Ryu, before me. But…” He shook his head slightly. “I can go.”

“I want you to come with me,” I finished, leaning over to grab his hand. “You and me on our own secret mission.”

He raised his eyebrow, but grinned. “Obviously, we should still tell everyone, but I do like the sound of that.”

“I’ll tell them, I promise. You see how he gets, though, right? How protective he is?”

“It’s because he loves you,” Ciel said. He opened his mouth but closed it, frowned, and seemingly changed his mind before he said something else. “None of us want to put you at risk.”

I pursed my lips. “I know. I’ll tell him. I don’t think it makes sense to try to assassinate Max at that meeting, but I’m also afraid that if they get within feet of each other, they’ll try to kill each other.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it does, either. Focus on the board. That meeting isn’t about Max. It’s about you and your father’s company. Max will only try to distract you from that.”

Ciel was right. Showing up at that meeting was about claiming my place, taking control over my father’s empire so we could use it to our own ends. Making Max’s life more difficult was a side goal, not the real reason why being there was important.

I couldn’t lose sight. This was about our empire. Taking Max out was only a piece of it. Our future was the endgame.

I picked up one of the pens and spun it in my hand. “What if he tries to kill me?”

Ciel frowned. “That is a possibility, but that’s why I’ll be right there. Maybe we can convince Obi to come, too. He can keep a level-head.”

I sighed. Obi still had barely spoken to me since that night at Kofler’s house, despite how I caught him staring at me on multiple occasions since then. He’d promised to mentor me; he had never wanted to do anything but protect me, but he’d made it clear he didn’t want more than that.

“I’ll ask him.”

Ciel nodded, then outstretched his hand. “Come here.”

I grabbed it, and he pulled me back into his lap. His thighs felt muscular and strong beneath me. Solid and dependable. Just like him.

“Sleep with me tonight,” he murmured, his lips brushing my cheeks. “Stay here again.”

“Okay, I will,” I said, running my hands through his hair. “Your bed is the comfiest, anyway.”

He sealed his lips to mine.