Page 246 of The Devil's Thorn

I walked to the bed and sat down, hands resting on my thighs, eyes fixed on the darkened window across the room. The city lights bled faintly through the glass—Naples glittering like something ancient and cursed.

I laid back against the pillows, letting my body sink into the mattress. I was exhausted. Every muscle in me ached—from tension, from restraint, fromrelease.

But I wasn’t falling apart. I wasn’t unraveling. I was settling into something I hadn’t expected. Not guilt. Not confusion. Just… acceptance.

That Rafael Romanov had taken something tonight. And that I’d given it to him. Willingly. No pretending. No blurred lines. No one to blame but myself. And maybe I liked it that way.

My eyes fluttered shut slowly. The ache in my body was dull now, deep in my bones, pulling me down like gravity. The sound of the city blurred into white noise.

And just before sleep took me— I felt the echo of his voice again.

“You’ll never be anything else again.”

CHAPTER 20

RAFAEL

The red on the map wasn’t right. I knew it the moment I looked at it. The route stretched from Naples to Marseille, then split east into Zurich and north into Berlin. A clean fork. Good on paper. Dangerous in reality.

Too much border overlap. Too many mouths to pay. Too many chances for something to go sideways.

And yet—I just kept staring at it. Not because of the route. But because I wasn’t seeing it. Not really.

I was seeing her. Bent over the stone wall of that cathedral. Hands tied behind her back. My name on her lips like a vow she didn’t want to give, butdid.

I’d had her in my bed every night after that. Until we left Italy. Until she returned to her life, and I returned to mine.

But the distance hadn’t fixed anything. She was still under my skin. Still in my mouth. Still in my goddamn head.

A woman like her didn’t fade. She embedded.

“You listening, or are we talking to the whiskey?”

Yuri’s voice pulled me out of it. I blinked once. Looked over. He was leaning against the bar, one arm slung across the counter, his other hand flipping a silver lighter open and shut. Nikolai was beside the table, cue stick in hand, one ball already sunk.

The basement smelled like leather and wood smoke. Dim lights. Familiar tension.

I straightened slightly, refocusing. “I’m listening,” I said.

Yuri grinned. “Sure didn’t look like it.”

“Get to the point.”

Nikolai stepped back from the table, expression calm—always calm, like a man carved from glacier and bone.

“The shipment’s running late tonight,” he said. “We moved it from 3 to 5 a.m. Port authority flagged one of the shells earlier. Too many eyes. We let it cool down.”

“Who’s running the offload?”

“Maksim and Kiril. Two new kids on the floor but trained by Vadim. They’ll pull it fast. We’ve got four containers. Two are clean. Two are dressed.”

I nodded.

“Contents?”

“First dirty one’s hardware. Modified imports—Russian cut, but repackaged to look French. Compact, no serials, all wrapped in legal equipment shipments. Second one’s coke.”

I looked up at that. “From where?”