Chapter 48 The real Hunter
The silence in the penthouse was deafening after Greyson left. Cassie stood frozen in the bedroom doorway, staring at the space where her husband had been moments before—the man she thought she knew, the man who had just confessed to being someone else entirely. The shattered remains of a crystal decanter lay scattered on the polished ebony floor, the shards glinting like the fractured pieces of her perfect life.
Crime family. Mafia. Liam's mother murdered.
The words echoed in her head like a gunshot in the night, each repetition making them more real, more impossible to dismiss as some kind of nightmare. She sank onto the carved teak bench at the foot of their bed, her legs suddenly unable to support her weight.
How had she missed it? How had a Hunter someone raised in Johannesburg’s elite circles been so naïve?
Even as the question formed, she already knew the answer. She'd been rebelling. Against her mother's expectations, against the suffocating world of high-society luncheons and polo matches, against a life mapped out for her since birth. Greyson had seemed like freedom dangerous, exciting, different from the polished finance heirs her mother kept pushing at her.
She'd wanted the fairy tale so badly she'd ignored every red flag.
Her phone buzzed against the nightstand. Dante's number flashed on the screen.
She answered on the first ring. "You knew," she said without preamble, her voice hollow. "You've known this whole time what he was."
"Cara mia," Dante's accented voice was heavy with regret. "I tried to warn you. Multiple times."
"Not hard enough." The accusation came out sharper than she intended, but she didn't care. Her world was collapsing, and she needed someone to blame besides herself.
"What would you have done if I'd told you outright that your charming husband was heir to a crime dynasty? You were in love, Cassie. You wouldn't have believed me."
She wanted to argue, but the words died in her throat. Because he was right. She'd been so desperate to escape her predetermined life that she'd thrown herself headfirst into another trap entirely.
"Liam's been taken," she whispered. "Jake Turner has him."
The silence on the other end stretched so long she thought the call had dropped.
"Merda," Dante finally breathed. "Jake Turner should have been eliminated years ago. The fact that he's still breathing means Owen Christianson O'Malley is getting soft in his old age."
"You know him too?" Of course he did. The glittering world of Johannesburg’s elite and the criminal underworld weren’t as separate as she'd naively believed. Money was money, and power recognized power, regardless of its source.
"Turner used to be reliable muscle for the Christianson O'Malleys. Good with intimidation, better with making problems disappear permanently. But he got greedy, started thinking he could build his own empire." Dante's voice turned clinical. "Owen made an example of him three years ago—destroyed his operation, killed his lieutenant, but left him alive as a warning to others. Turner's been nursing that grudge ever since."
"What does that mean for Liam?"
"It means your husband just became exactly what his father raised him to be. There's no line Greyson won't cross to get that boy back, no body count too high, no bridge he won't burn." Dante paused. "And Cassie? The woman who was naïve enough to marry into this world without asking questions? She needs to disappear. Because what's coming next is going to be a bloodbath."
She ended the call and stood in the center of her bedroom—their bedroom seeing everything with new eyes. The African art on the walls, the handwoven rugs, the custom-made furniture that cost more than most people's cars. All of it suddenly felt tainted, purchased with blood money she'd been too willfully blind to recognize.
In the walk-in closet, she found herself standing before Greyson's gun safe, staring at the brushed steel surface that had always seemed like masculine posturing rather than practical necessity. The code was their wedding date—even his security systems were part of the elaborate fiction he'd constructed.
Inside were weapons she couldn't identify, boxes of ammunition, and something that made her breath catch. A photograph tucked behind a stack of documents. Greyson, maybe nineteen or twenty, standing beside an older man who had to be his father. Both were in expensive suits, both were smiling, and both had blood spattered across their clothes like some grotesque family portrait.
Her husband—the man she'd thought she knew—looked perfectly comfortable in that world of violence.
She closed the safe with trembling hands and walked to her own dressing room, to the hidden panel behind her jewelry cases. The Hunter family had their own secrets, their own insurance policies. Her grandfather's old service revolver, the one he'd taught her to shoot when she was sixteen. "A Hunter woman should never be helpless," he'd said, much to her mother's horror.
She'd thought it was quaint old-world paranoia. Now she understood it was survival.
The burner phone in Greyson's nightstand rang, jolting her from her thoughts. She stared at it for three rings before answering.
"Greyson?" The voice was unfamiliar, tense with barely controlled panic.
"This is his wife." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, drawing on decades of Hunter breeding that demanded composure even in crisis.
"Mrs. Christianson O'Malley." The formal address felt like a foreign language. "I need to speak with your husband immediately. We have a problem."
"He left two hours ago to handle the situation with his son."
"Ma'am, your husband never made it to the rendezvous point. His car was found abandoned near the docks, and there's blood on the driver's seat."
The words hit her like ice water, but she forced herself to remain calm. Hunters didn't panic. They planned, they strategized, they took control.
"Who is this?" she asked.
"Someone who works for your husband. Someone who needs him alive." The voice paused. "Ma'am, I think Jake Turner has taken more than just the boy."
After ending the call, Cassie stood in the center of her destroyed fairy tale and made a decision that would have horrified the woman she'd been that morning. She wasn't going to wait for rescue. She wasn't going to hide in her ivory tower while her family was tortured by a madman.
She was going to do what Hunters had always done when cornered: she was going to fight back.
But first, she needed help from someone who understood both worlds she was caught between.
She dialed Dante's number again.
"I need you to come to Gauteng. "Tonight."
"Cassie,cara, you need to disappear. Leave the country, change your name, start over somewhere safe."
"They have Greyson too." The words stopped his protest cold. "Jake has my husband and my stepson, and I'm not running away while they're tortured because of my ignorance."
"What are you asking me to do?"
She looked at her reflection in the bedroom mirror pale, hollow-eyed, but with something new and dangerous awakening in her eyes. Something that had been sleeping in her blood for generations, waiting for the right moment to emerge.
"I'm asking you to help me become what I should have been all along," she said quietly. "Help me become a Hunter worthy of the name."
The silence stretched between them across an ocean. Finally, Dante spoke.
"Madonna, you're serious."
"Dead serious." She walked to the window overlooking the city that had become her battlefield. "The naïve little rich girl who married a fairy tale prince? She's dead. What Jake Turner is about to face is something much more dangerous."
"what's that?"
"A Hunter woman who's finally stopped playing by other people's rules."
" Welcome back."