Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
DOMHNALL
The warehouse stinks of rust, stale water, and something else—something metallic that makes my stomach clench. Blood. Not much, but enough to set every nerve on fire as I sweep my flashlight across the concrete floor, searching for any trace of her.
“Sir, over here,” one of Isaak’s men calls from the far corner. Carlos, I think his name is. He’s ex-military, with the kind of steady professionalism that doesn’t flinch at blood or chaos. “Fresh zip ties.”
I stride over, crouching beside the scattered plastic fragments.
My chest tightens as I imagine Mads bound here, helpless, while some bastard held her captive.
The rage that’s been building since Moira told me what happened threatens to explode, but I force it down.
Focus. Find her first. Kill everything else after.
“This has to have been where Moira and Anna were being kept,” Isaak notes, his own flashlight illuminating more cut ties a few feet away.
“Timeline?” I ask, though part of me doesn’t want to know. Every hour that passes makes this worse.
“Hard to say. Could be yesterday, could be this morning.” Marcus straightens, scanning the room with the methodical precision of someone who’s done this before. “Whoever was here cleared out fast, but they weren’t sloppy about it.”
Professional. Which means this isn’t some random kidnapping gone wrong. This is organized, planned, and deliberate. And that makes it a thousand times more dangerous.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, the sound sharp and jarring in the empty space. Unknown number. My heart lurches. I swipe to accept.
The screen flickers to life, and my world tilts sideways.
A video call. It’s her face—unmistakably hers—but something’s wrong. So fucking wrong.
Blood. There’s blood everywhere. It’s streaked across her cheek like war paint, dried under her fingernails, and splattered across her clothes. Her hair is matted with it, dark strands sticking to her forehead.
But it’s her eyes that stop my heart. They’re empty. Not vacant—empty. Like looking into a house where all the lights have been turned off and no one’s home.
“Mads!” The name tears from my throat, raw and desperate. “Anna!”
She tilts her head at me, and a smile spreads across her blood-stained face. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen—too wide, too knowing, like she’s in on a joke I’ll never understand.
“Hello, Domhnall,” she says, and even her voice is wrong. The cadence is off, the tone too measured, too clinical. Like she’s reading from a script written in a language she doesn’t quite speak.
I force myself to breathe, to think, to function despite the ice flooding my veins. “Who am I talking to?”
The smile widens impossibly further. “Red.” The name rolls off her tongue like she’s tasting it, savoring it.
My hands tighten around the phone until my knuckles go white. This is the alter Mads mentioned. The one who... killed someone. The one Anna was terrified of.
And she’s covered in fresh blood.
“We said not on video!” she snaps suddenly, her head jerking to the left like someone just shouted at her. Her expression shifts, features hardening with annoyance. “Well, I don’t care what you said. I wanted to see his face.”
She turns back to the camera, and that unsettling smile returns as her gaze locks onto mine through the screen.
“Pretty,” she murmurs, reaching out with one blood-stained finger toward the camera.
The digit hovers inches from the lens, leaving a crimson smudge on the screen when she finally makes contact.
I swallow hard, fighting the urge to be sick. “Can I talk to Mads? Or Anna?” My voice sounds foreign to my own ears, strained and hollow.
Her head twitches to the side again, like she’s listening to voices I can’t hear. The movement is sharp, bird-like. Predatory. “They’re here,” she says conversationally, as if we’re discussing the weather.
Relief floods through me so fast it’s dizzying. “Good. That’s good. Can I talk to them?”
Red laughs, and the sound raises every hair on the back of my neck. It’s not Mads’s laugh, sharp and challenging, or Anna’s, warm and musical. This laugh is knives and broken glass.
“They can’t come to the phone right now,” she says, tilting her head the other way. “They’re busy.”
“Busy with what?” I demand, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
“Hiding.” The word is matter-of-fact, like she’s commenting on the color of the sky.
“They don’t like what I do. It makes them queasy.
” She examines her blood-stained fingernails with academic interest. “Funny how the mind works, isn’t it?
They can watch movies about murder, read books about serial killers, but when I actually clean up our messes.
..” She shrugs. “Suddenly they’re delicate flowers. ”
My stomach lurches. “What messes? What did you do?”
But she’s already moved on, her attention drifting like smoke. “Now they’re arguing about you,” she says, pressing her ear toward her shoulder as if listening more closely. “Anna wants to come home. Mads says it’s too dangerous. They’re quite passionate about it, actually.”
“Tell them I’m coming to get them,” I say urgently, leaning closer to the screen. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll—”
“No.” The word cuts through the air like a scalpel, sharp and final. Red’s empty eyes focus on me with laser intensity. “That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Too many people knowing where we are, what we’re doing. Too many loose ends.”
She reaches up and touches the blood on her cheek. “I don’t leave loose ends.”
The implication hits me like a physical blow. “How many?” I whisper.
“How many what?” she asks innocently, though that predatory smile never wavers.
“How many people did you kill?”
She considers this for a moment, head tilting as she counts silently. “Today? Or in general?”
My vision blurs at the edges. “Today?”
“Just the three,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “Though I suppose you could count the one from this morning as yesterday, technically. Time zones are tricky.”
Four people. In less than twenty-four hours.
“They were following us,” she continues conversationally. “Pavel’s cleanup crew. Very thorough, very professional. It’s actually quite flattering that he sent his A-team after little old us. But as of now, Pavel is permanently shut down.”
“Pavel?” The name is familiar, tickling the back of my memory.
“Oh yes, we go way back. He used to work for Daddy Dearest.” Her expression shifts, something darker and more personal flickering behind those empty eyes. “He never did learn proper manners.”
My mind races, trying to process what she’s telling me. Pavel. The Librarian’s organization. The world Mads came from, the one I’ve been willfully blind to because it was easier than facing the past.
My hand holding the phone shakes, and I fight to steady it even as my stomach churns.
“Tell me where you are,” I say again, more urgently this time. “We’ll run. We’ll hide together. I have resources—”
“Oh, Donny,” she interrupts, and for just a moment, I hear something familiar in her voice. Not Mads, not Anna, but something that echoes them both. “You sweet, naive man. You still don’t understand, do you?”
She leans closer to the camera, close enough that I can see the flecks of blood in her eyelashes and the way it’s dried in the hollow of her throat.
“We can’t run from this. We can’t hide. Because it’s not about location—it’s about information. About what’s locked up in here.” She taps her temple with one blood-stained finger. “What Daddy taught us. What we know. What we’ve seen. There will always be someone else coming for us.”
Her head jerks again, and she frowns. “Anna’s crying,” she reports clinically. “She wants to go home. She wants her fairytale back.” The frown deepens. “Mads is telling her to shut up and be practical. They really should learn to get along better.”
“Let me talk to them,” I plead. “Please. Just for a minute.”
Red considers this, head tilting as she listens to her internal conversation. “They say no. They say seeing you will make them weak. Make them want things they can’t have.”
“They can have whatever they want,” I say desperately. “I’ll give them anything—”
“What they want is for you to be safe,” Red interrupts. “What they want is for this nightmare to end without you getting hurt. What they want...” She pauses, and for the first time, something almost human flickers across her features. “What they want is impossible.”
I lean forward, gripping the phone so tightly I’m amazed it doesn’t crack. “Nothing’s impossible. We can figure this out together. The three of us—the, uh, four of us, I mean. Whatever this is, we can handle it.”
Red laughs again, that horrible broken-glass sound. “Oh, sweet Donny. There is no ‘us’ anymore. There’s just me now. They’ve gone very quiet.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. “No. No, they wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t they?” Red’s head tilts, studying me like I’m a specimen under a microscope. “Anna tried to erase Mads completely. Mads was ready to sacrifice everything for you. They’re both so tired, Donny. So very, very tired.”
She reaches toward the camera again, and I find myself leaning back instinctively. “But I’m not tired. I’m energized. Focused. I know exactly what needs to be done.”
“And what needs to be done?” I ask, though I’m terrified of the answer.
“The board needs to be cleared,” she says simply. “All the pieces that threaten our king need to be removed.”
“What board? What pieces?”
Her smile turns predatory. “You’re so cute when you’re confused. Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Donny. Just know that when I’m done, you’ll be safe. All of you will be safe.”
“That’s not your choice to make!” I snap, anger finally breaking through the fear. “It’s their life—Anna’s life, Mads’s life. They get to decide—”