Chapter Twenty-One #3
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’ve been in 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’s eyes 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.”
Ronan’s grip eases, not because he trusts me but because he knows I listened.
He gives a short, curt nod, then steps back and goes still, the animal in him coiled but obedient.
Rowan pulls his handgun closer, Emerson checks the timers on his device one last time, and then they move out, shadows sliding toward the dock like predators.
I give them space and trail at a distance, keeping my movements slow so their backs are always in my sight. The nearer we get to the dockside shed, the thinner the foot traffic becomes until the only sound is the wind dragging across corrugated metal and the distant thud of crates settling.
We line up outside the door, and for a second everything goes still.
Then a voice cuts through the metal—Bryce, screaming, completely unhinged, like the world has slid out from under him.
The sound makes my teeth ache. I crouch, palms on my knees, mapping exits, watching shadows.
I force myself to breathe, to keep the timing tight—but there’s a hard, burning pressure under my ribs that wants to charge in and rip him apart with my bare hands.
Emerson doesn’t hesitate. He kicks the door in, and it crashes back with a sound like a gunshot, then Ronan and Rowan flow after him without a second thought.
I stay where I am, pinned to the darkness, listening as their boots hit the concrete and their voices collide with Bryce’s.
He shouts names into the empty space, hurling threats at no one in particular, a frantic spiral of accusation and rage.
I can’t see inside. The feed on my phone is a useless smear of light and dark, but I strain to make out voices through the static.
There’s a sharp sound—wood or metal striking—and then men talking, a low, dangerous banter of predator and prey.
Bryce’s voice slices through it, brutally and raw.
“You think you can do this to me? Who the hell—” He stops like he’s noticed something, like a thought has found its way into the wrong room.
Then Emerson’s voice, steady and cold, asks the only thing that matters. He doesn’t bother with names. He doesn’t need to. “Is she alive?”
There’s a harsh laugh from Bryce, and it sounds like bile.
“You think I’d let her live after bugging me?
” he spits. “You don’t know what we’ve lost—what we could’ve built if you hadn’t interfered!
” His voice cracks halfway through the sentence, the fury slipping into something raw and uncertain.
He tries to recover, talking faster, grasping at whatever control he thinks he still has.
He rants about their partners pulling out, the money being frozen, the warehouses blowing up.
Each word chips away at his confidence until he doesn’t sound powerful anymore; he just sounds desperate.
The anger in me stops building and becomes action.
I am done with hiding. I am done with letting them think they’ve won.
If he thinks he can yell like that and hide behind other men, he’s wrong.
I stand, letting the shadow throw itself off my face, and step toward the doorway like a person stepping onto a stage.
The sudden scrape of the broken door under my foot feels loud and perfect.
When I step into the light, the room shifts.
I catch them all by surprise—Bryce stands in his expensive but rumpled suit; the fabric wrinkled and his tie hanging loose, like the polish he once wore has finally cracked.
The surrounding walls are grimy and stained, years of neglect seeping through the metal and concrete.
Dahlia is slumped in a metal chair nearby, her head bowed, dark streaks of blood on her temple and clothes.
The sight gut punches me, but it steels the rest. I lift my chin and let my breath out slowly as they see me.
Bryce’s mouth drops open. For a heartbeat, he looks less like a monster and more like a man who followed the wrong map. He blinks, trying to make the numbers align. Then an absurd, terrible smile creeps across his mouth.
“Well, well, well,” he drawls, the words as slick as the oil on this dock. “Back from the dead.”
It’s exactly the reaction I wanted. It fits.
All the missing pieces snap together for him in the wrong order, and suddenly that confusion is my advantage.
I don’t answer in words. I let the silence speak, let my eyes tell him what comes next.
He doesn’t know half of what I can do. He doesn’t know that bringing someone like Dahlia into his chaos was a mistake that will echo.