There was a taste of blood in his mouth. Metallic. Faint. Cassian stirred, eyelids twitching beneath the blindfold. His neck ached — tilted back too far — and his shoulders throbbed from being pulled tight behind the leather of the chair.

Voices.

Female. Nearby.

“I can’t believe you did this, Ashley.” “You kidnapped the wrong person.”

Cassian didn’t move, not yet.

“I didn’t know! He was alone, in the car. Black suit, clean cut—he looked like the guy!” Ashley’s voice cracked with guilt. She sounded young. Untrained. Frantic.

“Clean cut?” the other woman repeated flatly. “Ashley… he’s in a white silk shirt. No jacket. No weapons. No trace of the mark on his wrist. Did you even check?”

“I—I panicked, okay?! The window was down. He was just sitting there. I thought—”

“You thought?” The woman’s voice cut like glass. “You were supposed to mark the target, not grab the first rich man under thirty with good hair.”

Ashley sputtered something unintelligible.

“And you only gave him a blindfold?”

“He didn’t scream!”

“That’s not the point! A gag would’ve been smarter, Ashley. Oh my god—”

Then came the sudden scrape of boots against the floor. Someone stepped close — Ashley, he guessed — and yanked the blindfold off.

Light hit him like a blade. He squinted, eyes watering, blinking rapidly to take in the room. Stark concrete walls. A workbench with mismatched tools. Harsh lighting from a single, buzzing fluorescent bar above. A warehouse? No — smaller. Maybe a storage room.

Then came the next surprise.

Ashley — a small woman, late teens or early twenties, clearly overwhelmed — hovered nearby, wringing her hands. Her light hair was tied back, her jacket slightly too large on her. She looked like she wanted to disappear.

But next to her stood someone else entirely.

A woman in full black, form-fitted tactical wear — straps, segmented armor, the hilt of a katana resting at her hip. Her dark hair was pulled into a sleek ponytail, her face half-covered by a patterned black mask.

Then, without a word, Ashley panicked and shoved the blindfold into his mouth.

He jerked back slightly, surprised.

“Ashley!” the other woman snapped.

Ashley froze. “I—I thought you wanted him gagged—”

Cassian made a low sound through his nose — not frustration, not pain. Just acknowledgment. He was listening. Processing.

The masked woman turned her gaze to him again.

“Who the hell is he?” she asked under her breath, barely audible.

Ashley flinched. “I—I don’t know. He was driving the same model. I thought it was—” The woman exhaled slowly and stepped closer to Cassian. Her voice dropped into something softer, but no less sharp.

“Let me make something very clear. I don’t know who you are yet. But if you scream, if you bite when I pull that cloth out of your mouth, I won’t hesitate to break your jaw. Understood?”

Cassian held her gaze. Then, ever so faintly, he smiled around the gag. The gall of it sent a flicker of something down her spine.

Confidence? No.

Control.

He nodded once.

She reached out, slowly, and pulled the cloth from his mouth. It was wet with saliva. He didn’t speak at first — just rolled his jaw, stretched it, and said in a calm, level tone:

“…You’ve made a very expensive mistake.”

Ashley’s breath hitched audibly.

The woman in black narrowed her eyes.

"Who are you?”

Cassian licked his lips, blood drying on the corner of one. “Cassian Moretti.”

Ashley blinked. “That—does that mean something?”

The katana-wielding woman froze.

Then her shoulders straightened.

Her voice, this time, was flat. No panic. Just realization:

“It means we kidnapped the prince of the Moretti mafia.”

Cassian smiled again. Not cruel — but precise.

“And your lives just got very, very complicated.”