Chapter 7 #2
He brought his knee up hard, catching Ryker under the ribs. He wheezed, grip faltering. Breakneck seized his forearm, twisted until the tendons screamed under his fingers, and drove Ryker down onto his knees.
“You’re coming with me,” Breakneck said, breath steady, voice low. “But you don’t know when you’re beat.”
Ryker spit blood. “Go to hell.”
He elbowed Breakneck, then lunged for the gun. Break went after him as he got his hand on the grip, started to turn to fire.
Breakneck looped his arm under Ryker’s chin, bracing his wrist behind Ryker’s skull. Ryker clawed at his forearm, boots scraping the concrete.
Breakneck tightened and with one controlled twist the crack echoed through the barn. Ryker went limp.
Breakneck let the body fall, chest rising and falling in slow, controlled breaths. His ribs screamed, his jaw throbbed, his wrists burned, but his mind was steady for the first time in hours.
He backed away from the corpse. He needed to get word to the DEA. “RCMP! Freeze!”
He stopped.
Boots thundered outside. Flashlights swept through the slats in the barn walls. Two officers filled the doorway, pistols up.
Breakneck raised his hands slowly, palms out, breath fogging the cold air.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t twitch.
He just stood there in the half-light, blood drying on his skin, bruises blooming across his ribs, Ryker’s body at his feet.
“Turn around,” one of the officers shouted. “You’re under arrest.”
Blair was halfway down the corridor, a case file tucked under her arm, when the station doors slammed open and Bessel and Jaffe hauled a man between them, wrists cuffed behind his back.
She stopped dead.
The breath left her chest in a quiet, startled hitch because she had never seen anything like him.
He was bare-chested, bruised, and streaked with blood that had dried in harsh lines across his ribs, his skin a canvas of violence and survival.
Dense muscle flexed across a broad chest, powerful shoulders tapering into arms thick with strength, every line of him cut and hard and unyielding.
His torso was sculpted like someone had carved it from raw determination and field op conditioning.
Tight jeans clung low to his hips, worn cowboy boots scuffed from work, and he moved with the grounded weight of a man who knew exactly how to use every inch of his body if he needed to.
His face was a whole different kind of dangerous. Black hair shaved close at the sides, wild on top. A bruise darkening along his jaw. A split at his temple. Dried blood under one cheekbone. Rough, ravaged, devastating. The kind of face that didn’t lose beauty even when bruised and battered.
But his eyes…God.
Gray. Sharp. Predatory. Intelligent.
A storm locked behind irises that flicked over every detail of the hallway like he was mapping exits, threats, weaknesses. Then those eyes landed on her.
Heat shot straight through her body, low and fast, catching her off guard. A visceral punch she felt in the base of her spine. He just looked, steady and assessing, and something tight and electric pulled through her abdomen like a string drawn too fast.
No criminal had ever done that to her. No man, period, and she’d danced with some fine male forms.
He radiated control even in cuffs, violence contained in the set of his shoulders, lethal training in every line of his posture. A man forged in places most people wouldn’t survive a minute.
Blair had built her life on reading danger at a glance.
This man wasn’t just danger.
He was gravity.
Standing there in the middle of her own station, spine straight, pulse stuttering in a way she hated, Blair Brown felt something she hadn’t in a long time. An awareness that wasn’t fear, wasn’t adrenaline, wasn’t professional caution.
It was heat.
Low. Slow. Unwanted. Unavoidable.
She forced her lungs to work again, forced her feet to root to the floor instead of stepping back or, God help her, closer. The constables escorting him couldn’t contain him. No one here could.
He lifted his chin just a fraction.
Her pulse tripped. Once. Hard.
She swallowed.
This man was trouble.
This man was trained.
This man was beautiful in the most dangerous way imaginable, a dark, ruined Gabriel come down to earth, minus nothing but the wings.
For the first time in a long time, Blair didn’t know if she should brace herself
or just breathe him in.
Breakneck passed her with the constables flanking him, and something in the air shifted.
For a heartbeat, just one startled, impossible heartbeat, he stopped moving.
Those storm-gray eyes, colder than steel and twice as cutting, flicked down to her shirt, skimming the RCMP crest like it meant something, like he’d memorized it before he even understood why.
Blair’s breath snagged. Her whole body leaned toward him without permission, drawn by the violent pull of his presence. She was mesmerized by his face.
“Sergeant Brown…”
The way he said it, low, rough, scraped raw from pain and cold and whatever hell he’d been dragged through, curled through her in a slow spiral, whispering across every inch of her skin.
His voice was the kind that came from waking up in a combat zone, from sand in the lungs and blood in the throat.
It slid under her guard so fast she didn’t have time to brace.
Those eyes snapped back to hers.
“You’re all in danger,” he rasped, voice gravel and warning. “You need to listen to me. Now.”
The words hit her gut like a blow.
She tore her gaze away long enough to glance at Jaffe and Bessel, of course it was them, hauling him like they’d bagged themselves a trophy, but the world blurred at the edges. Nothing seemed solid next to the raw presence of the man in front of her.
The constables jerked him forward.
Blair snapped back into motion, pulse spiking.
“After you book him, put him in Interrogation Two,” she blurted, needing breathing room for a moment, but needing answers more, needing to understand what the hell this was.
The man twisted just enough to look at her again, his face drawn tight with pain and fury and something that looked a lot like desperation.
“We don’t have time for this!” he shouted, voice cracking like a whip across the hallway.
The constables yanked him onward. He kept eye contact with her until he was swallowed by the bright light of the processing bay.
Blair stood rooted to the floor, pulse thundering, breath caught between shock and heat and something dangerously close to fear.
Whatever this man was, whatever had been done to him, whatever he carried in those gray eyes, had just walked straight into her station and warned her the world was about to burn.
Blair stopped at the observation window, her gaze dropping to the pistol holstered at her hip.
She hesitated only long enough to acknowledge the thought.
It wasn’t procedure to disarm for a cuffed suspect, but something about the man in that room made her pulse thrum with a strange awareness. Not fear. Something sharper.
She rested her palm on the grip, grounding herself, then pushed the door open.
Bruises mottled his ribs. Dried blood streaked down one arm. His gray eyes lifted the moment she entered, sharp and assessing, flicking once to her firearm before meeting her gaze.
He wasn’t looking at her gun like a threat. He was looking at it like he understood its weight, its reach, the exact second he could take it from her if he wanted to.
A shimmer of heat ran up her spine.
He tracked every inch of her.
“Sergeant Brown,” he rasped, voice sandpaper and warning. “Shut the door.”
The metal door shut behind her with a solid thud as Blair stepped into Interrogation Two, tablet in hand, breath steady. She’d braced herself for a violent criminal, the kind who needed two constables to keep contained. What a flimsy word when applied to him. She had not braced herself for…him.
Dylan Cross sat with his arms still cuffed behind his back, shoulders pulled tight, body bent slightly forward from the way the chain forced his balance.
His torso was a sweep of bruised muscle, darkened ribs, and deep shadows where hands and fists had left their mark.
His skin glowed with a warm, sun-burnished tone, even under the unforgiving overhead light.
A faint sheen of dried sweat clung to him, making every contour more defined.
Her gaze rose despite herself, and she finally got a full dose of his face now that they were alone, isolated, the door shut behind her.
His punk-cut hair only added to the outlaw look, black as midnight, the unruly, straight strands catching the light like silk, wild across his forehead from whatever violence he’d crawled through.
A smear of dried blood cut across his cheekbone and more shadowed the hard line of his jaw.
He had stubble, rough, grown in under duress, giving him that dark, dangerous gunslinger look, coarse enough she imagined it scraping her palm if she touched it.
His mouth was full and carved, a perfectly disreputable line that might have been sensual if it wasn’t tight with pain.
A small split marked his bottom lip, a bead of dried blood clinging to the corner, and all she could think about, shockingly, stupidly, was the instinct to brush her mouth there, kiss the injury as if that could ease it.
He was truly, forcefully beautiful, in a way Blair found not only intimidating but criminal.
She had to tear her gaze away before her brain misfiled what she was supposed to be doing.
His skin held the heat of exertion, flushed down his throat and across the hard line of his collarbones.
Even bruised, even bleeding, he was devastating.
He looked up.