Chapter 1
SIENNA
By the time I left Callaghan Holdings, I’d spent fourteen hours cleaning up other people’s mistakes and had begun to seriously consider whether murder was a viable career change.
Nathan had disappeared into a meeting shortly after lunch, leaving me with a missing freight manifest, an increasingly hysterical client, and an accountant who seemed to believe that attaching eleven spreadsheets to an email counted as an explanation. At ten past ten, I’d finally found the shipment, calmed the client, and sent Nathan a message informing him that if he abandoned me with another disaster, I would start charging him for emotional damages. He replied with a promise to buy me breakfast.
I was going to hold him to it. I’d only been his assistant manager for three months, which was long enough to learn that Callaghan Holdings was a serious operation and not nearly long enough to understand how its owners managed to keep it running. The company owned warehouses, commercial properties, and freight businesses across Blackthorne. Nathan handled the day-to-day operations. I’d met Marcus Voss twice, both times when he came in to discuss logistics with Nathan, and Damien Cross once, when he’d walked through the offices with a security team and looked at every door as though he expected someone to kick it down.
The fourth owner was a name on contracts and a signature on documents: Maddox Callaghan. Nathan talked about him with the weary affection usually reserved for difficult brothers. I hadn’t met him. As far as I knew, he spent his time buying companies and making Nathan’s life more complicated.
There had been strange things lately. Shipment references changed after approval. Drivers reassigned without explanation. Security staff appearing on floors that hadn’t needed security the week before. I had questions, but Nathan was usually forthcoming when something concerned my job, and he’d told me only that the partners were dealing with a sensitive business issue.
I wanted to believe him. I also wanted eight hours of sleep and a car that didn’t sound as though someone had dropped a box of cutlery into the engine.
My phone rang as I pulled out of the underground garage. Chloe’s name lit the screen. I answered through the speakers, and she immediately demanded to know why I was still awake.
“Because my employer has confused hiring an assistant manager with acquiring a second nervous system.”
“You’ve been there since seven.”
“And I’m going to send Nathan an invoice for the years I’ve lost.”
Tianna’s laughter sounded in the background. “She’s coming out tomorrow, right?”
“I am,” I said, turning onto the road out of Blackthorne. “Unless my car finally gives up and I have to start a new life in the woods.”
“Take the highway,” Chloe said. “That back road’s miserable at night.”
“The highway is currently a parking lot, and I have spent the day explaining simple things to people who should know better. If another driver tries to merge into my door, I may become a headline.”
We talked until the streetlights thinned and the city fell behind me. I promised to meet them for dinner the next evening. Chloe made me repeat it twice, as though she expected Nathan to emerge from the glove compartment with another emergency. After we hung up, I turned the music down. The rattle under my hood had returned.
“Please,” I told the dashboard. “We’re twenty minutes from home. You can fall apart in my parking space. I’ll even respect your decision.”
The engine jerked hard enough to throw me against the seat belt. A warning light blinked on, followed by another. I guided the car onto the gravel shoulder as the steering grew heavy, and it died with one last ugly shudder.
For a while I sat there listening to the ticking metal beneath the hood. I tried the ignition. Nothing but a dry click.
“You vindictive little bastard.”
My phone had two percent battery. I pulled up Alex’s number, ready to endure an hour of my younger brother explaining why I should have replaced the car months ago. The screen went black before the call connected. I pressed the power button until my thumb hurt. Nothing. The charging cable was in my handbag, but the car’s accessory power had died with the engine. Outside the windshield, the road stretched empty between fields and dark woodland. No houses. No streetlights. No passing traffic.
I waited. Five minutes became ten. The temperature dropped, and the damp cold worked its way through the windows. When I got out to look under the hood, I discovered exactly what I’d expected: an engine containing several thousand things I couldn’t identify, none of which seemed willing to help.
Then I saw light through the trees. It came from somewhere beyond a narrow dirt track leading off the road, a hard white glow that looked like floodlights. An industrial building, perhaps. A farmhouse with an outbuilding. Someone might have a phone I could borrow.
I stood beside my useless car and considered the options. Waiting in the cold with no way to call anyone wasn’t appealing. Walking toward an unknown building in the woods wasn’t much better. The light won. I locked the car, pulled my coat tighter, and followed the track. Wet leaves clung to my boots. Branches scraped my sleeves. As I walked, I heard voices ahead, then the low rumble of an idling engine.
I slowed before the track opened onto a concrete yard. An old warehouse stood beneath two glaring floodlights, its loading door raised just high enough to reveal darkness inside. Two black SUVs were parked at angles near the entrance. One man stood beside the first vehicle. Another was holding someone upright by the collar of his shirt. The man being held was bleeding.
I stopped behind a tree, one hand still wrapped around a branch. My mind tried to turn the scene into something ordinary—a fight, a robbery, a film shoot—until I noticed the pistol in the hand of the third man. He stood beneath the floodlight, tall and broad through the shoulders, dressed in black trousers and a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. Ink ran over both forearms: intricate black-and-grey designs disappearing beneath the fabric, sharp lines broken by shaded shapes I couldn’t make out from a distance. His hair was dark, neat despite the wind, and a close-trimmed shadow of stubble sharpened his jaw. A thin scar cut through one eyebrow. He looked young. Not much older than I was. He also looked completely at ease in a place where a man was bleeding onto the concrete.
“Please, Maddox,” the injured man said. “You know me. You know I wouldn’t have done it if they’d given me a choice.”
The man with the gun didn’t raise his voice. “You gave them the warehouse address.”
“They said they only wanted the shipment.”
“And you believed they’d send a polite request to the men guarding it?”
“I needed the money. My wife—”
“Don’t use your wife to explain what you did.” He stepped closer. “When she needed surgery, I paid for it. You came to my house afterward and thanked me. You looked me in the eye, Curtis. Then you sold the location of three men who trusted you.”
Curtis’s face crumpled. “I didn’t know they’d kill them.”
“One of them was nineteen. He’d worked for us for six weeks.” The man called Maddox paused, and something in his voice turned colder. “His mother called Nathan seven times because nobody had told her where her son was. Do you understand what you sold?”
Curtis began to sob. I felt the sound in my stomach. I should have gone back to the road. I knew that with an absolute certainty that somehow failed to move my legs.
“Who paid you?” Maddox asked.
Curtis shook his head. The man beside the SUV shifted, but Maddox held up one tattooed hand. He crouched in front of Curtis, close enough that their faces were almost level.
“The people who bought you are going to kill you if they get the chance. You know that. I can still find them before they do this to someone else. Tell me who gave the order.”
Curtis whispered something I couldn’t hear. Maddox leaned closer. Then Curtis said a name clearly enough for it to reach the trees.
“Vale. Graham Vale. He said it came from someone higher up.”
The man by the SUV took out his phone. Maddox asked two more questions about a transfer, a route, and a container number. Curtis answered between tears, then reached desperately for Maddox’s sleeve.
“Please. I’ve got children.”
Maddox looked down at the hand gripping his shirt. He removed it without haste.
“So did the men you sent to their deaths.”
He stood and raised the pistol. My body understood before my mind did. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. The shot cracked across the yard. Curtis collapsed. The man holding him stepped away. There was no dramatic struggle, no second chance to change his mind. One moment he was begging to go home; the next he was lying motionless on the concrete. I stumbled backward and clapped a hand over my mouth. Nausea rose so quickly that I bent at the waist, fighting to keep quiet. My heel landed on a fallen branch. It snapped.
“Movement in the trees,” someone said.
I looked up. All three men were staring toward me. Then I ran. I crashed through the undergrowth, branches whipping my face and catching in my hair. Someone shouted behind me. I didn’t look back. My boots slipped on wet roots, and I caught myself against a trunk hard enough to skin my palm. The track vanished. Every tree looked like the one before it. Footsteps gained on me. A hand caught the back of my coat, and I twisted so violently that the fabric tore. I drove my elbow backward and heard a man swear. For one hopeful second, I was free. Then I ran into someone solid. Hands caught my upper arms before I fell. I swung at the face above me and connected with a jaw. Pain flashed through my knuckles.
“Christ,” the man muttered, letting go.
I tried to dart past him, but he moved into my path. The floodlight caught his face. Maddox. He was breathing a little harder now. There was a red mark along his jaw where I’d hit him. At this distance, the tattoos were clearer: a dark, detailed sleeve winding down one arm, another design circling his wrist, the ink broken by an old pale scar. His stubble was so short it barely covered the hard line of his jaw. His eyes were dark and utterly alert. He wasn’t holding the gun anymore. I searched his hands anyway.
“Stay away from me,” I said.
He lifted them slowly, palms visible. “I’m not touching you.”
A second man emerged behind him, rubbing his ribs. “She saw the whole thing.”
“I know, Damien. Go back to Marcus and make sure Curtis’s phone is secured.”
“We don’t know who she is.”
“I’ll find out.”
Damien looked at me with an expression that made my stomach drop. Maddox noticed it, too.
“Go,” he said, and the other man obeyed.
I backed into a tree. There was nowhere else to go.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
Maddox studied me for a moment. “You came looking for help and walked into something you should never have seen. I’m not going to punish you for that.”
“You expect me to believe you after what I just watched?”
“I expect you to be frightened. I don’t expect you to trust me.”
His composure was unbearable. I wanted him to shout or threaten me, to make himself into something I could understand. Instead he stood a few feet away, watching me as though my fear required careful handling.
“He begged you,” I said. “He was on his knees, and you listened to him beg, and then you shot him.”
“I did.”
“How can you say that like it’s nothing?”
“It wasn’t nothing.” His gaze didn’t leave mine. “Three men are dead because he sold their location. That doesn’t make what you saw easier, and I’m not asking you to think it does.”
“You could have called the police.”
“The people involved in this aren’t going to disappear because I file a report.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I can give you tonight.”
I hated the steadiness of his voice. I hated that he didn’t pretend to be innocent. More than anything, I hated how young he looked. There should have been something visibly monstrous about him, something that warned the world what he was capable of. Instead he was an attractive man with expensive clothes, dark tattoos, and a small swelling on his jaw where I’d hit him.
“I just want to go home,” I said, my voice breaking despite my efforts.
He glanced toward the road. “Where’s your car?”
“On the shoulder. The engine died. My phone’s dead, too. That’s why I came down here. I saw the lights and thought somebody might let me make a call.”
Something changed in his expression, a brief tightening around his eyes. “You walked all this way because you needed a phone.”
“I didn’t exactly plan to attend an execution.”
His mouth moved as though he might smile, but he didn’t. “What’s your name?”
I hesitated. He waited without moving closer.
“Sienna.”
“Sienna what?”
“Bennett. Sienna Bennett.”
The stillness that followed felt different. He looked at me more carefully, taking in my face as though searching for something he couldn’t quite place.
“Bennett,” he repeated.
“Is there a problem with my name?”
“Where do you work?”
“Why? So you can have me fired if I tell anyone?”
“I’m trying to work out whether someone knew you’d be on that road.”
A fresh wave of cold moved through me. “I work for Callaghan Holdings.”
His expression closed. For several seconds neither of us spoke. Then he took a phone from his pocket, deliberately slow enough that I could see what he was reaching for.
“Nathan,” he said when the call connected. “The assistant manager you hired this summer. What’s her full name?” He listened, looking straight at me. “That’s what I thought. I’ll explain in the morning.” He ended the call.
I stared at him. “How do you know Nathan?”
“He’s my business partner.”
I knew before he said anything else. The answer arrived like a fist to the chest: the contracts, the signatures, the name on the glass doors I’d walked through every morning for three months.
“Maddox Callaghan,” I whispered.
He inclined his head once.
I let out a breath that sounded almost like laughter. “Of course. Of fucking course.”
“You haven’t met the other owners yet.”
“I’ve met Marcus. I’ve met Damien. Nathan told me you were busy with acquisitions.” I gestured toward the trees. “Is this what he meant?”
He accepted the accusation without blinking. “Nathan doesn’t involve the office staff in what happens outside the legitimate businesses.”
“The legitimate businesses?” I repeated. “That’s a fascinating choice of words.”
“Sienna—”
“I work there. I prepare your freight reports. I approve invoices. I spent most of today trying to find a shipment that had apparently vanished between two warehouses. Tell me I haven’t been helping you do whatever the hell that was back there.”
For the first time, his composure cracked. He stepped closer, then stopped when I flinched.
“Listen carefully. Nathan hired you to run legitimate operations. If anything in your work has been used for something else, that wasn’t your decision and it isn’t your responsibility.”
“That isn’t nearly as comforting as you think.”
“I know.”
I dragged a hand through my hair and looked up at the dark canopy. I wanted my apartment, my catless and perfectly ordinary apartment, my friends arguing over dinner, Nathan complaining about quarterly reports. I wanted the last half hour removed from my life.
“I can’t go back there tomorrow,” I said.
“Then don’t. Take time. Resign if that’s what you decide. Nathan will make sure you’re paid everything you’re owed.”
“You don’t get to make this easy by being reasonable.”
His gaze softened in a way that made me angrier. “I’m not trying to make it easy.”
“You murdered a man.”
“I did.”
“And tomorrow you’ll put on a suit and sit in a meeting and talk about profit margins.”
He held my stare. “Probably.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand how you live with yourself.”
“There are nights when I don’t, either.”
The answer was so quiet that I almost missed it. For the first time, I saw something behind his composure—not regret for the decision, exactly, but exhaustion so deeply buried that he seemed surprised to have revealed it. I didn’t want to feel anything for him. Not curiosity. Not pity. Certainly not the unwelcome awareness of how close he stood, or how the black ink on his arms moved when he flexed his hands.
“I need to leave,” I said.
He stepped aside. “I’ll walk behind you to the road. You can choose how you get home once we’re there.”
“And if I call the police?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “You have that right. But there are people connected to Curtis who may already know someone witnessed what happened. Until I know who they are, please don’t tell strangers where you were tonight. That’s a warning about them, not a threat from me.”
I wanted to dismiss it as manipulation. The fear in my stomach made that impossible. We walked back through the trees with several paces between us. I could hear his footsteps, steady and unhurried. Every few minutes I looked back. He never tried to close the distance. My car was still on the shoulder, a miserable silver shape beneath the moonlight. The sight of it nearly made me cry. Maddox called Marcus and gave him the location. He arranged a tow truck, then asked for a driver to bring another vehicle. I objected before he’d finished.
“I’m not accepting a car from you.”
“It’s a loaner, not a gift. Yours isn’t starting tonight.”
“I’ll ask my brother to come.”
“Use my phone. Call him yourself.”
He unlocked the screen and held it out. I stared at it for a moment before taking it, careful not to touch his fingers. Alex answered on the fourth ring, sounding half asleep and immediately alarmed when he heard my voice. I told him the car had broken down and my battery had died. He offered to come, but he was over an hour away at the farm, and I couldn’t bear the thought of explaining why I was calling from a stranger’s phone while the stranger stood beside me.
“I’ve got a ride,” I told him. “I’ll call when I get home.”
“Sienna, it’s nearly midnight. Who’s taking you?”
I looked at Maddox. He stood a few feet away, watching the road instead of me.
“Someone from work,” I said. “I’ll explain tomorrow.”
I ended the call before Alex could ask anything else and handed the phone back. Maddox took one look at my trembling hands, removed his charcoal coat, and offered it to me.
“You’re freezing.”
“I’d rather not owe you anything.”
“You don’t owe me for being cold.”
The wind cut through my shirt. I took the coat and hated how quickly the warmth settled around me. It smelled of cedar, smoke, and something clean beneath both. I could see the edge of a tattoo at his collar now, disappearing under the open top button of his shirt. For several minutes we waited in silence. Then the question I’d been trying not to ask escaped anyway.
“Did Curtis really have children?”
Maddox looked toward the trees. “Two.”
“And what happens to them now?”
“They’ll be provided for. His wife won’t lose her house, and the children won’t go without what they need.”
I stared at him. “You killed their father and you’re going to pay their bills?”
“His children didn’t choose what he did.”
“Neither did the families of those three men.”
“Exactly.”
I looked away, furious at the part of me that understood his reasoning. Understanding wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t approval. I wanted to tell him that, but he already knew.
“I can’t make what you saw tonight acceptable,” he said. “I’m not going to insult you by trying.”
I pulled the coat tighter. “Then don’t.”
A pair of headlights appeared at the far end of the road. Maddox straightened as a black SUV approached and pulled onto the shoulder. Marcus stepped out, recognized me, and stopped with his hand still on the door.
“Sienna?”
“Apparently everyone knows me except the man whose name is on my paycheck,” I said.
Marcus glanced at Maddox, and whatever passed between them made his expression harden.
“I’ll take you home,” Marcus said. “You can sit in the back if you’d prefer. I won’t ask you anything about tonight.”
I looked at Maddox. “Is he part of it, too?”
Maddox didn’t pretend not to understand. “Marcus, Damien, Nathan, and I own the company together. We also share responsibilities you weren’t hired to know about.”
It was more honesty than I wanted.
I shrugged off his coat and handed it back. He accepted it without comment.
“I don’t know whether I’ll come to work tomorrow,” I said.
“Then Nathan will hear from you when you’re ready.”
I walked toward Marcus’s SUV, stopped, and turned around. Maddox stood beside my dead car, his tattooed forearms bare in the cold, the swelling on his jaw beginning to show. He looked like a man waiting for a late-night tow truck, not someone who’d executed another human being less than an hour earlier.
“You asked me my name,” I said. “You already know where I work. You know where I live now, too, don’t you?”
“Marcus needs an address to drive you home. I won’t come there uninvited.”
“You make promises very easily.”
“Only the ones I intend to keep.”
I searched his face for a trace of mockery and found none.
“I hope I never see you again, Mr. Callaghan.”
Something unreadable crossed his eyes. “After tonight, I understand why.”
I climbed into the SUV and shut the door. Marcus pulled away without speaking, leaving Maddox beneath the headlights beside my broken car. For the first ten minutes I watched the road ahead and tried to stop shaking. Then I closed my eyes and saw Curtis on his knees, heard his voice cracking around the word children, heard the gunshot that had ended the conversation. But other images kept forcing their way in: a tattooed hand opening slowly so I could see it was empty; a man standing back because I’d asked him to; the flash of exhaustion in his eyes when he’d admitted that some nights he couldn’t live with himself.
None of it excused what he’d done. I knew that. I would not let my mind soften a murder into something romantic simply because the killer had a beautiful face and had spoken to me gently. Yet the questions wouldn’t leave me alone. Who had killed those three men? Why had Curtis betrayed them? What was Graham Vale doing with a shipment that might have passed through the company where I worked? And how much of the business I’d spent three months helping to run belonged to a world I hadn’t known existed? I opened my eyes. Marcus was watching the road, his expression carefully neutral.
“I found a missing shipment today,” I said. “A reference number had been changed after approval. Nathan told me it was an internal mistake.”
Marcus’s hands tightened on the wheel. It was slight, but I saw it.
“What shipment?” he asked.
I gave him the number from memory. He didn’t answer. Instead he reached for his phone, placed a call through the car’s speakers, and waited. Maddox picked up almost immediately.
“She’s safe?” he asked.
Marcus glanced at me in the mirror. “She’s here. And she just told me something you need to hear.”
A silence followed, long enough for the road noise to fill the car.
“Put me on speaker,” Maddox said.
“You already are,” I told him.
Another pause. Then his voice, lower this time.
“Sienna, tell me everything you know about that shipment.”
I looked through the windshield at the empty highway ahead, at the dark trees on either side, and realized that I hadn’t left the warehouse behind at all. Somehow, without understanding how, I’d carried a piece of it into the car with me. And the man I’d sworn never to see again was waiting for my answer.
