The air inside feels thick, heavy with the scent of dust and something metallic. Berk finally drops into a chair in front of the monitors, the blue light from the screens washing over her face. She stares at the data, scrolling through logs and feeds, her fingers moving without pause. She’s already hunting for a trace, some sign of where they took Kimber.
When Ronan comes back with food—eggs, toast, something that actually smells decent—she barely glances up. He sets the plate beside her anyway. For a second, I think she won’t touch it. Then she picks up a fork, moves the food around, taking a small bite. It’s not hunger driving her. It’s routine. Fuel to keep going.
I drop into the chair across from her, elbows braced on my knees, not saying anything. I don’t have to. The silence between us says enough. We’re both thinking along the same lines. Kimber’s out there, scared, hurt, maybe worse.
Rowan joins us, his expression hard. “We’ll find her,” he says, like a vow more than a statement. His voice is low but sure, and I can feel the weight of it settle in my chest.
Berk doesn’t respond right away. Her eyes stay glued to the monitors, the data still flashing. Finally, she says, almost under her breath, “We have to.”
It’s not just determination—it’s desperation.
I study her for a moment, and the truth hits me like a punch—quiet, brutal, and without warning. Kimber’s face from that call keeps replaying on a loop, her tiny body swallowed by the cheap chair, her eyes wild and searching like she’s trying to find one of us through the screen. The image is a physical thing in my chest.
I try to breathe through it. I count inhale-two-three, exhale-two-three, like some old training that should still work. It doesn’t. The anger is a live wire under my skin, the fear another weight pressing down on my ribs. Bryce’s smugness, Dean’s casual cruelty—those voices crawl into my head and won’t leave. I see Reign’s bruised hands in the light of memory, my mother’s hollowed-out face, the way Berk disappeared for years after. All of it folds over Kimber now, and I choke on the thought that I failed the one person I swore I’d keep safe. I should have been there. I should have been the one on that screen.
Ronan’s footsteps cross the floor, and he drops a hand on the back of my chair. “Em?” he asks quietly, the single syllable loaded with more than concern. I look up, and for a second the room is a blur of faces and screens and the small, stubborn thing inside me that refuses to break. I don’t answer because words would splinter everything. Instead, I stand, pace the length of the room, and let the motion burn some of the panic out of me. My knuckles meet the edge of the table hard enough to sting, but the ache grounds me. When I sit again, it’s different—steadier, edged with a promise that burns hotter than fear.
I wipe my face, angry at the wetness and myself for letting it show. No more tears. Not now. The morning light pushes through the blinds and paints the monitors in strips of gold; the house outside is quiet, but everything has changed. Kimber is out there with men who made a career of breaking people, and I am the one who swore to stop that. I clench my jaw until my teeth ache and say it out loud. “I’ll burn the whole damn world down before I let them keep her.” Ronan’s grip on my shoulder is hard and steady. Berk doesn’t look up, but I feel the weight of her attention. Their resolve folds into mine, and for the first time since the call, the panic becomes plan.
When Berk finally looks up, it’s like the room has to catch its breath. Her eyes are red-rimmed, the skin around them raw from holding in what she can’t afford to let out. Her bottom lip trembles, and she bites it hard enough to draw blood, as if pain could shut the rest of it down. Then she does the one thing I never expected—she apologizes. The word is small, broken, and it hits me harder than anything else tonight.
“What the hell are you apologizing for?” I snap before I’ve thought it through. The anger in my voice is clumsy and immediate because I’m terrified, and anger is what I know to throw at fear. “Don’t you dare blame yourself.” My voice softensonly a fraction, but I say it again, because she needs to hear it from more than just her own head. “Berk, this is not your fault.”
That’s the line that breaks her. Her shoulders fold, the steel melting away in a flood. She crumples into sobs that rattle the quiet we force on ourselves when we sleep with one eye open. For a long minute she’s just small and raw and human—the girl we thought we’d lost and the woman who carried everything alone for so long. She keeps saying she should have known that she should have seen them coming, and every time she says it my stomach drops a little further. She’s replaying the maps, the wipes, the redundancies, the places she hid things and the routes she thought impossible to trace. The guilt curls her under like a winter storm.
I know what’s under that guilt. It’s more than strategy gone wrong. It’s the old ghosts—what they did to her and Reign, the promises that were broken when we were kids and the things we swore we’d fix when we were old enough to do it. I see it in the little flinch she makes when a memory chews its way to the surface. Her voice stammers, “I should have known. I should have seen them coming.” It’s a litany, a knife she turns on herself.
We close in on her without thinking. Ronan is the first; the way he moves is blunt and urgent, an instinct to protect that’s honed into muscle memory. He wraps her in a bearhug that’s more cage than comfort, and she collapses into him, arms finding that familiar anchor. Rowan is already there, fingers working a calming rhythm at the base of her skull. I fold in beside them, my hands on her shoulders, grounding her to us.
She resists at first, a brief flinch of pride or fear, but the longer we stand like this, the more she gives. Her apologies keep spilling out—sorry, I’m sorry, over and over—until it’s just noise in the back of the room. I tell her to stop. Rowan says it too, low and fierce, because none of us will let her carry thatalone anymore. Ronan’s voice is a steady rumble beneath all the tremors in hers. “You did everything you could,” he says, and I believe him because I know what she did to get us here. She worked like a machine, surgical and merciless on their pockets. She burned bridges the right way. This wasn’t an oversight. It was a fracture we’ll make right.
When she wobbles, exhausted raw from emotion and lack of sleep, Ronan scoops her up without asking if she wants to be moved. She folds around him like that’s exactly where she should be, knees hooked, fingers clutching his shirt. It’s a reflex, a return to some safer memory where he’s the solid thing and the world isn’t trying to tear her apart. I stand watching them, and for a second, I’m back in the house where we grew up—small hands clinging to the shirt of the man who promised he’d always be there. It hits me like a punch, and it makes the cold, dark heart in my chest tighten.
We move her to the bedroom like we’re carrying something precious and fragile. Ronan doesn’t set her down. He lies back on the mattress and tucks her against his chest, letting her curl into him like when nightmares start. I climb in on his other side, Rowan pulling the blanket over us. The room smells faintly of dust and old laundry, cheap and honest, and that ordinariness is a small mercy. We curl around her and start saying the things we know make our girl feel less alone—how much we love her, that we’re going to fix this, that Kimber will be found. The words feel both too small and the only ones that mean anything.
She protests, voice muffled against Ronan’s throat. She tries to argue that she should be the one chasing every lead, that she can’t sleep until she has every trace combed through. But exhaustion wins. Her protests slow and then stop, and the hard set around her mouth eases for the first time in days. Her breathing comes ragged at first, then settles into a rhythmbetween sob and sleep. I can hear the hitch still there when she shifts in the dark, a tiny echo of the day’s terror.
Lying there with them, my hand on her back, I feel a mix of rage and protectiveness that makes me want to tear the world apart and then stitch it back together. I whisper promises into the hush—short and sharp. We’ll find Kimber and make them pay. The words are small, but they’re vows. Around me, their breathing evens. Ronan’s chest rises and falls steadily as a drum. Rowan’s hand never stops its slow rubbing. Berk finally lets go completely and slips under—a fragile surrender that feels like both collapse and a surrender to trust.
I stare at the ceiling as exhaustion settles in—bone-deep and absolute. The anger is still close, still burning, but it’s been honed into something useful. We’ve been shattered by grief before and learned how to put ourselves back together. We’ll do it again. For Berk. Kimber. For everything they thought they took from us.
Ronan and Berk don’t look peaceful in their sleep. The sight of them drives a sharp twist through my chest. Berk is curled into him like she’s trying to disappear, her fists knotted in his shirt, face pressed against his throat. Ronan’s got her wrapped so tight it’s a wonder she can breathe. Even asleep, he’s on guard, jaw locked, hand fisted in her hair as if he’s daring the world to try to take her again. She mumbles once, a soft, broken sound that makes his arm tighten instinctively around her.
Across the bed, Rowan’s lying flat on his back, calculating stillness that means his mind hasn’t stopped moving. I can tell by the rhythm of his breathing that he’s awake. None of us can really shut off anymore. I whisper, keeping my voice low so it doesn’t break the fragile calm. “You up?” He turns his head toward me; his eyes dull in the half-light, and gives a slow nod. I hesitate, glancing back at Berk and Ronan, then gesture toward the door. “You want to check the feeds?”
He doesn’t say a word, just slides off the mattress, feet silent against the floor. We move like ghosts through the hallway, careful not to disturb the quiet. The walls hum faintly with the sound of the war room—monitors buzzing, fans whirring, a mechanical heartbeat that hasn’t stopped since we moved in.
Once we’re inside, the glow of the screens hits us—soft blue and white light that makes both of us look older than we should. Rowan sits down beside me, shoulders tense as he types, fingers flying through lines of code. I join, the two of us working in practiced silence, scanning data feeds, trackers, and every thread of a lead that might take us closer to Kimber.
It doesn’t take long to see what’s wrong. Several of our channels are dead; screens that once flickered with GPS pings are now flatlined in gray. The encrypted comms Berk built are glitching too, faint interference cutting through even our secure channels.
“They found some of our access points,” Rowan mutters under his breath, eyes narrowing. “They’ve either jammed or burned them.”
“Yeah,” I answer quietly, rubbing a hand across the back of my neck. “They’re getting smarter. Or more desperate.”
Desperate men are dangerous. I know that better than anyone. They’ve lost their businesses, their money, their power—all thanks to Berk. Every explosion, viral leak, and burned contact came from her relentless planning. She dismantled their empire piece by piece. But they’re still out there, and like rats cornered in the dark, they’ll gnaw through anything to survive.
The silence between us stretches until the hum of the servers feels deafening. The air smells faintly of metal and dust, like old machinery and tension. I glance over at Rowan, his face pale in the glow. He looks like I feel—wired, restless, haunted by things we can’t fix yet.