A metal stairwell descends into amber light. The blood trail goes down.
We follow it.
The stairwell dumps us into a wider corridor with velvet-lined walls. Underground rehearsal level. I've been here once, years ago, when Nash dragged us to some opera fundraiser and Rex refused to get out of the car.
Two more guards on the floor.
One of them is out cold. The other is sitting against the wall, cradling his hand, his index finger pointing sideways at a ninety-degree angle. He sees us coming and scrabbles backward with a yelp, broken finger pointing everywhere.
"Where's my mate?" Raf snarls. "White hair. Combat boots. Can't miss her."
The guard's eyes go wide. "I don't—I wasn't—the other one, the one with theface?—"
"Wrong question," I say, stepping past Raf.
I crouch and get eye level with the guard. My voice is calm because someone has to be calm and Raf is vibrating at a frequency that suggests the next person who gives him a bad answer is going to lose teeth.
"Our singer is somewhere in this building. Our singer. Someone took… him. You're going to tell me where sh—he—is, and you're going to tell me right fucking now, or my bassist here is going to do to your other hand what was done to that one."
Raf cracks his knuckles behind me.
Not for show. He's actually cracking his knuckles because his hands are clenched so tight they need the release.
But the timing works.
The guard's face goes gray. "Down… down the corridor. Double doors. There's a rehearsal theater. Hughes—he had a cage set up on the stage. I swear I didn't know what it was for?—"
Hughes?
StephenfuckingHughes?
I'm already running.
Raf overtakes me. I'm taller but he's faster in a sprint, and he tears down the corridor like a guided missile.
Three guards between us and the double doors.
The first one steps out of a side room, sidearm half-drawn, and Raf hits him without breaking stride. It’s a shoulder check that launches the guy into the wall so hard plaster cracks. The sidearm skitters across the concrete. Raf doesn't even look at it.
The second one is smarter.
He's got his weapon up and aimed, stance planted, and he fires.
The round punches through the space where Raf's head was a millisecond ago because Raf dropped into a slide—a fucking baseball slide on concrete, his bass-calloused hands scraping the stone to slow him down—and came up inside the guard's range. Raf's fist catches the man's wrist from below, torquing the gun skyward. The second shot goes into the ceiling. Plaster rains down.
My turn.
The third guard comes at me from behind a support column, swinging a baton in a wide arc aimed at my skull.
I catch it.
My palm closes around the shaft six inches from my temple and the impact travels through my arm and into my shoulder and I feel it, but I don't let go. His eyes go wide because catching a baton mid-swing isn't something most people do.
Most people aren't fucking alphas who have spent a decade channeling every ounce of grief and rage into beating drums until their hands are weapons.
I wrench the baton out of his grip and drive the butt end into his solar plexus. He folds. I shove him into the wall, pin him with my forearm across his throat, and lean my full weight in.
"Where is she?" I snarl.