What Lies Between Us (Dark Refuge #3)

Chapter 1

Gaby’s hands shook as she pushed the doors to the conference room open.

She’d faced armed traffickers, gone undercover in a den of predators, stared down men who would have sold her without blinking.

But nothing tightened her chest like the uncertainty of what Callan had uncovered in the encrypted files.

Worst case, she learned her sister was dead. There was no softening that kind of truth.

Almost as bad, the files might contain nothing at all. No names, no locations, no trail. She’d be right back where she started, hunting for a nineteen-year-old girl who’d vanished two months ago without a single solid lead.

She knew what it felt like to hit a wall.

She’d been a detective once, two hard-earned years on the force before she walked away from the career she’d planned her whole life.

Not because she wanted to quit. Because the higher-ups had kicked Natalie’s case to an already buried FBI field office.

That was the moment Gaby understood, with harsh clarity, that if her sister was going to be found, she would have to be the one to do it.

Then Nick Devlin had made her an offer she never saw coming.

He hadn’t sugar-coated it. He needed a female investigator, and he wanted to keep an eye on her. Maybe both were true. Either way, she’d taken the job without blinking.

The paycheck mattered. Hunting a ghost didn’t come cheap. But the access mattered more. Devlin didn’t hire paper-pushers. He hired big, unflinching, been-there-done-that investigators. Former FBI. Ex-CIA. Men who’d spent decades learning how monsters thought, moved, hid.

She wasn’t big. She wasn’t fearless. And she for sure wasn’t tough in the way they were. But she was relentless. For the first time since Natalie vanished, her tentative hope had turned into something real.

She clung to that as she stepped into the glass-and-steel war room. The doors whispered shut behind her. The meeting was set for ten, but the room was empty except for Dev’s IT savant, Callan Ritchie.

He sat at the far end of the long table, fingers flying over his laptop, multiple screens glowing around him like a cockpit. Code streamed down one monitor. Grids of linked locations filled another. He didn’t look up when she entered.

“You’re early,” he said. “Dev and Rhys will be here at ten on the dot, not sooner.”

Gaby checked her watch. 9:52.

“It figures,” she muttered. She set her legal pad down. “I’ll grab some caffeine.”

“You’ll need it,” Callan murmured. “This stuff is a lot.”

She didn’t ask what that meant. Not yet.

“You’ll also need to make a fresh pot. That one’s been here since I got in.”

She kept her second “it figures” to herself.

At the coffee station, she added a splash of hazelnut creamer. The rich, nutty aroma curled upward, the same subtle notes she’d caught on Rhys’s skin that night under the falls. Her breath hitched as the memory surfaced—warm, vivid, impossible to fully shut out.

She forced herself to look away, pressing her palm to the glass as she stared down at the city. Traffic crawled. Pedestrians hurried. The world kept moving, unaware that hers had stalled in one suspended moment.

Her sister’s face rose in her mind. Soon, Natalie, when I tell you what I had to do to find you. Going undercover in a BDSM club, letting a man who keeps me off-balance strip away my armor. You’re going to lose your mind.

And still, the memory of their one scene rose again.

Moonlight splintering through the mist of the waterfall, the spray cool against her overheated skin, his big body firm against hers.

He surrounded her with heat and the kind of restrained power that made her ache in places she hadn’t known existed.

“Look at me, Gabriella.”

God. Even in memory, her name in his soft British accent slid over her like a caress.

She remembered his thumb beneath her chin, the gentle pressure tipping it upward.

The way his eyes searched hers, as a dom demanding obedience, but also as a man reaching for the same brief escape she was sent sensation rushing through her.

The tension between them crackled then flared so suddenly it left her dizzy.

A thick rope-and-wood swing hung from a heavy tree branch arching over the pool and cascading falls. He lifted her and set her on the seat. Something slick glided inside her with startling fullness.

They called the backyard the playground, but there was nothing innocent about it.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

“Indeed, it is,” he replied, amusement curving his mouth. “I want to make sure you enjoy your ride.”

He tied her wrists above her head with quick, confident movements. She was at least ten years his junior, a novice in his world, no matter how hard she’d tried not to look like one. Even after weeks at the Pointe, she still gasped and blushed—especially around him.

His gaze never left hers as his fingers traced the length of her bare body—unhurried, possessive.

The world shrank to the thud of her pulse and the tingle his touch sparked in its wake.

No matter the role she played, she had chosen him.

Night after night, she found herself drawn to him, helpless as a moth drawn to flame.

“Anything pinching or pulling?” he asked, checking in. One of the more experienced subs had told her that was how you knew a good dom. If they don’t, she’d warned, steer clear.

“No, sir,” Gaby whispered. “Just… full.”

“As intended,” he murmured. “You’ll feel it even more when your body moves with the motion of the swing.” His fingertip traced a slow line across her collarbone then drifted lower, circling a taut, aching nipple. “You’re trembling, lovely. Are you nervous—or is that a chill from the mist?”

“Neither, sir,” she breathed. “It’s from anticipation.”

A low, amused hum rumbled from him. “You’re a delight. Where have you been hiding?”

“I’ve been here for weeks. In plain sight.”

His attention lingered on her face before sliding down her body once more, slow and assessing. “Plain? You?” That same dark amusement returned. “Never.”

When he leaned in, his mouth hovering just shy of hers, and ordered, “Spread your legs for me,” a rush of liquid heat gathered between her thighs.

He would know exactly how aroused she was the instant he touched her.

Still, she obeyed without hesitation, the shaft sliding deeper as she parted her thighs as far as the ropes would allow.

A loud hiss snapped her back to the present as the coffee machine sputtered out its last breath.

Her hands trembled as she poured a cup. Guilt followed the violent surge of desire that had swept through her. She should have been thinking about Natalie, not about Rhys’s hands, his mouth, or the way he’d claimed her completely.

The conference room doors whooshed open.

“Ten o’clock straight up,” Callan said.

Gaby nearly sloshed hot coffee over her hand when she turned and saw Rhys step in behind Dev. Tall. Rangy power held in check. No jacket. Black button-up stretched across broad shoulders, sleeves rolled to his forearms. His silver-blond hair caught the light as he coolly assessed the room.

Her mouth went dry. The man was far too sexy for a business meeting.

She hurried back to the table, setting her mug down with more force than necessary. Warmth crept into her face when Rhys’s attention settled on her just a second too long.

Whether he noticed her flushed cheeks or simply sensed the charge she hadn’t shaken, she couldn’t tell. He didn’t comment. Since the day of the rescue, when he’d learned who she really was, he’d said very little to her. What they’d shared hadn’t survived the truth.

Dev took his seat at the head of the table. Rhys settled into the chair to her left. His cologne drifted toward her: subtle, woodsy, with a hint of hazelnut.

Perfect. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with.

“Cal,” Rhys said, “run down what you’ve found.”

As the screens switched to what mattered most, the heat stirred by her memories evaporated.

Callan’s monitors were now layered with spreadsheets—shipping manifests, wine inventories, transport schedules. Rows scrolled. Codes. Dates. Destinations. The amount of information was dizzying. Even Dev had gone quiet.

“Most of what Gaby pulled from the trafficker’s system was triple masked,” Callan said, without looking up. “If they’d done this five years ago, I might’ve missed it. But someone got lazy.”

Or bold, Gaby thought.

One line jumped out at her: Farfalla Rossa. Transfer Group C

“Farfalla. Isn’t that pasta?” she asked.

Dev leaned forward slightly. “Farfalle is the pasta. Farfalla in Italian means butterfly. In this case, Red Butterfly.”

Gaby surged halfway out of her chair before she realized she’d moved. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “That’s Natalie,” she whispered.

The room stilled for several tense seconds.

Rhys spoke first. “What makes you so sure?”

Her fingers gripping the edge of the table had gone numb. “As a gift to herself on her eighteenth birthday, Natalie got a red butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder.”

Silence swallowed the room again.

Not in triumph or with relief. But with dread now that they had proof, no matter how circumstantial, that her sister had been trafficked.

“Can you tell who bought her and where she went?” Gaby asked Callan.

“I’ll need more information about Natalie. Let me bring up the standard asset specifications.”

He made it sound like a product specification in an online store, and she barely kept from flinching.

That was how she had felt standing under hot lights, dragged onto a stage, reduced to measurements and checkboxes.

Hair. Eyes. Age. Weight. Skin. The camera had zoomed in, clinical and merciless, cataloging her body for faceless men who callously appraised her.

They didn’t see a person. Just goods. Inventory.

A commodity measured by how closely it matched a buyer’s appetite.

Natalie would have felt that too. Worse.