Chapter 35

Tyrone

I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of my office, watching the city blink and breathe below. It looked peaceful from up here—still, controlled. But I knew better. Just beneath that calm surface, chaos pulsed. Girls were disappearing, whispers were turning into patterns, and nothing about it felt random anymore.

The soft click of the door opening pulled me from my thoughts. Damon walked in, his phone still pressed to his ear. Marius followed, ever the shadow behind. We’d spent the better part of the last few days buried in phone records, reports, and conversations cloaked in threats. The deeper we dug, the more questions we found.

“I don’t like it,” Damon muttered as he ended the call. “Too many dead ends.”

“No such thing,” I said, pushing off the window and walking toward the table where we’d spread everything—maps, dossiers, rosters of university girls. “Dead ends mean we’re close. They want us to stop looking.”

Marius lifted a brow, folding his arms. “You’re assuming someone’s watching us.”

“I know someone is,” I replied. “We’re not the only ones hunting. They’re watching what we touch. And the moment we get too close, the trail vanishes.”

Damon leaned on the table, rubbing his jaw. “And you think it’s someone inside one of the families?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I think it’s someone just outside. Close enough to have protection. Smart enough not to trigger internal alarms.”

The silence stretched. We all knew what that meant. Traitors. Rot in the branches of our legacy. It wasn’t just business anymore. This was personal.

And then, like a reflex I couldn’t control, my thoughts slipped—straight to Seri.

Her name hadn’t been spoken in the room, but she hung there like smoke. Unspoken. Known.

She wasn’t just another girl. She was sharp, grounded, suspicious in all the right ways. The kind who saw things others missed. The kind who asked questions. And that made her dangerous.

“She shouldn’t be involved,” I said before I could stop myself.

Damon looked up. “Seri?”

I nodded once. “She’s on campus. Close to it all. If she gets curious—”

“She is curious,” Marius cut in. “She’s already asking questions.”

Damon’s jaw twitched. “We’re not using her.”

“No,” I said quickly, firmer than I meant to. “We’re not. She’s not like the others.”

Marius didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. His stare said enough. He saw the shift in my tone. He heard the edge. The weakness.

And he wasn’t wrong.

Because the truth was—Seri was under my skin.

More than I cared to admit. Damon went to make his calls. Marius disappeared into his network. I was left with the hum of silence and a city that didn’t sleep.

My mind circled back to her.

The way she looked at me—like she saw something I didn’t even recognize in myself. Like she wasn’t afraid. Like she should be, but wasn’t.

She wasn’t like the others—girls who fell over themselves trying to get our attention, who wore short skirts and high heels to parties we didn’t invite them to. Seri wore jeans and boots and oversized sweaters. She didn’t play the game.

But she made me want to break every rule.

The weekend passed in a blur—calls, coded messages, face-to-face meetings in places with no cameras. We moved quietly but relentlessly. The list of missing girls kept growing, and the names were beginning to echo too loudly in my head. These weren’t just victims. They were connected. Daughters of allies. Sisters of business partners. Women whose disappearances should have caused waves—but didn’t. And that silence told me everything.

Someone powerful was covering this up.

Marius kept us grounded in logistics. Damon drifted between angry and obsessed. And I? I stayed cold. Focused. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

But the truth was, every time I closed my eyes, I saw her.

Seri’s smile when she thought no one was looking. The line between her brows when she was thinking too hard. The way she moved, too graceful for someone pretending to be invisible.

She was a contradiction—quiet but dangerous. Soft-spoken but calculating. I saw her fire. I saw her grief. I saw the way she scanned a room like she was hunting, just like us.

She was already in this, whether she knew it or not.

And I hated that.

I didn’t want her anywhere near this world.

And I sure as hell didn’t want her becoming one of the names on that goddamn list.

But how do you protect someone who doesn’t want saving?

I kept trying to draw boundaries in my mind. To tell myself she was off-limits. That she was a distraction. That we had bigger things to worry about.

But every time her name came up in conversation—every time her face flashed through my mind—it chipped away at my control. I’d seen what our world did to women like her. And I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing it happen again.

We were missing something. I could feel it. A piece of the puzzle so obvious it was hiding in plain sight. Maybe we were too close. Maybe that was the problem.

I glanced at the pile of files on my desk. Faces. Names. Last known locations. And always—always—that same eerie calm from the authorities. No urgency. No press. No missing posters beyond the first few weeks.

This wasn’t just trafficking. It was orchestrated. Some of the girls had been branded as runaways. Others conveniently had bad grades or partied too hard. Their reputations were used against them to explain their disappearance.

But not Seri.

No one could frame her as careless. And that made her all the more dangerous to whoever was watching.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized—we were on a clock. Not just to stop this ring, but to keep her name from becoming the next red flag on that list. Each time I made a connection, a pattern began to form—disjointed, yes, but increasingly coherent.

There were locations all the girls had in common in the final 48 hours before they vanished. One of them? A private party hosted by a student society affiliated with Sigma Phi. Our society. Or, more accurately, a splinter group claiming our name.

My stomach turned.

That’s when the phone on my desk buzzed.

I grabbed it without hesitation.

“Got something,” Marius said—and hung up.

He never wasted time with details. That tone alone told me it was important.

I moved immediately, grabbing my jacket and slipping into a state of action so fluid it was second nature. The old instincts kicked in, the ones I’d been trained in since I was fifteen. This was what I did best—plan, analyze, respond.

Before I left, my eyes lingered on the table. The faces stared back at me.

Some already lost.

Some we still had time to save.

And then, just beneath the surface of it all—her face.

Seri.

Even as I walked out of the office, heart hardened by years of strategy and violence, I knew one thing for sure.

If anything happened to her, I wouldn’t just burn this operation down.

I’d burn the whole world with it.