Page 6 of The Boss
“You don’t go alone,” Cade said, the order like a strike. “You don’t go anywhere until we understand what she is.”
“She was careful,” Leif said, his voice edged with command. “She erased herself. She looked at me like she saw me—like she knew who the hell I was. That matters. If she’d meant to hurt me, I’d be dead already. I’m not some mark to be played. This ends on my terms, not hers.”
Titus’s laugh was low. “You were convenient, Severin. People use convenient.”
Elise flinched at the edge in Titus’s tone and cut in, voice sharp as a blade. “Stop. He’s not your prey. He’s my brother. You won’t speak of him as if he’s a thing to be judged.”
Titus met her eyes for a long moment, and then the room inhaled at the tension between the two Dantes. The question of trust wove itself around them like anet.
Hours ground into strategy. Zane pulled contacts and footage. Men were sent to the club with faces that could buysilence. Titus asked for lineage digs, but kept the focus on tracing Dante lines and potential hidden branches that might connect to the woman, her past, her ties, her truth. Elise hovered by Leif, protective, touching his wrist as if she could still the Brand’s burn with human warmth.
Leif’s head pounded with hunger and questions. Every time he shut his eyes he didn’t just see Mary, he experienced again the grip of her body, the heat of her mouth, the power of how quickly she’d taken hold of him. She’d come at him with fire and he’d matched it, certain she’d be another night and another name, yet she’d branded herself into him in a way no blade ever could. It wasn’t longing. It was a demand, a provocation he couldn’t shake. He’d believed himself empty, but she’d carved him open and claimed him. Then she’d vanished and left him with a mark that didn’t belong to his blood.
One thread of possibility his mind refused to let go of was the idea that some blood in his family had brushed a Dante line years ago. Not a full crossing, nothing legal and neat. Aslip. Awoman. Asecret marriage. Achild given another name. He’d heard whispers before, family stories of a mother who loved outside her station, but those were stories, not evidence. Still, when the Brand glowed under air and light, his mind crawled to that possible gap in his pedigree like a moth to flame.
When the men left the room to begin the discreet work, Cade pulled Leif aside, into the heavy velvet drapes of the adjoining study. The room smelled faintly of lemon oil and old paper. He closed the door behind them and turned, folding his hands in front of him like a man binding a wound.
“Listen to me,” Cade said, voice low. “You’re family now in a way you didn’t ask for. That changes how the world will see you. That doesn’t mean you’re less Severin. It means there are peoplewho’ll use whatever they can to their advantage. We keep this tight. You do what I say for now.”
Leif gazed at him, eyes hot and tired. “And if she’s waiting somewhere? If she’s in danger?”
“Then we find her, together. But not in a way that sets the city on fire. Not in a way that hands leverage to people who’d use it. You want her. Good. You don’t go stumbling in blind. You listen.”
Leif pressed his Branded palm over his chest like a man making a vow. “I’ll listen. But if she comes back and I’m kept away, I’ll break you for it.”
Cade gave a humorless snort. “I know you will. But know this: Iwon’t let you be used as a pawn. Not on my watch.”
They stood like that for a long moment, sun slicing the drapes into bright lines across their stillness. Leif resented and acknowledged him both in the same breath. Rage met respect and both curdled into something like reluctant trust. Then they left the study together.
Elise waited outside and touched Leif’s shoulder once as he passed. “Promise me you won’t go out alone tonight,” she said. “Promise me you’ll stay where I can see you.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, the small gesture filled with a thousand small promises. “I promise. For you.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Good.”
But when he walked out into the sunlight, cedar and masonry and the blue of the sky looked like a stage on which something dangerous might be acted out at the slightestmisstep. The Brand on his hand was a compass he didn’t want but couldn’t set aside.
The day moved like an unhurried clockwork. Men and women scoured lists, cross-checked records, asked the kinds of people who owed them favors. Zane and Titus moved like two predators on different hunting circuits, Zane ready to skewer anyone with a lie, Titus willing to bend history until a hidden truth snapped up. Leif answered questions and drank coffee that tasted like gasoline. Elise was a bulwark, an impossible softness in a web of cruelty. She stood between Leif and every sharp edge, offering him a hand to holdonto.
Late that afternoon, he found himself alone on the back terrace watching a thunderstorm gather miles away, lightning stitching the horizon with white. Rain would come. The scent of wet earth rose up as if warning him of things that blurred between justice and vengeance. He swallowed, hating the way his stomach tightened.
He thought of Mary, her fingers like fire along his skin. He thought of the Brand, of the way it had declared something he didn’t understand. He thought of blood ties and secrets and whether the world had room for a man who belonged to two families in different measures. He thought about what would change if the wrong people foundout.
And with the storm breaking across the horizon, he knew one thing with brutal certainty.
Mary was his, and nothing on earth or in hell would stop him from findingher.
Chapter 3
Three Weeks Later...
LEIF SEVERINhad never failed at a hunt. Not once. Not in business, not in blood, not in women. Failure didn’t belong in his vocabulary, yet here he was—over three full weeks since the night at The Alabaster Club—and he had nothing.
Not a single thread of truth. No name he trusted. No trace of her. Not a whisper he could chase down and make bleed. She’d vanished, and the not-knowing was worse than any wound he’d ever taken.
His palm still burned, faint and mocking. The lion’s head etched into his skin pulsed with its own rhythm, alive, reminding him with every throb that he had been branded like a fucking Dante. He had scoured Dallas—his Dallas—with an obsession that pushed men past their limits. He had pulled favors from cops, sifted through hours of grainy surveillance, leaned on managers and housekeepers and anyone who had been within ten feet of her at The Alabaster.
The result? Nothing. She was gone, as though swallowed by smoke. And that made him furious.
