Wired to betray - between loyalty and you

CHAPTER 4

ZARA'S POV

Today's lecture passed quickly — exactly what I needed. I wasn't paying attention to a single word of it, but I couldn't very well stand up and walk out without drawing the kind of attention I'd spent weeks carefully avoiding. So I sat. Nodded at the right intervals. Kept my eyes in the direction of the whiteboard while my mind orbited somewhere else entirely.

The moment it was over I was on my feet, bag slung over my shoulder, out the door before half the room had even closed their notebooks.

I checked the time in the corridor. 4:23 pm.

I groaned inwardly.

Somewhere in the next few hours I had somewhere to be. It would take two hours to reach my apartment from here — two hours I didn't have, which meant no rest, no reset, no quiet. Just the road and whatever was waiting on the other side of it.

I got into my car, clicked the seatbelt, and leaned back against the headrest for a moment before starting the engine. My mind was running on everything and nothing simultaneously — the low, dull pressure behind my eyes that had been threatening all day finally graduating into a proper headache. I needed rest. I'd been carrying a particular kind of tension lately, the sort that doesn't come from physical exhaustion but from the sustained effort of being someone you're performing rather than someone you simply are.

Make that a lot of tension. Make that weeks of it.

My phone rang.

I jerked upright, the sound cutting through the quiet of the car like something deliberately unkind. I hadn't been expecting a call. I'd planned to ignore it — whatever it was, whoever it was, I didn't have the capacity — but apparently my eyes had an agenda entirely their own, because I glanced at the screen before I could stop myself.

My father.

I stared at it for two full rings.

Then I picked up, half cursing, half something I didn't have a name for.

I didn't speak first. I never do with him anymore — not since things became what they are between us, which is to say distant in the particular way that hurts more than anger because at least anger implies the other person still considers you worth the energy. I cleared my throat instead, the silence between us stretching awkward and heavy.

It's a strange thing, to be strangers with someone who made you. But that's what a stupid plan only of us fully wanted had done to us — turned two people who used to understand each other into people who cleared their throats on phone calls because neither wanted to be the one who needed the other first.

Even as a mafia king, my father had love in him. He loved me more than anything in the world — I'd never doubted that, not really, not even on the worst days. But love, I'd learned early, doesn't cancel out the other things a person carries. And my father carried the quiet, persistent wish that I had been born differently.

"Princess." His voice came through measured and calm, the way it always was when he'd already made a decision. "I will be sending Rafe Orion to help you with the mission."

The words landed flat and final.

"No, Dad." I rejected it immediately, the word leaving my mouth before I'd even fully processed it. "You can't do this."

"Zara." Just my name. A caution wrapped in a single word, the way only he could manage. "I've given you enough time, yet—"

"Is this because I'm not a boy?"

The question came out quieter than I intended. I let it hang between us anyway, let it take up the space it deserved

A pause.

"Zara. This has nothing to do with your gender," he said, and his voice had gone gentle in the way that somehow made it worse.

"Doesn't it?"

"I'm proud of you, Zara."

Something in my chest pulled tight.

"You are?" I asked. And then, because I had been carrying it for so long and the call was already painful and the headache behind my eyes had made me careless: "Then why did you tell Solomon Voss that you wished I was never born? Or that I was a boy?"

The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.

Heavy. Airless. The kind that meant I'd said something that couldn't be unsaid.

He never knew I heard him. That was the thing — he had never once suspected that his four-year-old daughter had been awake that night, had padded down the hallway in her socks, had stopped outside the half-open door to the study when she heard voices. Had stood there and listened to her father tell his oldest friend, Solomon Voss, that she was a waste. That she had killed her mother coming into the world. That if she'd been a boy, the death would have meant something — would have been worth the price of it.

That was the night my journey to become enough had started.

I'd spent every year since trying to make him look at me the way he would have looked at a son. Trying to make him see me as capable rather than costly. Trying to earn a smile instead of the slow, quiet shake of his head that I'd grown up learning to dread.

"Prepare," my father said finally, his voice smoothed back over, giving nothing away. "Don't make this hard — for him or for you."

There was a crossed-out pause where I almost said something I would have regretted.

"Okay, sir." Hurt. Hollowed. Flat. I answered monotonously, giving him nothing back.

"Fail," he said, quiet and absolute, "and you will be punished severely, princess."

He ended the call.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment, the screen going dark, the car very still around me.

Then I started the engine and drove.

I drove home with the music loud enough to hurt.

Not because I wanted to listen to it — I couldn't have told you a single song that played. I needed the noise. Needed something between my ears that wasn't my father's voice, wasn't "fail and you will be punished severely" sitting on my chest like something I couldn't lift.

The London streets blurred past. Traffic lights. Grey buildings. People living ordinary lives with ordinary problems and ordinary fathers who looked at them like they were enough.

I white-knuckled the steering wheel the whole way home.

By the time I pulled into my building's car park it was 6:14 pm. I sat in the car for a moment after switching off the engine, head tipped back, eyes on the ceiling. Just breathing. In. Out. The kind of deliberate breathing you do when you're trying to convince your body that everything is fine even though your mind is somewhere on the floor.

Two hours and sixteen minutes.

The number surfaced without warning and for a second I didn't know why it mattered — then I did. 8:30 pm. Derrick's address. The text I'd been trying not to think about since the moment my father's call swallowed everything else.

I got out of the car.

I dropped my bag at the door, kicked off my shoes somewhere near the hallway, and made it to the bed before my legs decided they were done. I lay there staring at the ceiling, arms at my sides, completely still. The apartment was quiet in the particular way empty spaces get when the person inside them is too tired to fill them.

I didn't want to go.

I wanted to pull the duvet over my head, turn my phone face down, and simply not exist for the rest of the evening. I wanted one night — just one — where I wasn't a mission, wasn't a disappointment, wasn't something my father had deployed and was waiting on results from.

But then his voice came back.

Fail and you will be punished severely, princess.

And underneath that, older, quieter, the one I'd carried since I was four years old in a corridor outside a half-open door —

She's a waste.

I sat up.

I didn't make a decision so much as something in me made it for me — the part that had been running on spite since before I was old enough to name it. The part that had learned, early and painfully, that the only answer to being told you're not enough is to show up anyway.

So I showed up. To the mirror first.

I stripped off the day — the lecture, the headache, the phone call, my father's quiet cruelty — and stepped into the shower. The water ran hot until the tension in my shoulders loosened enough to function. I stayed until the bathroom was full of steam and I felt less like a person who'd been gutted on a Tuesday afternoon.

When I came out I dressed slowly, deliberately. Dark fitted trousers. A black top that was simple enough to be effortless. Heels, because they made me feel like I was standing on something solid.

I did my hair without really thinking about it, muscle memory carrying me through while my mind stayed carefully, purposefully blank.

I stood in front of the mirror when I was done.

Looked at myself the way I'd learned to look — not searching for flaws, not checking for approval. Just looking. Taking stock of the person looking back.

She didn't look like a waste.

She looked like someone who had been told no her entire life and had quietly, methodically, made a habit of going anyway.

I picked up my bag, my keys, my phone. Checked the address Derrick had sent one more time. Then I walked to the door and opened it without letting myself think too hard about any of it.

I wasn't going for Cyrus.

I wasn't even going for the mission.

I was going because I refused — categorically, completely, in every bone in my body — to be a waste.