Rafe's POV
Cassian Calder did not stop for bodies.
That was the first thought that cut through my mind when the driver slowed the car.
Bodies were common along the edges of deals gone wrong—especially in places like this, where roads clung to cliffs and the ocean swallowed evidence without complaint. The sea was efficient. It erased without ceremony. No questions. No witnesses. No memory.
We had passed wreckage before. Twisted metal. Burned-out frames. Sometimes still warm.
We had passed survivors before, too. Crawling. Bleeding. Crying.
Cassian had never once asked us to look twice.
He believed in inevitability. If you were meant to live, you would. If not, he wouldn't interfere. Mercy, to him, wasn't an emotion—it was a structural flaw.
Yet tonight, the car slowed.
I felt it in my chest before I understood it fully—that subtle shift in the air when something happens that should not.
"Boss?" I said, keeping my voice neutral, though my hand had already moved instinctively toward my weapon.
Cassian didn't answer immediately.
His gaze was fixed ahead, posture unchanged, but something in the way his jaw set told me this wasn't hesitation. It was assessment.
"Pull over," he said finally.
The words landed heavy.
For a moment, none of us moved.
The driver's hands tightened on the wheel. I saw it in the reflection—knuckles paling, breath catching. He looked at me in the mirror, waiting for confirmation I didn't have.
"You sure?" I asked.
Cassian didn't turn his head. "Yes."
In all the years I'd worked for him—years soaked in blood, leverage, and silent wars fought across continents—this was a first.
Cassian Calder did not involve himself in chaos he had not authored.
He was not reactive. He was not sentimental. He didn't chase disasters like some men chased adrenaline. If something burned, it was because he had lit the match. If something collapsed, it was because he had weakened the structure first.
He was a planner. An architect.
A man who built catastrophes carefully, then stepped back and watched them unfold.
We made chaos disappear.
We didn't collect it.
Didn't rescue it.
Didn't slow down for it on the side of the road.
We cleaned messes. We erased problems. We buried mistakes—ours and other people's—until no one remembered they had existed at all.
That was our function.
That was my function.
Which meant this—
This deviation—
Set off every internal alarm I had.
I watched him out of the corner of my eye, looking for signs of doubt, impulse, or distraction.
There were none.
The car slowed.
Gravel crunched beneath the tires as we drifted toward the shoulder. The ocean roared somewhere below us, distant but constant, like it was reminding us that nothing here stayed forever.
When the car came to a stop, the silence inside it felt louder than any gunshot.
I stepped out first, scanning the road, the treeline, the cliff edge, the darkness beyond. Training dictated every movement—angles, shadows, possible threats.
Only when I was certain we weren't walking into an ambush did I allow myself to look at what had caught his attention.
A body lay near the edge of the road.
Female. Young.
Blood everywhere.
She shouldn't have been alive.
I turned back toward Cassian, already prepared to advise we move on. This coast was crawling with opportunists, and stopping like this—unplanned, undocumented—was how men with power made mistakes.
But Cassian was already out of the car.
I had followed Cassian Calder since before most conglomerates learned his name. I had watched him dismantle competitors without raising his voice, ruin governments by redirecting supply chains, and bring billion-dollar empires to their knees with a single decision made behind closed doors.
The Sovereign Consortium did not dominate through noise.
It dominated through inevitability.
Our operations ran across continents—shipping, defense tech, infrastructure, intelligence-adjacent assets woven so deeply into global systems that removing us would cripple entire regions.
Other conglomerates feared him openly. His own family feared him quietly, stepping carefully around his silences, never mistaking blood ties for immunity.
Cassian Calder did not act on impulse.
Which meant this wasn't impulse.
He approached the body slowly, as though the night itself had shifted priority around him. I watched from a few steps back as he crouched, the ocean roaring faintly in the distance.
Then I saw it.
Her eyes opened.
Even from where I stood, I felt it—an instinctive, unsettling awareness that made the hairs on my arms rise. Ash gray. Narrowed slightly at the corners. Not glazed. Not unfocused.
Aware.
I had seen men stare death in the face with defiance. I had seen fear, rage, bargaining.
I had never seen awareness like that.
Cassian stopped moving.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke.
He stood a few steps ahead of me, his coat shifting faintly in the wind, his silhouette outlined by the hard white spill of the headlights.
The night seemed to hold its breath.
Even the forest felt suspended, branches unmoving, the usual rustle absent. The only sound was the distant crash of waves and the faint rhythm of her breathing.
"Get her," he said.
I didn't question it.
Not because it made sense—but because nothing Cassian Calder did ever needed justification in the moment. Still, as I moved forward, lifting her carefully into my arms, the weight of what we were doing settled uncomfortably in my chest.
She grunted softly as I shifted her, a sound so faint it barely registered as pain—but it was enough to confirm she was alive.
Barely.
Her body was light. Too light.
Blood soaked through my clothes as I carried her to the car, every step deliberate, controlled.
I laid her carefully across the back seat, angling her body, sliding a folded jacket beneath her head, shifting her just enough to keep pressure off what I suspected were the worst of her injuries. Her breathing stuttered, a soft, uneven sound that made something tighten low in my chest.
Cassian watched without comment.
Once I was back in the front seat, the door sealing shut with a muted thud, he spoke again without looking at me, his attention already shifting toward what came next as though the interruption on the roadside had simply been another variable entering a preexisting plan.
"Contact the aircraft," he said. "Have it ready when we arrive."
I was already dialing.
"And alert the medic," he added. "Tell them to prepare immediately."
That, more than anything, told me this wasn't temporary.
We always traveled with medical personnel—discreet, elite, accustomed to patching up damage that could never reach official records. But Cassian didn't deploy them without reason.
I relayed the instructions concisely, providing coordinates and estimated arrival time, keeping my voice level despite the implications unfolding in my head.
"Drive," I told the driver.
The driver responded immediately, pressing the accelerator with controlled force as the car surged back onto the road, headlights cutting through the darkness while the cliff and forest fell away behind us.
From the front seat, I glanced into the rearview mirror more than once—not at the girl, but at Cassian.
He sat angled slightly toward the window, posture relaxed but exact, one arm resting along the door, the other loosely draped across his lap. The dim interior lighting traced the sharp lines of his profile without softening them.
There was no visible tension in his jaw, no tightening of his shoulders, no restless movement of his hands. He looked as he always did in moments that would have unsettled most men—composed, analytical, untouched by haste.
I had seen that same stillness in boardrooms when acquisitions were decided in a single sentence, when entire companies realigned because he had chosen to move a piece no one else had noticed. It was not indifference. It was control refined through habit and consequence.
The road stretched ahead of us in a narrow ribbon of asphalt, the headlights cutting clean paths through the dark. On one side, the cliff dropped away into a depth that swallowed light and sound alike, its presence felt more than seen. On the other, the forest pressed close, dense and unyielding, branches crowding the edge of the pavement as though reclaiming what little space the road had carved out.
Somewhere below, the ocean roared against the rocks, unseen yet constant, its weight vibrating faintly through the frame of the car.
Cassian didn't look back again.
But I knew—whatever we had picked up on that road, whatever bloodied anomaly now lay unconscious in the back of his car—
This night had just rewritten priorities.
And Cassian Calder did not make exceptions lightly.