Chapter 60 Ties That Burn

Chapter 60 Ties That Burn

Scarlett’s

Morning light filtered through the penthouse windows, soft gold against the cold steel inside me. I’d barely slept. My mind had been slicing through Maria’s financial records, uncovering one buried secret after another until dawn.

Every piece was another artery of her empire.
And I intended to sever them all.

I stood at the marble counter, a cup of black coffee untouched in front of me. Leone waited at my side, tablet in hand, his posture stiff.

“The Eastern laundering chain collapsed last night,” he reported. “After you presented Maria’s offshore accounts, half her men defected. The other half are panicking.”

“Good,” I murmured. “Let them choke on her downfall.”

Leone hesitated. “There’s… another issue.”

I lifted my eyes. “Speak.”

“It’s Damien.”

A pulse of heat flickered in my chest, anger, pain, something else I refused to name.

“What about him?”

“He’s been asking questions. About your meetings last night. About Kade.” Leone’s voice lowered. “He thinks you’re in danger.”

I almost laughed.
Danger? No.

I was in danger now.

“Damien doesn’t get to ask anything,” I said coldly. “Not anymore.”

Leone nodded, but I felt his eyes on me quietly measuring the woman I’d become.

Before I could say more, my phone buzzed.
A single message.

Unknown Number:
He’s moving against you. Thought you should know.

Attached was a photo.

Damien.
Entering a warehouse owned by one of Maria’s most loyal captains.

My stomach tightened—not with fear. With betrayal.

Again.

“Prepare the car,” I said. “We’re going.”

Leone blinked. “To confront him?”

I met his gaze.
“No,” I whispered. “To remind him I’m not the girl he thinks he broke.”

The warehouse loomed like a concrete shadow, abandoned on the outside but humming with life within. Leone parked near the back entrance, and we slipped in beneath the low thrum of machinery.

Damien’s voice carried through the hallway angry, controlled, lethal.

“You made a deal with Maria,” he snarled. “I know you did. I want names. I want locations.”

Maria’s captain, Petras, spat back. “I don’t answer to you, Agent Black. Scarlett’s the one you should be worried about.”

Damien grabbed the man by the collar, slamming him into the wall. “Scarlett doesn’t know what she’s doing. Maria will destroy her.”

My breath tightened.
So that’s what he thought of me.

Helpless.
Blind.
A fragile thing spinning on strings she couldn’t see.

I stepped into the room.

“She already tried,” I said.

Damien froze.

Petras gasped. “Ms. Devereux—”

“Get out,” I ordered.

Petras didn’t hesitate. He ran.

The warehouse fell into heavy silence.

Damien turned toward me slowly. His jaw was tight, his eyes burning with frustration, fear, something deeper.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. “Scarlett, you’re putting yourself in the middle of a war you can’t win.”

“I’m winning it already,” I said simply.

“You’re deluding yourself.” He stepped forward, voice low and fierce. “You’re not ready for this world. Maria will crush you.”

“I’m not fighting like Maria,” I said. “She plays to survive. I’m playing to end her.”

Damien dragged a hand through his hair. “You’re changing. And not in a good way.”

“And whose fault is that?” I shot back, heat rising through me. “Yours? Maria’s? Kade’s? All of you used me for something. All of you lied. So guess what? I’m done being the one who gets hurt.”

Damien flinched like I’d struck him.
Good. Let him feel a fraction of what he made me feel.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he said softly. “Let me help you.”

I laughed cold, humorless. “Help me? You’re meeting with Maria’s men behind my back.”

“That’s not what this is,” he snapped. “I’m trying to stop her before she reaches you—”

“She’s afraid of me,” I said. “Finally.”

Damien stepped even closer now, eyes searching mine, desperate. “Scarlett… I don’t want to lose you.”

“You already did.”

His breath hitched.

For a moment, the air between us crackled not with anger, but with something far more dangerous. A memory of what we used to be. A promise that never had a chance to bloom.

But then he destroyed it.

“You’re not built for this,” he whispered. “This power, this darkness, it'll kill you.”

I smiled, slow and sharp.

“You still don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not becoming Maria.”

I leaned in, my breath brushing his ear.

“I’m becoming something worse.”

Damien stiffened, heartbeat hammering against mine. “Scarlett…”

“For once,” I murmured, stepping back, “don’t follow me.”

I turned and walked away, heels clicking with finality.

Damien didn’t call after me.

But he followed anyway.

Back at the penthouse, I stood on the balcony overlooking the city. The wind was cold. The sky was bruised with storm clouds.

Maria was coming.
I could feel it like a tremor beneath my skin.

And Damien…
He was becoming unpredictable.

Dangerous in a different way.

For me. For my heart.

If this was a war, I couldn’t afford weakness.

Leone approached quietly. “We have her location,” he said. “Maria. She resurfaced in Prague. And she’s gathering forces.”

I breathed out.
Finally,

“Then pack a bag,” I said. “We leave tomorrow.”

Leone hesitated. “What about Damien?”

My gaze didn’t shift from the skyline.

“Damien made his choice,” I whispered. “Now I’ll make mine.”

Lightning flashed, slicing the sky open.

The war had begun.
And this time, I wouldn’t be the one bleeding.

Prague smelled like rain and old stone, the kind of damp that clung to your shoes and to the edges of memory. I landed at dusk, the city folding itself around me in a labyrinth of alleys and bridges, fairy-tale spires blotting out the last light. It felt almost obscene, flying in under beauty when everything I carried inside me was ash.

Two weeks had hardened into a map of decisions. I had taken Maria’s empire apart piece by piece from the inside out, and tonight I was going to walk into the heart of what she’d left behind in Prague. This city was one of her strongholds: shell companies, safe houses, a network of men who answered when she snapped her fingers. I’d bought their silence with ledgers and threats. I’d fed them the truth and watched them fold. Tonight I wanted answers. Tonight I wanted to see her.

Leone drove, part of the show now my fixer moving like a shadow at my back, loyal in a professional way that cost him. In the delegation of men I’d swept into my orbit, loyalty was currency; cash, fear, or promises would buy most things. Love, it turned out, could not be purchased. It was sticky, terrible, and always in the way.

“Anja’s waiting at the club,” Leone said, voice quiet as Mercedes ate the cobblestones. He sounded almost… I'm anxious. “She says Maria’s been slipping. Less visible. But she’s here.”

Anja was the local I’d cultivated an information broker with eyes that never blinked twice. She’d paid for contacts in places where you paid in favors and silence. If Maria had a thread, Anja could follow it.

We parked two blocks away and walked through a shower of rain that smelled of metal and old smoke. Lights gilded the river; people laughed in restaurants; life carried on as if there weren’t a knife pointing at its throat.

The club looked like a monolith of smoked glass and polished marble. Inside, it was warm and dark in the way that made secrets seem like companions. Anja stood by a private table, hair damp, phone in hand. She rose and slid into the seat opposite me like a shadow making herself more permanent.

“She’s moved again,” Anja said without preamble. “Not far. But not alone.”

“Who’s with her?” I asked, tasting the words before I said them. My voice refused to be the brittle thing I’d expected; it was steady enough that I could hear it.

“Men you know,” Anja said. “And one you don’t. Someone working through Kade’s old channels. He’s a ghost with a face now. He goes by Blackwell.”

Kade. The name felt like an ember just before it caught on. I had danced with him earlier, let him test my teeth but I’d never let him own the room. “Then the room’s full,” I said. “Send me directions.”

Anja hesitated, studying me like a woman deciding whether to hand a loaded gun or a rope. “You know she’ll be watching,” she said finally. “Maria loves theatrics. She’ll set a stage.”

Good. Then I’d take the stage and burn it down.

The rendezvous was at an old bank building that had been converted into a private club for the rich and guilty. Marble floors, a private elevator that smelled of oil and old paper, portraits of men who had once thought money was immortality. They were wrong.

Leone and I slipped in through the back when the crowd thinned. The private room was on the second mezzanine palms, soft light, the hush that let conspiracies feel sacred. I was ready to play my part: the bereaved heir turned bad, the queen rose from the embers. It wasn’t hard to adopt the shape of Maria’s world; she had made me in it.

They greeted me with the wary deference I’d been building everywhere I went. Anton Vargas was there, older, his laugh like dry leather. Kade lounged in a corner as if he belonge
d to the shadows rather than the light. But when I walked in my skin tightened with a different awareness: someone else had come in the dark behind them. A man I didn’t know until he stepped into the light.