Every time she thought she was out, the Wraiths reminded Iris there was no such thing as walking away.

Once the skull was on your back, they owned you.

Spinning her keys around her finger, she left her car parked on 51st Street and headed toward the warehouse a block down. A red and blue neon sign hung above the entrance, the glow of the “W” reflecting off the chrome and black motorcycles parked in a line along the front.

Growing up, Iris had never liked Harleys—they were nothing more than two-wheeled death traps. A riding jacket and helmet could only protect from so much if the bike went down. But there had been no avoiding them once she joined the Wraiths almost five years ago now.

It was then as it was now—a lifestyle.

Rook was on guard duty, it seemed, judging from his slouched position in the chair resting on its back two legs. Unlike many of the men who walked in and out of this place, he wasn’t so bad.

He was far more mellow than the others and didn’t partake in as many of the parties as he probably could have, but that was what she liked most about him.

Even though he was a bit brooding and a little rough around the edges, he wasn’t a bad guy at all.

“Thought you found a new wave,” he grumbled—the only way she could think to describe the low timbre of his voice that always managed convey his annoyance with the world.

“Rosalie has a job for me,” Iris said, the only explanation she needed to give.

There were only two people whose orders were followed without question—Johnny and his daughter, Rosalie. He’d founded the Wraiths long before Iris had ever stepped foot inside this place, and as the years passed, his empire had only grown.

What started as just a club grew to something greater. Something darker.

They didn’t just run guns. They dabbled in a little of everything.

Drugs.

Human trafficking.

Other shady shit that Iris didn’t like to think about to keep her conscience clear.

Johnny had been notorious—the person who evoked fear when his name was whispered—but after two subsequent heart attacks and a bullet that collapsed his left lung, he’d had to hand over the reins of his operation.

Right into the waiting hands of his daughter.

Rook nodded, pushing the toothpick tucked between his lips to the other side of his mouth. “Explains the company.”

Iris frowned, looking from the door’s handle back to him. “Company?”

His laugh was humorless as he gestured with a tilt of his head to the warehouse. “Trust me, you won’t miss her.”

She thought of questioning him further, but figured she would get the answers for herself once she was inside.

“Be seeing you, Rook.”

As he tipped his chin in acknowledgment, she slipped past him and into the warehouse.

The thumping bass bleeding out of the speakers assaulted her ears, the special lining within the walls preventing it from being heard outside. Lights flickered, breaking up the heavy darkness inside the room and illuminating the scores of people inside.

At a table in the corner, a girl was bent over a pool table, happily snorting a line of coke. The man at her side encouraged her with a smile as his hand eased beneath her skirt. A full-on orgy was going on in another corner, and she was pretty sure the three off to the side were seconds from brawling.

It was chaos. Always was.

Iris hadn’t been blind to the world when she first came to the Wraiths. She knew people did bad things—her father had been a police detective, after all—but seeing it up close, seeing the way people responded to the stimuli had changed everything she thought she knew about people.

She hadn’t even been here two weeks before someone had offered her a bump.

Despite being offered every vice a person could think of, she’d declined every time.

She had a plan—one that needed her focus and commitment. Something drugs would only hinder. She couldn’t afford to take that risk.

Walking down the familiar back hallway—the same path she’d traveled many times before, though this time with less wonder and curiosity—Iris didn’t blink.

Once, the images hanging in the black frames had captivated her. On the surface, it looked as if the Wraiths were a family. The pictures all showed them wearing smiles with their arms around each other. Pictures of those they’d lost over the years.

But Iris knew what those pictures didn’t show.

If the Wraiths had ever been that happy, Iris had never witnessed it.

Now, there was just animosity, backstabbing, and a whole lotta ugly that she wasn’t trying to decipher.

The office door at the end of the hall was cracked, dim light spilling out onto the floor. Even at her distance, Iris could hear voices. Most she was well familiar with, but there was another, high and lilting, that she didn’t recognize at all.

Raj, one of Rosalie’s guards—and sometimes fuck buddy—stood next to the door, his beefy arms folded across his chest. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to look intimidating, but he only managed to look like a peacock with his chest poked out, considering his blue Mohawk.

He nodded as she stepped around him, pushing the door open as she walked past.

As she entered the room, her gaze first sought out Rosalie, and it took everything in her not to do a double take. It might have been a few months, closer to a year probably, since she had last seen her pseudo-boss, but before she’d left, her hair definitely hadn’t been the platinum gray that it was now.

It was almost startling against her olive skin in a way that made her wonder why she had bothered to do it at all.

But, then again, Rosalie had always had a flair for the dramatics, and maybe her new hair was just a part of it.

Yet, even with her second glance, Iris was sure she even dressed differently as well. Instead of dripping in diamonds, she wore a simple black choker, and she’d exchanged her skintight dresses for black jeans, a ripped shirt, and combat boots.

Maybe there was more to Rosalie calling her back for a job than she’d anticipated.

Whatever it was, though, she had no intention of getting involved.

Working with the Wraiths was too much like quicksand—they pulled her under until nothing but darkness was left.

“Good, you’re here,” Rosalie said, flicking a hand in Iris’s direction, though her gaze never strayed from the woman sitting across from her. “This is our bounty hunter.”

Iris tried not to cringe at the title. Considering her father had spent nearly half a decade working as a bounty hunter after the royal shit show that they had only ever called the incident, she didn’t like to compare what she did for the Wraiths with what he had done.

He’d brought criminals to justice.

She brought criminals to … other criminals. One sinner to another.

Back in the early days, when Rosalie had brought her in and agreed to provide her room and board in exchange for her services, she’d thought she would be stuck cleaning up after people or having to fend off the men who didn’t care how old you were as long as you were in a skirt. Instead, she’d wanted her for other things.

Things Iris was surprisingly good at.

But that was easy enough, considering her father had been a damn good detective, and even with her mother’s faults, even she had been a rather successful con artist.

It made sense that Iris had fallen somewhere in the middle.

Blinking, Iris looked from Rosalie to the woman she was speaking to—the voice she hadn’t recognized.

Nor did she know who the woman was. If nothing else, she definitely didn’t look like she belonged in this room. They were all clad in some variance of leather and denim while she, on the other hand, wore a white dress that was rather conservative down the front but with a plunging back that hid very little.

Understated diamond earrings adorned her ears, a white gold pendant hung at the hollow of her throat, and when she smiled, no malice appeared in her expression.

She looked genuinely pleased to be making her acquaintance.

Weird.

“Iris, this is Belladonna.”

She quirked a brow, wondering if that could possibly be the woman’s birth name, but she didn’t voice the question aloud before she extended a hand with a half-smile. She was less concerned with formalities and more interested in why Rosalie had been called her in at all.

Unlike the three others in the room besides Rosalie, Belladonna, and the other woman with the the pink hair Belladonna had brought along with her, Iris wasn’t officially part of the Wraiths organization.

Sure, she did the odd job for them—Rosalie, specifically—and even had their mark on her hip, but she wasn’t privy to the inner workings of the organization. She was little more than a glorified errand girl.

Or pet.

Told to fetch whenever it was necessarily and leashed when it wasn’t.

Iris had always hated that feeling.

“A pleasure, Iris,” Belladonna said as she shook her hand with a surprising grip before reclaiming her seat. “I’m happy you could join us.”

Her voice was low and pleasant with that languid quality that seemed to add a layer of truth to her words. She might have believed Belladonna had come here for her, specifically, rather than a meeting with the Wraiths as it were.

Considering she still had no idea why she was even here, she figured there wasn’t a better time to ask. “I’m assuming you want me to find someone?”

A grunt sounded across the room, briefly grabbing Iris’s attention.

Bear.

He stood in the corner of the room, more sentinel than bodyguard. Unlike Raj, the threat Bear presented was quite effortless. Even slouched against the wall, there was no mistaking the power the man wielded, and Iris knew firsthand what he was capable of if someone pissed him off.

Which Rosalie liked to do regularly, but even as he was volatile—how he’d earned his name in the first place—he also knew better than to physically harm Rosalie.

There were some lines no one was willing to cross, and that was at the very top of the list.

Though he hadn’t actually spoken, it was clear whatever had been discussed prior to Iris’s arrival wasn’t sitting well with him. And as outspoken as he tended to be, she was surprised he’d managed to stay quiet this long.

“I’ve already taken care of the finding bit, I imagine,” Belladonna said as she plucked a folder from the chair next to her and handed it over to Iris.

She only briefly considered how odd it was that Belladonna seemed to be leading this meeting though this was Rosalie’s place of business. If anyone else tried this, even her own people, she would have lashed out viciously.

Yet she quietly sat, and though her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, that was the only displeasure she showed.

Iris helped herself to one of the stuffed leather armchairs, sinking down into it as she accepted the folder and opened it on her lap, gazing over the contents.

It only took one glance at the picture clipped to the pages inside to understand why everyone was acting so strangely.

Why Bear seemed uptight.

Why Rook had warned her about being careful on her way in.

And even why Rosalie hadn’t spoken more than a casual greeting.

In the file was a picture of the one man the Wraiths had been trying to get their hands on for years. Staring back at her with murder in his eyes was Synek Jønsson.

Public enemy number one.

* * *

Boogeymen weren’t supposed to exist.

They were meant to be a figment of a child’s imagination—the thing that went bump in the night and made your blood race and heart skip a beat. Boogeymen belonged in ghost stories and pictures.

He definitely wasn’t supposed to be real.

Synek had been long gone by the time Iris came around, but that didn’t mean his legend had gone away with him. She’d heard stories about him—about the things he could do with a knife and a smile.

To most, he’d been a machine. Willing to do whatever was asked of him, no matter how bloody or deranged.

To others, he was something else.

From what she understood, he and Bear had been close—which explained his attitude—and if she wasn’t mistaken, Rook had been a part of their little group as well.

Synek hadn’t bothered to get close to anyone else. If anything, he did his damnedest to make everyone around him fear his very presence.

Iris hated the very idea of him.

He sounded not just sadistic but psychotic. She’d wondered why they’d ever bothered keeping someone like him around until Rosalie had confessed to her in a ten-minute conversation more than she’d ever learned in the six months she’d been there at the time.

She could still remember the day she had first heard his name.

Iris couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and though she had come around to the Wraiths nearly a year prior, she’d still been reeling from the spiral downward trek her life had fallen into after the trial.

It was before she became the Wraiths’ honey pot, and before she ever became known as the bounty hunter of the rich and depraved.

Back then, Rosalie had been something of a big sister to look up to—long before Iris realized she was barking up the wrong tree—and when Iris had found her upset, staring at a picture, she hadn’t been able to just leave her there.

“Is there anything I can do?” she’d asked, figuring her response would be something along the lines of what she always said: No, go the hell away.

Instead, Rosalie had tossed the picture down, giving her the chance to actually see the two figures depicted in its black and white depths. Rosalie wasn’t hard to recognize, her midnight black hair distinguishable even in the dark image, but it was the boy with her that made Iris curious.

If she had to guess, Rosalie couldn’t have been more than a pre-teen in the picture and the boy she was with might have been a couple of years older. He was thin in the way that said he wasn’t eating enough, but his eyes … his eyes had seen far more than he should have at his age.

And though his fair hair was slightly curly and hung about to his shoulders, that didn’t soften him at all. It only brought out the cut of his jaw.

Rosalie was beaming in the picture, her happiness infectious, but the boy, he was neither smiling or frowning. He was just … existing.

“Who is he?” Iris had asked, not daring to pick up the picture itself. Instead, she inched a little closer to get a better look.

“I loved him,” was her answer, though it didn’t provide her with any clue as to his identity, “and do you know what he did with it?”

“What did he do?”

“He betrayed me.”

For weeks, months even, that was all Rosalie had ever said about the boy in the picture—the boy whose name she still didn’t know. Soon, she had started to think that he hadn’t just betrayed Rosalie—though she still hadn’t a clue what he had done to betray her—but rather that he had betrayed the Wraiths as a whole.

“How?” Iris finally dared to ask, actively bringing up the man so many refused to mention in more than passing.

For a moment, Rosalie looked as if she would answer her inquiry, and she would finally have an answer to the question she always wondered, but instead, Rosalie merely shook her head. “It’s not important now.”

She’d turned a beguiling smile on her, beckoning her closer. Surprised by her sudden change in attitude, Iris had hesitated, and saw the moment that was a mistake.

Rosalie reached for her, snagging her wrist, before yanking her down beside her none too gently. The pain that had rippled up her arm nearly took her breath away, but she hadn’t dared complain.

“You wouldn’t ever betray me, would you?” Rosalie had asked, her tone thoughtful, though it had taken Iris a few months longer to see through the ruse.

Her answer then was the same as it was now—no.

At least not outright.

The Wraiths and Rosalie, in particular, had long memories. And once a name went on her shit list, it was hard getting off it.

“The target is Synek?” Iris asked, keeping any inflection out of her voice as she looked up from the file she had long stopped reading once she saw his picture in the corner.

While Rosalie might have whispered about him in a sort of envious, sympathetic tone, the others didn’t quite feel the same.

Some were in awe of who Synek was—apparently, one of the best cleaners who had ever come out of the Wraiths—but Iris wasn’t as easily moved.

To her, he was nothing more than a ghost story.

“He’ll be in New York a week from today,” Belladonna said with a slight nod of her head. “I’ve heard from various sources that your organization has been trying to find him.”

That was putting it mildly.

If there was anyone the Wraiths as a collective wanted to get their hands on, it was Synek.

Rosalie, especially, wanted to make an example out of him, and maybe—though she’d never admit it—she wanted closure as well.

“If you hope to get your hands on him,” Belladonna continued, “I’d wager this is your last chance.”

The way she phrased it sounded as if she knew something the rest of them didn’t, but it wasn’t Iris’s place to question anything.

“Well, I should leave you all to your meeting. I trust you have everything you need?” the woman asked, though it was clear she wasn’t expecting an answer.

She smoothed a hand along the front of her white pencil skirt as she stood, her assistant following, and only once the pair of them were moving toward the door did another shadowed form seem to peel off the wall to follow behind them.

Considering he was wearing a bulletproof vest with a gun strapped to his back and a mask over the lower half of his face, Iris was surprised she hadn’t noticed him before then, but he hardly made a sound, and if not for the slightly narrowed eyes as he gazed at the men in the room, she might have thought he wasn’t fully aware.

Who the hell was Belladonna?

As the mysterious woman exited, Rosalie eased to her feet. That serene expression she’d been wearing during the entirety of this meeting slipped away, replaced by a hunger the likes of which Iris had never seen before.

She was excited, that much was clear, and she could barely contain herself.

Iris didn’t have to ask why—she held the answer in her hands.

Rosalie hardly had the door shut before Bear was speaking. “Far be it for me to tell you how to commit suicide, but going after him isn’t going to go well for you.”

Now that Belladonna was gone, more of Rosalie’s true personality seeped out. Gone was the demure attitude, and in its place came blatant arrogance. “If I wanted your opinion, I still wouldn’t ask for it. Sit down and shut up, Bear.”

There were men in the Wraiths who would have quickly shut their mouths and did as they were told so as not to court her wrath, but Bear had never been the sort to listen to anyone—especially not Rosalie.

Whatever bad blood simmered between them, it hadn’t died out with time.

As his fingers flexed and he opened his mouth to respond, Iris quickly jumped in. “What exactly is your plan?” She might not have wanted anything else to do with the Wraiths, but that didn’t mean she still didn’t like a few of them.

Bear was one.

And the last thing she wanted to see was something happen to him because he couldn’t keep his temper in check.

“He’s going to be wherever Belladonna has listed in there,” Rosalie responded with a flippant wave of her hand. “Someone will go in, drug him, and lure him out, and then, he’ll be mine.”

Right … ’cause it would be that easy … “No offense, but I’m pretty sure if he’s managed to avoid you this long, he isn’t just going to let you within a mile of him. He’d shoot you on sight.”

Or any of the others.

Iris doubted there was anyone here who could … “Wait. Is that why you called me in?”

“You’re the only face he won’t recognize,” Raj said from his new position by the filing cabinets in the corner. “It’ll be easy.”

Iris might have needed to show Rosalie respect when others were around and mind her words, but she didn’t have to show Raj the same courtesy. “If it’s so easy, then why don’t you volunteer? You’re not scared of him, are you?”

There were two sorts of men who belonged to the Wraiths.

There were those like Bear and Rook who did bad things for a living but were good people. Then there were men like Raj who were just as disgusting on the inside as they were out.

Maybe if the target had been a girl who needed to be broken in for the Wraiths’ purposes, he’d be all over that—or anyone, really, who couldn’t fight back.

At her question, the color in Raj’s cheeks deepened, his rage becoming apparent. “You got something to say to me, Iris, you come right over here.”

It wasn’t as if every person in this room didn’t have a bit of fear in them when it came to Synek, but only his masculinity was so fragile that he needed to lash out at her for pointing it out. Yet she was the one expected to face a man who could easily hurt her in the blink of an eye.

“There’s no need to argue,” Rosalie butted in, though she looked pleased with the banter. “Synek would probably stab any man he didn’t know who tried to get close to him. He’s less suspicious of women.”

That might have been true, but that still didn’t explain why Iris needed to do it. She had too much she needed to focus on to divest time in something else … especially since she was sure she’d made it clear months ago that she was done.

“You’re gonna have to pick someone else for your suicide mission, Rosalie.”

Whatever patience she might have possessed from the good news of her finally being able to make Synek pay disappeared as she lost her smile. A beat of silence passed before she said, “Leave the room.”

It was clear she spoke to the others in the room and expected Iris to remain where she was, and while she had plenty of reason to fear her, if Iris had to choose between her and Synek as an enemy to have, she would pick Rosalie any day.

Synek was an entirely different breed of monster.

As soon as the door closed, Rosalie spoke. “Sorry if I gave you the impression that you get an opinion on this. In case you forgot, you do what I say, not the other way around.”

Iris bit her tongue, holding back what she wanted to say next. Once was forgiven, twice was asking for retaliation.

“Syn likes pretty, broken things,” Rosalie said as she pulled a metal nail file from the top drawer of her desk. “He’d love you.”

It was clear she thought that was a compliment, but Iris didn’t take it as one. “No, you told me he liked to break pretty things.”

“Then that’ll make your job easier. He’ll be distracted because he’s attracted to you, and you’ll be able to lace his drink without him noticing.” As she began moving the edge of the file across her nails, her smile grew a bit more sardonic. “I’m sure you can be what he needs.”

Another backhanded compliment leaning heavily toward an insult. “I told you I was out,” Iris said, keeping her voice low to ensure the anger she felt wasn’t as easily detectable. “You agreed.”

“I agreed to let you work on your little side project under the condition that you be available when I need you. That time is now.”

There’d been no mention of any of that, no matter what Rosalie wanted her to believe.

Iris wanted to argue further but then thought better of it. There was no way she would get out of this, no matter what she said. “What do you want me to do?”

The sooner she finished with Synek—the sooner she finished with this mission—the sooner she could move on.

Because as soon as she was able to, she was getting in her car and leaving New York.

Without ever looking back.