For their first meeting, Belladonna had taken her to her offices in the heart of Manhattan, but when she called to schedule a meeting a few days later, she didn’t ask to meet there again. Instead, she sent Iris an address to a small but trendy French bistro in the Village.

The building was a muted shade of yellow with ten white tables and complementing blue chairs along the sides of the building.

Iris couldn’t miss Belladonna as she approached the restaurant, her hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket. Not when she stood out among the sea of women in colorful dresses, and she was the only one wearing white.

This wasn’t the first time her choice in fashion had sparked Iris’s curiosity.  She couldn’t help but wonder if it was tied to her image—whether it was just another part of the persona—or if the color held some significance and she just didn’t know it.

“Good evening, Iris. I trust you found this place okay?”

She arched a brow as she helped herself to one of the wrought-iron chairs before glancing around to catch any sight of the Jackal. It wasn’t necessarily what she had said that made her hesitate, but how she had said it. Now was the first time she thought she had ever heard the woman short with her.

“No problem at all,” she said with a shrug, thinking about the rather long cab ride she’d taken to get to this side of town. “Something wrong?”

Whatever she had been reading on her phone was forgotten as Belladonna turned the screen off and tucked the device away, forcing a smile though it didn’t reach her eyes. “As much as it possibly can be. Now, onto business.”

She plucked out a tiny thumb drive, extending it across the table. “I assumed you wouldn’t be dining with me and would want to get started right away,” Belladonna said before dropping the device into her hand.

This moment felt all too familiar. Very much like the first time they had ever crossed paths, Iris was being offered a job to find someone. The last one had changed her life in ways she had never expected, and a part of her worried that this one would do the same.

“Who am I looking for?” Iris asked, turning the device around in her hand.

Belladonna opened her mouth to respond but was cut short when the waitress returned, carrying a glass of bubbly pink wine. She set it in front of Belladonna before walking away again.

“You’re not looking for anyone.”

“No?”

“When I asked you whether you were willing to die for your father, I meant that quite literally.”

At this point, she really shouldn’t have been surprised by whatever came out of her mouth, but it was starting to feel as if everything she said was meant to top anything that came before it.

“I’ve already completed one suicide mission for you,” Iris said, dropping the thumb drive on the table and sliding it back over. “I don’t plan on doing another.”

For Synek, she’d had the element of surprise on her side. He had never seen her coming. It was something else entirely when the man she was looking for was family of a man like the Kingmaker. If the man had to have an entire team of mercenaries to make sure nothing happened to him, she couldn’t imagine the level of security provided for his family members.

Not to mention, she hadn’t known the Kingmaker even had any family other than the brooding assassin Iris had met a few times. She still remembered how difficult it had been to even find the smallest shred of evidence of who the Kingmaker was, and he was a rather prominent figure in the underworld.

“This particular job would be the easiest for you, I’d imagine.”

“Why? Because you already have my grave picked out?”

“Because I only need the world to think you’re dead. Everyone loves a martyr.”

Her brow furrowed, Iris said, “I don’t understand.”

“It will all make sense in the end. That, I promise,” Belladonna said with a lift of her glass.

“So what happens after I become your martyr?” she asked.

“Then it’s all over,” Belladonna said with such finality that Iris blinked, wondering if she had heard her correctly.

“And what? Everyone gets to walk away.”

“Precisely.”

* * *

Iris wasn’t sure how she had picked the one hotel in Manhattan that still used old-fashioned keys as opposed to electronic cards, but while she had been charmed by the idea at first, as she stood in front of the door, ready to put the key in the lock, she hesitated.

The door was still locked, that much she could tell with the slightest amount of pressure to the door handle, but something felt ... off, and she knew what would be waiting for her, even before she finally forced herself to unlock the door and let herself inside.

“You know, this breaking and entering thing you have going on is getting old.”

As she’d suspected, Synek was waiting for her, stretched out on the couch in the sitting room of the suite, one booted foot resting on top of the glass coffee table. In ripped jeans, a shirt that might have been new two decades ago, and his leather jacket tossed across the back of a chair, he didn’t look like he belonged in the suite that had a rather regal décor to it.

Iris couldn’t figure out why that made her smile.

“You were gone when I woke up,” he said calmly, flatly, lacking that hint of worry he’d had when they had spent the night together before.

He was, at a glance, upset with her.

As if he had any right.

“I didn’t make any promises that I would stay.”

A dark brow cocked up as Synek sat forward with exaggerated slowness. “You taking the fucking piss?”

“I’m assuming you wanted something?” she asked as she ventured farther into the room, dropping her bag on the table and going over to the mini bar.

This time, she wasn’t drinking because she wanted to forget any and everything. She drank because the day had been exhausting. It was all too much too soon, but this time, she at least grabbed one of the glasses sitting upside down on the counter and poured vodka into it before going in search of something to mix with it.

“You already know the answer to that,” came his response, his voice closer than she was expecting.

She remembered to breathe before she turned to face him, drink in hand. She had walked into Belladonna’s offices without blinking an eye, stared across the room at someone who was more than capable of murdering her with one hand, but only Synek managed to make her feel nervous.

Only he was able to get beneath her skin and make her feel things she never had before.

It should have been easy to quit him, to walk away from this complicated mess that they had between them, but instead, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to.

Some part of her had known that Synek would find her again. That if she didn’t outright tell him what new hotel she had moved into for the moment, he would go out of his way to find her and make it quite clear that there was no point in doing so.

She couldn’t hide from him.

Not now. Not ever.

She couldn’t quit him.

“Do I?” she asked, punctuating the question by sipping her drink to try to buy herself time.

To what, she wasn’t sure. She was only delaying the inevitable.

“I want you,” he answered.

No hesitation.

No stuttering.

He said it with absolute conviction.

And sitting right there on the tip of her tongue were four words that she shouldn’t say if she wanted to keep her focus. He spared her from answering by asking, “Where were you today?”

“I went to see my father.”

“After?”

“I don’t understand your question,” she answered, looking away.

But he didn’t let her evade him for long before he was turning her back to face him. As demanding as ever. “I know you went to see him, but where did you go after?”

“How could you have known that?”

Not only had she made sure to get out of the room without waking him, but she had made it a point to take the bus out to the prison rather than her own car. Unless he was superhuman, there was no way possible he could have caught up with her in enough time to know what she had been doing.

Unless ...

“Are you tracking me, Synek?”

“You’re bloody well right I am.”

She barely checked the urge to roll her eyes. “So if you were tracking me, you should already know the answer to that question.”

“You went dark an hour after visitation hours were over. That tells me nothing.”

Iris glanced down at her drink, swirling the contents around in the glass before she put it to her lips and tipped it back. “That tells you everything.”

She had considered, on her way back to the hotel from her meeting with Belladonna, not telling him about it. She knew he wouldn’t like it, and judging from the darkening expression on his face, she hadn’t been wrong.

But whatever hunt Belladonna was sending her on, Synek was a part of it.

“Have you gone mad?” he asked, reaching up to pluck the glass from her hand and set it aside before pressing the back of his hand against her forehead. “Finally fucking lost it, have you?”

She swatted his hand away, attempting to step around him, but unable to move at all when he struck an arm out and flattened his palm against the wall, caging her in exactly where she was.

“What’s she asked you to do? Betray me in exchange for getting your father out, is that it?”

“Of course not,” she responded, glaring at him.

Betraying him had never been an option, but his boss, however, was another story.

“Which part?” he asked, knowingly. “Her aiding in releasing your father or betraying me?”

Now or never ... “I wouldn’t betray you.”

“Then who ... no.”

Iris attempted to speak, to explain as best she could, but the grip he had on her face shifted until his hand was cupping the nape of her neck, and she had no choice but to face him.

He might have been merely curious before, but now something was rather fierce about his expression. She couldn’t look away even if she wanted to.

“Iris, luv, you need to walk away.”

“I can’t. You know that.”

“Iris.”

“Synek,” she shot back, knowing that his name would get his attention. It always did. “Don’t ask me to do that,” she said, her voice low.

Because if he did, then she would be betraying him, and she hated the very idea of that.

But Synek wasn’t hearing her, even as he stared down at her with such an expression that she could almost feel what was reflected in his face. “You don’t know what he’ll do to you.”

“It isn’t that I don’t know,” Iris answered, curling her fingers around his, holding tighter than she meant to. “I just don’t care. If I didn’t live in fear of a man who took everything from me, I’m not going to live in one because of him.”

The Kingmaker.

The man everyone feared, so much so that they wouldn’t even say his name.

She could see, on any given day, the power he possessed. It wasn’t just the money and the facilities and the way people whispered his name with awe. He had mercenaries. Men, and even a woman, who were willing to do his bidding. He only need ask for it.

They killed for him.

Bled for him.

She knew, if only partly, the sacrifices Synek had made for him.

There was all the reason in the world to fear what his retaliation might be, but that was the thing about sacrifice. It wouldn’t matter, in the end, what happened to her. It only mattered that she had done everything she could for the only family she had left.

“He would send me,” Synek said after a moment, his voice like a caress against her skin. The tension in his shoulders had eased, his stance loosening. He even brushed her hair over her shoulders, his fingers skimming her throat.

Calming her.

“If he ever thought for a second that you were trying to betray him, he would send me after you. He wouldn’t make it painless. It wouldn’t be simple and quick.” His gaze darted over her face, his eyes now blank. “He would want to make an example out of you. You get me, Iris? He would send me.”

Even if Synek didn’t want to go. “Because you signed the contract.”

At one point, she was sure he had been glad that he had signed the contract in the first place just to be free of the Wraiths. The Den wasn’t a burden the way the Wraiths had been. He quite enjoyed the people he worked with.

She didn’t think he had ever hated that contract until now.

“It’s null if he dies,” Synek said, meeting her eyes again, a sort of calm clarity filling his gaze and replacing his momentary fear. “It won’t be easy, considering our last row, but ... I could convince them.”

She had no idea what he meant, but she also didn’t like that look in his eyes. One that promised bad things.

She wasn’t the only one willing to make sacrifices.

“I don’t think she wants him dead,” Iris said, twisting her fingers into the front of his shirt, unable to help herself.

“If she wants to use you for bait against him, then she must, ’cause it ain’t a secret what I’ll do if he tries to send someone after you.”

And as much as Belladonna seemed to know—not just about them but the entire Den as well—Iris wouldn’t be surprised if she had already accounted for that fact just as she had accounted for the Kingmaker killing the governor.

Synek had another role to play.

“She promised that in the end, you’ll be free too,” she whispered. “He won’t be able to come after either of us.”

“And you believe that?”

“I believe that if she’s going out of her way to distance everyone else but him from her line of fire, she believes that.”

He still didn’t look sure. “You trust her?” Synek asked.

“Not even a little.”

Iris wasn’t a fool. She knew that her usefulness to Belladonna was selfish at best and at worst ...

No, she didn’t trust the woman.

But she did believe that Belladonna would be willing to do anything if it meant she took down the Kingmaker, and Iris knew she could use that in the future.

“Everyone has a role to play,” Iris said, thinking back over everything that had happened over the past two weeks. “We just haven’t figured out the extent of ours yet.”

* * *

Synek didn’t think twice before he was out on the balcony, a cigarette tucked between his lips as he inhaled the calming nicotine into his lungs.

He’d been doing well, limiting his intake and trying to be less of a prick than he’d been over the past few years. Despite a few setbacks along the way—others’ doing—he’d been doing well to keep a lid on his anger and not lash out.

He wanted to think first before he acted.

Now? Now, he wished he didn’t have to think at all.

This time, it didn’t come down to a choice, and even if it had, there was only one logical choice to make. But that didn’t make it any easier knowing that soon—and he wasn’t quite sure when it would be—he would have to choose between duty and the woman he loved.

It wasn’t the challenge that stressed him, or even that he would have to live as a fucking nomad if he wanted to evade the Kingmaker after betraying him, but it was something else entirely when he had more than himself to risk. It wouldn’t just be him running if the Kingmaker ever got word of what they were doing.

Synek would give his life to protect her and slaughter anyone that tried to stop him, but he was only human. There was only so much he could do.

And the Kingmaker wasn’t the type of man to stop at either of them. He went after family. Friends. Children. Anyone if it meant a lesson would be taught.

Synek ground out his cigarette, tossing it in the trash on his way back inside, but as he started for the bed, he paused.

Iris was there, bundled up on the left side, but he could still see the way her arm was stretched across the bed where he usually slept. That fear wasn’t in her face when she slept. Nor was the anger. The disappointment.

He realized, at that moment, that he would do anything to keep her happy—even if that meant risking everything.