Serena's POV
The room smelled of old paper and something sharper — gunpowder, or perhaps guilt.
The walls were lined with corkboard, and every inch was covered: photographs, maps, printed financial records connected by red string in patterns that spiralled outward like a spiderweb.
Names. Dates. Companies. Bank transfers stamped with red crosses.
But it was the passports that made my breath stop.
Over thirty of them, spread across the central desk like playing cards — each one open to a photograph, each photograph marked with a bold red X.
They looked like people who had simply been in the wrong place, in the orbit of the wrong man, at the wrong time.
Taken care of. That was the cartel's language for it.
I had always known Lucian was the devil.
I had felt it the night he bought m
