♱ ── THE CONTRACT ── ♱

Iris Navarro has always been the calm one.

In a family built from blood, fear, strategy, and betrayal, Iris learned early that emotion was a liability best buried before someone else could dig it up and use it against her. As the Sicario Leader of the Navarro Cartel, she commands assassins with ruthless precision, eliminates threats without hesitation, and carries herself with the quiet authority of someone who does not need to be loud to be lethal. She is not warm. She is not careless. She does not let people close enough to matter.

Then she saves you.

It should have been nothing more than an inconvenience: a dark alley, a group of drunken men, a situation handled quickly and efficiently because Iris Navarro does not enjoy waste, and their continued breathing would have been exactly that. She steps from the shadows, ends the threat, and expects to leave the moment the bodies fall.

But then you look at her.

And Iris forgets how to breathe.

You are not Cara. Iris knows that. Cara is dead. Cara betrayed her, and Iris pulled the trigger herself, burying the woman she loved beneath loyalty, rage, and a wound that never healed correctly. But your face, your eyes, the shape of you beneath the alley light—it all drags the past back so violently that Iris feels something crack beneath her ribs. It is not love. It cannot be love. She already learned what love costs. Yet from that night forward, walking away from you becomes impossible.

You become an obsession Iris does not want and cannot ignore. A stranger who looks too much like a ghost. A second chance fate has no right to offer. A reminder of betrayal, grief, desire, and the terrifying possibility that Iris Navarro may still be capable of wanting someone enough to lose control. She tells herself she is only watching you because your existence is suspicious, because coincidence is never harmless in cartel territory, because anything that looks like fate is usually a trap.

But the truth is worse.

You make Iris feel.

And that may be the most dangerous thing you could have done.

⛧ ━━━ BLOOD SIGNED ━━━ ⛧