Chapter Four
The room smelled like mold, cold coffee, and resignation. Drew Hawkins came awake before his eyes even opened, that deep, instinctive awareness that something wasn’t right seeping into his bones. The kind of awareness that didn’t come from nightmares. It came from years of staying alive.
He didn’t move. Didn’t twitch. Just breathed. Slow. Even. He listened.
There were two other sets of breaths in the room.
The studio apartment he’d rented for cover didn’t exactly lend itself to stealth.
It was barely larger than a shipping container—peeling paint, a half-broken radiator, one flickering bulb, and a bathroom door that didn’t close properly.
The couch sagged. The bed creaked. He shared the place with a mouse and three cockroaches he’d named out of pity—Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Newark glamour.
He’d spent years in worse, but not by much.
Drew kept still, muscles ready but loose. The knife under his pillow was gone. That told him two things—whoever had come in was good, and they didn’t want him dead. Yet.
He took one quiet breath, cataloguing the sounds.
The first intruder was near the window—steady, patient, trained.
The second was closer to the door, heavier on his feet, calm.
Professional spacing. Two of them. He could take one, maybe both, but not without noise.
And noise would mean attention he couldn’t afford.
He was just starting to shift his weight, preparing to move, when a voice cut through the dark.
“Don’t do it.” It was the voice he heard on most nights in his dreams. “I am not in the mood. And I told you we needed to talk.”
A click.
Light filled the room—dim, amber, harsh against the grime.
Kael “Surge” Makani stood near the door, hand resting on his sidearm, eyes sharp and cold.
He looked older—six years written in the hard lines of his face—but not diminished.
Hell, it all looked good on him. He wore a short sleeved tight black t-shirt and black tactical pants.
His long, dark hair was tied back, his stance balanced and calm.
His skin was a deep bronze, his arms inked from shoulder to wrist in intricate Polynesian patterns that spoke of lineage, loyalty, and loss.
The tattoos caught the light, alive in the low glow, each mark a story carved in silence.
For a heartbeat, Drew didn’t breathe.
Kael.
The name landed like a punch to the chest.
He’d imagined this moment for years, but never like this. Not with Kael standing in his apartment like a ghost with a gun.
He was sure that for Kael, the sight was worse. Drew Hawkins—Wraith—the man he knew he’d mourned was alive. And now he was standing there, barefoot, alive, breathing the same air like nothing had ever happened.
The man near the window—Reef, he was pretty sure—let out a low whistle. “Well Wraith, I pictured you a little differently. I figured with how you can move without being seen, you must be native Hawaiian.”
Kael didn’t look at him. His voice was tight. “Out.”
Reef hesitated. “You sure you don’t want—”
“Out,” Kael repeated, sharper this time.
The word carried command, the kind that wasn’t open to debate.
Reef exhaled, muttered something about emotional reunions, and crouched by the window.
He slipped through it, pushing upward toward the roofline with practiced ease.
Drew caught a flicker of movement above—someone reaching down to pull him out.
Then, there were only the two of them.
Kael’s gaze locked on Drew. It was the kind of look that stripped everything away—pretense, distance, excuses. He didn’t speak, didn’t move. The silence was a living thing between them.
Drew sat up slowly, instinct and memory warring in his blood. “You gonna stand there all night and glare at me? If so, I think I’m going to need to put some coffee on.”
“Don’t move.” Kael’s voice was ice.
Drew froze mid-motion, eyes narrowing. “What the hell are you doing here, Kael?”
“Wanted to make sure the dead man walking and talking on my comms unit was real.”
Drew’s heart stuttered once. “You could’ve called.”
Kael’s tone cut through the air. “You don’t get to make jokes. Not after six years of being a goddamn ghost and me being the fucking idiot mourning you.”
Drew exhaled slowly, his heart ached, wanting to tell him everything, but he couldn’t. So instead, he leaned back on his hands. “So, you found me. Congratulations. You want a medal or a drink?”
Kael stepped closer. The movement was smooth, controlled, but fury burned beneath the calm.
“I want the truth. You died. And although they didn’t find a body and I had no fucking right to claim you even if you had, I fucking buried you in my mind.
There was nothing left—no trace, no body, no goddamn explanation. ”
Drew fought down his need to tell this man how much he had meant to him. “Guess I’m bad at staying dead then, huh.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
Kael’s fingers flexed once, a tremor barely there. “You could’ve reached out. Whatever shit you were in, I could have helped you.”
“Could’ve,” Drew said quietly. “But the people I worked for back then wouldn’t have liked that much.”
Kael’s voice dropped lower. “Who the hell were you working for?”
Drew hesitated. “Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Something in Kael’s tone broke through Drew’s composure. For the first time, he saw the hurt under the steel. The disbelief. The grief that had never really healed.
“Kael...” Drew started, but the words caught. He forced them out rough. “You have to understand, I didn’t have a choice.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. “Bullshit. There’s always a choice. You think I didn’t look? You think I didn’t burn every favor I had trying to find out what happened to you?”
Drew swallowed hard. “And what did you find?”
“Nothing,” Kael said, voice low. “Just a wrecked op, a burned village, and your name on a list of the dead.”
“Then you should’ve left it there,” Drew murmured.
Kael’s eyes went dark. “I don’t leave my own behind.”
“Like you said,” Drew said softly, heart clenching. “I wasn’t yours to leave.”
The tension snapped like wire between them. Kael’s hand moved—faster than thought. The gun was out, steady in his grip, but the look in his eyes wasn’t anger anymore. It was confusion. Pain. A man torn between killing a ghost and protecting one.
Drew’s own voice sharpened. “You gonna shoot me for disappearing? Or because you don’t like what it says about you?”
Kael didn’t answer.
“Do it,” Drew pushed, bitterness spilling through. “We’re good at endings.”
The muscle in Kael’s jaw jumped. “You think I came here to kill you?”
Drew shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone I trusted once tried to kill me.”
Kael exhaled sharply through his nose. The gun dipped a fraction, his eyes closing for a heartbeat before reopening—hard again, controlled. “You talk too damn much.”
“Always have,” Drew retorted. “It’s part of my charm.”
The silence between them thickened. Then, with no warning, Kael raised the weapon again.
Drew’s eyes widened. “Kael—wait—”
The muffled phfft of compressed air cut the room. Pain stung his shoulder, hot and immediate. He gasped, eyes dropping to the small dart embedded just below his collarbone.
“You son of a—”
Kael’s voice was quiet now, too calm. “Sleep it off, Wraith.”
The world tilted sideways. Drew fought to stay upright, every muscle rebelling. His pulse thundered in his ears. Through the blur, Kael was still there, still steady, still impossibly real.
“Why?” Drew forced out. “You couldn’t just walk away?”
Kael crouched beside the bed, close enough that Drew could feel his breath. “I told you before. We need to talk.”
His hand came up, fingers brushing Drew’s jaw with a touch too familiar for a stranger. “You deserve the headache coming for you,” he said softly.
Drew would’ve laughed if he could. Yeah, he thought as the dark swallowed him. On that, we agree.
****
The first thing Drew registered was the sound—the slow, deliberate drip of water onto concrete.
He opened his eyes to the dim yellow glow of a single bulb swinging lazily from a frayed wire above him.
The room was small, square, and cold—all rough concrete and shadows. A place built to break people.
He shifted instinctively, and pain flared through his wrists.
Thick steel cuffs pinned his hands behind the chair.
His ankles were cinched just as tight, heavy industrial zip-ties reinforced with tape.
The chair itself wasn’t just bolted down—it was welded to a thick steel plate on the floor.
Whoever had done this hadn’t wanted him to move an inch.
Rookie mistake, Drew thought, testing the play in the bindings. You never underestimate the man you’re holding.
His right thumb ached already—he’d need to dislocate it to get free. He could. He’d done it before. But not yet. Timing was everything.
A low scrape echoed from the shadows, and a man stepped into the cone of light.
“Manō.” Drew always figured it was best to try to get his interrogators off their game as soon as possible.
Tane Ikaita—code name Manō—filled the space like a threat made flesh.
Broad-shouldered and solid, his dark skin inked from wrist to shoulder with sharp-edged Polynesian patterns that told stories Drew couldn’t read but respected all the same.
His arms were folded across a chest that looked carved out of stone, black t-shirt stretched tight over muscle.
The shark tattoo, the reason for his call sign, on his right forearm seemed to move when he flexed.
His face was serious, unreadable, and framed by short dark hair that fell over his brow.
That kind of face had seen violence and didn’t flinch from it.
“You know, my call sign suits me,” Tane said, voice low and steady. “Manō means shark, and it has deep cultural significance here in the islands for my people. We are viewed as guardians of our family, our ‘ohana.”