Jay jay's POV
The phone call from Sienna had been a calculated execution of my sanity. Her voice over the receiver hadn't been her usual sweet, administrative purr. It was cold. Absolute.
"I have Keiren, Jay Jay," she had whispered, the background noise dripping with an eerie, hollow silence. "He's so quiet when he's terrified. If you tell a single soul—if you bring Tiger, or Angelo, or your little Section E dogs—I'll ensure Keifer gets his brother back in pieces. Come to the old iron foundry on the edge of the district. Alone."
It was a lie. Deep down, in the fractured remnants of my instincts, I knew Keiren was likely still locked in his room, drowning in his own trauma. But "likely" wasn't a risk I could take with the boy who used to hide behind my back when the world got too loud.
Sienna knew that. She knew exactly which strings to pull to drag me into a slaughterhouse.
The foundry was a skeletal carcass of rusted steel and shattered glass. The moment the heavy iron doors groaned shut behind me, the illusion shattered. Keiren wasn't here.
Instead, the shadows detached themselves from the corrugated walls. Six men. Heavy boots, blunt-force weapons, and eyes that held the empty stare of paid butchers.
"Looking for someone, tomboy?" the largest one grunted, cracking a heavy iron pipe against his palm.
"Sienna really is a coward," I spat, my voice echoing in the vast, empty space. I shifted my weight, my bruised ribs from four days ago screaming in protest. "Sending six of you to do a snake's laundry?"
They didn't waste time talking.
The first one lunged, swinging a lead pipe aimed straight for my temple. I ducked, the air whistling past my ear, and drove my elbow upward into his sternum. The bone cracked under the impact. I wrenched the pipe from his grip, spinning to parry a blade aimed at my flank.
But Tiger was right—I looked like I'd already crawled out of a blender. My body was sluggish. A heavy boot caught me in the stomach, sending me crashing against a stack of rusted iron sheets. Sharp pain exploded behind my eyes. Blood, warm and metallic, began to pool in my mouth.
I scrambled up, grabbing a jagged shard of broken glass from the floor, slashing wildly to keep them at bay. I managed to open a deep gash across one attacker's forearm, but a crushing blow from a wooden bat caught my shoulder. My vision went white. I dropped to one knee, gasping for air, the glass slipping from my bloody fingers.
This is it, looking up at the pipe swinging down toward my face. I love you... keifer.
The roof exploded.
Shattered fiberglass and dust rained down like a collapsing sky as three figures dropped from the rafters with terrifying, practiced precision. Section E.
"Step away from the asset!" a voice roared through the dust cloud.It was...CI.N.
Before the goons could even register the intrusion, the tactical team dismantled them. It wasn't a brawl; it was a clinical extraction.
Bones snapped, bodies hit the concrete, and the air filled with the deafening cracks of non-lethal suppression fire. One of the operatives hauled me to my feet, bracing my shaking frame against his tactical vest.
Then, the heavy front doors were violently thrown open.
The silhouette framing the blinding afternoon light was unmistakable. Keifer.
But he wasn't alone. Sienna was right behind him, her designer coat artfully torn at the shoulder, her hair disheveled, and tears already streaming down her immaculate face.
The moment she saw the room—saw me bleeding, surrounded by Section E and the groaning bodies of her own men—she didn't freeze. She adapted.
"Keifer, look out!" Sienna shrieked, her voice reaching a hysterical, glass-shattering pitch. She threw herself to the floor, gripping Keifer's leather jacket, trembling violently. "She tried to do it! She brought them to kill me! She said if she couldn't have you, she would take away everything you have left!"
Keifer's face went completely bloodless. The golden flecks in his eyes didn't just drown in shadows—they turned into absolute, murderous ice. He didn't look at the unconscious men. He didn't look at Section E. His gaze locked entirely on me, holding the jagged glass, covered in blood.
"Get out," Keifer barked at Section E, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, demonic resonance. "Get the hell out before I make this a crime scene you can't cover up."
The operatives hesitated, looking at me, but I gave them a weak, imperceptible shake of my head. This was my execution. They couldn't save me from this. Slowly, silently, they melted back into the shadows of the exit, leaving the three of us in the suffocating silence of the foundry.
Sienna was sobbing on her knees, clutching her throat. "She... she called me, Keifer. She said she knew about the charity gala. She said she'd frame me to look like a traitor to the family if I didn't meet her here so she could finish the job. Look at her! She has a weapon!"
Keifer didn't say a word. He walked forward, his boots heavy against the concrete, his movement slow and deliberate. He stopped exactly two inches from me. The air vanished.
With a movement so fast it blurred, his hand went to his waistband. The metallic click echoed like a thunderclap in the empty warehouse.
The cold, heavy barrel of a semi-automatic handgun pressed hard into the center of my chest, right over my hammering heart.
"Give me one reason," Keifer whispered, his voice dangerously low, a jagged blade tracing my throat. "One single reason why I shouldn't put a bullet through your chest right now."
I looked at the gun, then up into the eyes of the man I had torn my own soul apart to protect. "Keifer... she's lying. She set this up. She told me she had Keiren—"
"Shut your mouth!" he roared, pressing the barrel deeper into my sternum, forcing me to lean back against the rusted iron pile. "Don't you dare speak his name! You think I'm blind? You think I don't see what you are? You're a cancer, Jay Jay. You creep into my house,you leave my brother fighting for his life in a hospital bed, and now you drag Sienna out here to slaughter her?"
"Look at the men on the floor, Keifer!" I yelled back, tears of sheer, agonizing frustration finally bursting from my eyes, mixing with the blood on my cheek. "They aren't mine! They're hers! They work for Kaizer Watson! They work for Marco Valerius! She is using you to destroy your family!"
"No! Keifer, don't listen to her!" Sienna wailed from the floor, rocking back and forth. "She's insane! She's obsessed with destroying us! Please, just make her stop!"
Keifer's grip on the gun was so tight his knuckles were stark white, shaking with the restraint it took not to pull the trigger. "She has been by my side for long, Jay Jay. She watched over my family while you were playing security guard for the underworld. And you expect me to believe a lying, street-rat tomboy over her?"
"I am trying to save your life!" I screamed, my voice breaking, the pain in my chest from the gun barrel matching the absolute devastation in my heart. "If you're going to kill me, look me in the eyes when you do it! Look at the woman who loved you enough to walk into a death trap just because she thought your brother was in danger!"
Keifer's gaze flickered for a fraction of a second, searching my bleeding, broken face.
The raw truth of my heartbreak was laid bare before him, just like it had been in the hallway four days ago. For a breathless moment, the gun trembled against my chest.
Then, Sienna let out a sharp, choked gasp from the floor, pretending to faint from the trauma.
The flicker in Keifer's eyes died, replaced by an iron curtain of pure, unadulterated hatred. He didn't lower the gun. He leaned in closer, his breath hot against my face, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register that froze the blood in my veins.
"You are nothing to me," Keifer whispered, each word a slow, agonizing twist of a knife. "If I ever see your face again—if you breathe the same air as Sienna, Keiren, or Sienna's shadow—I won't use a courtroom. I won't use the police. I will personally bury you so deep in the earth that God Himself won't be able to find your remains. Do you understand me, murderer?"
I couldn't speak. The realization that the man I loved was completely, utterly gone—brainwashed by the devil sitting on the floor behind him—choked the life out of my throat. I just stared at him, my silence the only testament to my broken spirit.
Keifer lowered the gun, his eyes disgusted, as if looking at a piece of filth he'd stepped on. He turned his back on me without another word, walking over to Sienna. He scooped her up into his arms with a tenderness that made me want to rip my own heart out of my chest.
Sienna buried her face in his neck, but as Keifer turned to carry her out of the foundry, her head shifted. She looked back at me over his shoulder.
The tears were gone. Her eyes were wide, bright, and mocking. She curved her lips into a slow, victorious smirk, mouthing three silent words to me before they disappeared into the blinding light outside:
I win, Tomboy.
The heavy iron doors banged shut, leaving me alone in the dark, bleeding onto the cold concrete, with nothing left but the terrifying certainty of the gala ahead.
Keifer's POV
The quiet of my house was deafening, but it brought no peace.
I sat on the edge of the plush armchair in Sienna's guest room, the heavy first-aid kit open on the low table between us. The amber light of the bedside lamp cast long, distorted shadows across the walls. Sienna sat perfectly still on the edge of the mattress, her head tilted slightly to the side, allowing me access to the injuries she had sustained at the foundry.
I soaked a cotton pad in antiseptic. My fingers were steady, trained by years of handling corporate espionage and physical threats, but my mind was an absolute battlefield.
"Hold still," I murmured, my voice raspy. "This might sting."
"It's okay," she whispered, her eyelashes fluttering against her pale cheeks. "As long as you're here, I don't feel the pain."
I pressed the damp cotton against the shallow red lines cutting across her collarbone and the side of her neck. I waited for her to wince. I waited for the deep, shuddering gasp of someone whose flesh had been violently torn by a paid mercenary's blade or a heavy iron pipe.
Nothing happened. She barely blinked.
I frowned, leaning in closer under the pretext of cleaning the wound. My eyes narrowed as I analyzed the marks with a clinical, detached precision. The panic that had blinded me at the foundry was beginning to recede, leaving behind the cold, calculating businessman who parsed data for a living.
These weren't defensive wounds.
The lacerations were uniform. They were thin, perfectly spaced, and shallow—parallel red tracks that started high near her jaw and dragged downward. There was no bruising beneath them. No jagged tearing from a weapon. They matched the exact width and spacing of human fingers. Her own fingers.
She did this to herself.
The realization hit me like a physical blow to the solar plexus, freezing the blood in my veins. Jay Jay's bloodied, broken face flashed behind my eyes. "She's lying. She set this up."
The words I had screamed over, the words I had met with a loaded gun, began to echo in the hollow chambers of my chest with a terrifying new weight.
"Keifer?" Sienna's soft voice broke through my spiraling thoughts. She looked up at me, her eyes pooling with a sudden, perfect layer of tears. "What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Nothing," I lied, my voice dropping into a flat, dangerous register as I tossed the stained cotton pad into the tray. "The scratches are just... shallow. You're lucky."
"I was lucky because you saved me," she said.
Before I could pull away to pack up the kit, Sienna moved. She slid off the edge of the bed, dropping to her knees on the floor between my thighs. Her movement was fluid, entirely devoid of the physical trauma she had claimed to suffer just hours prior. She placed her small, unbruised hands on my knees, looking up at me with an expression that was entirely too calculated, too heavy with intent.
"Sienna, you need to rest," I said, my muscles locking as I instinctively tried to create distance.
"I don't want to rest, Keifer," she whispered. She stood up slowly, pressing her body against mine as I remained seated. She leaned down, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, burying her face into the crook of my neck. "I spent four days watching you slip away. Watching you obsess over her. I thought I was going to lose you to that monster."
The scent of her perfume—a heavy, expensive floral blend—invaded my senses. Usually, it was a familiar, comforting presence in my office. Tonight, it smelled like copper and deceit.
"I'm right here," I said mechanically, my hands hanging uselessly at my sides.
"Prove it," she groaned against my skin.
Suddenly, her lips pressed against the bare skin of my neck. Her kiss wasn't the frantic, terrified reach of a victim seeking comfort.
It was an assertion of ownership. Her mouth moved against my pulse point, her fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of my neck, trying to pull me deeper into her space, offering herself to me without reservation.
A sudden, violent wave of pure revulsion crashed through my entire body.
The moment her lips touched my skin, my stomach rolled in protest. It felt sticky, toxic, and utterly sickening—like a parasite trying to bore its way beneath my flesh.
My breath hitched in my throat, and a cold sweat broke out across my forehead. Every nerve ending in my body recoiled from her touch, screaming at me to push her away, to scrub my skin until it bled just to erase the taint of her mouth. It was a visceral, disgusting feeling that made my jaw lock with suppressed nausea.
And then, a secondary thought hit me. A thought so irrational, so utterly shattering, that it left me completely paralyzed.
Why do I feel like I'm cheating?
It was a madness. Sienna was the woman who had been by my side for three years. She was the one my family trusted.
Jay Jay was the outsider, the street-rat tomboy I had pushed into a dark corner, the woman I had threatened to bury in the earth just hours ago. I owed Jay Jay nothing. I had given her nothing but anger, a brutal hallway kiss, and a loaded gun to the chest.
Yet, as Sienna's lips traced my jawline, the disgust transformed into an overwhelming weight of guilt.
I felt a profound, horrifying sense of betrayal, as if by merely allowing this woman to touch me, I was breaking a sacred vow to the girl currently bleeding on the concrete floor of that abandoned foundry.