Bryce.
He’s in a storage room—bare walls streaked with rust, a single bulb swaying overhead. The harsh light casts sharp shadows across his face, carving the fury deeper into every line. He paces back and forth, hands cutting through the air, the camera shaking like he can’t stay still.
Then the frame shifts, just enough to show what’s behind him.
Dahlia.
She’s slumped in a metal chair, her wrists tied to the arms, her face bloodied and bruised. Her hair is matted, one eye swollennearly shut. The sound that escapes me is more breath than voice, a small, raw noise that disappears into the cavernous quiet of the surrounding warehouse.
Bryce’s voice fills the feed, jagged and furious. “Who the fuck is this?” he yells, glaring straight into the camera. “You think you can screw with me? You think I don’t know what’s going on?” His words are ragged, the edges of panic showing beneath the rage. He grabs the gun sitting on the table beside him and waves it toward Dahlia, the metal glinting as the camera adjusts. “You better come clean,” he snarls. “Now. Or she dies.”
Dahlia stirs, her head lolling to the side as she tries to lift it. When she speaks, her voice is weak but still defiant. “Don’t—don’t tell him anything,” she slurs. “He doesn’t know. I didn’t—”
Her sentence ends with a sharp crack. The gun whips across her face, sending her head snapping sideways. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out. The sound echoes through the phone, metallic and final.
Bryce grabs her by the hair, jerking her upright, his face close to hers, his eyes wild and glassy. “Who bugged my phone?” he screams. “Tell me who’s been in my system!”
He never points the finger at the guys—not once. That’s when it settles in. He doesn’t know. He’s spiraling, sensing the walls closing but still blind to who’s responsible.
The realization steadies my grip, sharpens my focus.
I glance at the secondary tracker running in the corner of my screen. The signal from his phone pings steady—same location, right near the water behind the warehouse.
He’s here.
The decision comes as instinct. My thumb moves before I can think better of it, cutting the call mid-scream. Bryce’s red, furious face freezes for a fraction of a second before disappearing into black. I’m left staring at my faint reflection on the dark screen, my pulse so loud it drowns out the distant hum of machinery.
I take one slow, deliberate breath and slide the phone back into my pocket. Every sense sharpens. The air smells of oil and cold metal. The warehouse hums faintly in the distance, pretending it’s asleep. I crouch lower, adjusting the straps on my pack.
I hug the shadows and move like I’m part of the darkness, every step planned so the concrete won’t complain. The comm tucked in my ear is my lifeline and my line to the guys, but right now it’s static. I get a word or two—Ronan’s breathy curse, Rowan’s clipped “Berk—”—and then nothing but that awful, hollow hiss. I whisper into the dead channel anyway, because maybe whatever’s left of our connection will catch it. “Bryce is here. Dahlia’s with him. He’s armed. There’s a device already on the second beam. I’m setting one more charge, then I’m moving to his location.” My voice is a blade in the quiet.
My hands are steady when I pull the last charge from my pack. For a second I hesitate, because the wiring will work better if this is the last piece, because if I don’t put it where it needs to be, we lose whatever leverage we have. Dahlia’s life hangs in the balance, and logic and fury war inside me, but the plan needs to be finished. I press the pad to the beam, tuck the timer away where it won’t snag, and whisper the confirmation into the comm. “Last one’s down.”
The tracker shows Bryce’s phone pinging faintly near the water, behind the warehouse. To get there, I have to cut across a narrow service path and creep into a rundown shed that smells of diesel and mold. I move like a ghost, slow and silent, hugging crates and keeping the light off my face. The surrounding warehouse pretends it’s business as usual; that pretense makes my stomach twist.
My comm explodes to life before I’m halfway to the shed door—three voices overlapping, raw with panic. “Berk, where are you?” Ronan’s bark snaps through first. “Status now.” Rowan’s voice is thin with control, but there’s an edge to it. Emerson’s calm is gone, replaced by the precise kind of worry that makes my throat close.
I answer in quick, clipped breaths, letting them know exactly where I am. “I’m at the back of the warehouse; his phone’s pinging near the water. I’m heading toward the small shed back there. The last charge is set. He has Dahlia. I’m going in.” My words fall short of the picture in my head. I don’t add the worst parts—Dahlia’s face, the gun pressed to her temple. I don’t need to.
No sooner do I say it than Ronan’s voice becomes a snarling, savage thing. “Do not move. Wait for us. I swear to God, Berk, wait.” The growl in his tone is a living thing, part command, part plea.
I can hear the pleading in Rowan and the logic in Emerson as they echo the order, but my fingers go numb and something hardens behind my eyes. “If I wait,” I tell them without hesitation, “Dahlia dies. I can get in and out. I can—”
“Then you die,” Rowan snaps, the word small and hot. “We don’t lose you.”
“It’s not your call,” Ronan hisses, the danger in his voice close enough to sting. “You may have started this, Berk, but you don’t get to walk into the teeth of it.”
I’m not surprised when the arguments start—the love of them has a hundred ways to look—but it makes me reckless all the same. “I’vebeenin the teeth of it.” I growl back. “We can’t wait,” I say. “I’m not asking.”
There’s a beat of silence, the kind that makes the hair on my arms rise. Then a sound behind me, too familiar and too solid. The press of weight and the clamp of a muscular arm around my waist. Ronan. He grabbed me from the dark and pulled me back so hard my knees almost give out. His breath is hot at my ear, his voice a low, furious rasp. “I told you I couldn’t survive losing you again,” he growls. “That means no more solo heroics. Not without us.”
I try to twist free, to argue, to make him see reason through the haze of adrenaline, but his grip doesn’t loosen. It isn’t rough so much as unquestioning—an instinctive insistence that what he loves stays close, seen, accounted for. My protest dies in my throat when I hear footsteps—Rowan and Emerson slamming down on pavement, pretending silence is no longer an option. They appear in my periphery like phantoms, closing in until we’re a small, impossible circle. Ronan holding me, Rowan’s face tight, Emerson’s shoulders squared.
They don’t need to shout. Their presence conveys their frustrations can’t without speaking. Rowan’s jaw works. Emerson’seyes are furious and careful all at once. Ronan’s head tilts so his lips hover above my ear. “If it were us,” he says, voice nearly a whisper, “and we went ahead without you, how would you feel?” The question lands like iron.
It stops me. For the first time since the call, the logic and the love and the fear all meet in the center and push back. Dahlia’s life is a blade at my throat, but these three men—my soulmates—are the only ones who can carry me home if it all spins out. I feel the truth of it in the press of Ronan’s arm and the stubborn set of Emerson and Rowan’s shoulders.
My voice is small when I answer. “I—” I draw a slow breath, tasting rust and diesel and the cold salt air. “Okay. You go first.”