Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Mateo
The rain in Surrey was different from the rain in London. In the city, rain was just another layer of grime, tasting of diesel and wet concrete. Here, in the manicured silence of the suburbs, it tasted of wet grass and judgement.
I sat in the rental sedan, unmarked, generic, invisible, three houses down from the address Rowan had tried so hard to scrub from the internet. My engine was off. Just the rhythmic thweep-thweep of the wipers marking time.
It was 11:00 PM. The street was asleep.
Except for the grey four-door sedan parked directly across from number 42.
The occupant hadn't moved in two hours. He was professional enough to keep his engine off to avoid the exhaust plume, but amateur enough to light a cigarette every forty-five minutes, the cherry glowing like a beacon in the dark cabin.
Vance was getting desperate. He wasn't sending scouts to capture content anymore. He was sending threats.
I didn't need a background check to know what was in the glove box. I could smell the intent from here, a sour, metallic spike that cut through the damp air.
I checked my phone. The extraction team was four minutes out. A private ambulance service, fully vetted. It was the cleanest way to move a civilian without causing a scene. Neighbors don't ask questions when they see a stretcher; they just close their curtains and feel relieved it’s not them.
But the sedan was a variable.
I opened the car door. The air was cold.
I didn't sneak. Sneaking implies you’re trying to hide. I walked down the center of the street, my boots heavy on the wet asphalt. I let my scent bleed out, cedar, rain, and absolute, unchecked territorial aggression.
The lighter flared in the gray car. Then it froze.
The guy saw me. He saw six-foot-five of trouble walking through the rain in a dark peacoat. He saw the scar cutting through my eyebrow. He made the calculation.
He fumbled for the ignition.
Too late.
I reached the driver’s side window before the engine could catch. I didn't knock. I slammed my open palm against the glass. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet suburb.
The guy flinched so hard he dropped his lighter. He was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a jacket that he shouldn't have been able to afford given his choice of vehicle. A freelancer.
He rolled the window down an inch. "Can I help you, mate? I'm just waiting for a—"
I reached through the gap. My fingers hooked over the top of the glass. I pulled.
The glass didn't shatter; the mechanism inside the door shrieked and died as I forced the window down with brute strength.
"Oi!" He scrambled back against the passenger door, eyes wide. "What the hell—"
I reached in with my other hand and grabbed the camera sitting on the passenger seat. A long lens. Professional grade.
"You work for Vance?" I asked. My voice was a low rumble, barely louder than the rain.
"That's private property! You can't—"
I squeezed. The casing cracked. The lens crunched. I felt the delicate internal mirrors shatter under my grip. I kept squeezing until the expensive equipment was nothing but plastic shrapnel and dust in my hand.
I dropped the debris into his lap.
"The ambulance arrives in two minutes," I said.
"What ambulance?" He was shaking now. He smelled like cheap tobacco and terror.
"The one coming for the woman in number 42. She is being moved."
I leaned down, bringing my face level with his. I let him look at the scar. I let him smell the violence rolling off me in waves.
"You are going to sit here," I instructed. "You are going to watch them load her up. And then you are going to drive back to London and tell Julian Vance that the asset has been liquidated and relocated to a facility he cannot touch."
"I..." He swallowed hard. "He'll want to know where."
I didn't say a word. I just looked at him.
I held the gaze until he broke. Until he looked down at his lap, at the broken camera, baring his neck in submission.
"Go home," I said.
I turned my back on him. I didn't check to see if he pulled a weapon. He wouldn't. He was a watcher, not a fighter.
The ambulance turned the corner, lights flashing but siren silent.
I moved to the shadows of the hedges. I watched the team work. Efficient. fast. Rowan's mother looked confused but compliant as they guided her out, wrapped in a blanket.
I pulled out my secure phone. I keyed the mic.
"Extraction complete," I grunted. "Package is en route to the Manchester safehouse."
"Copy," Juno’s voice came back, smooth and cool. "Is the site clean?"
"Trace removed," I said, glancing at the terrified kid in the Fiesta. "Message delivered."
"Come home, Mateo," Juno said. "Before the storm breaks."
He wasn't talking about the weather.
The storm broke exactly forty minutes after I stepped back into the penthouse.
I stood in the kitchen listening to the silence of the apartment shatter.
"You kidnapped her?" Rowan’s voice started low, a vibration of pure disbelief, and escalated quickly into a frequency that could cut glass.
She was standing in the middle of the living room, holding her phone like a weapon. Stephen was sitting on the sofa, looking calm but alert. Juno was leaning against the mantelpiece, swirling a glass of something amber.
"We relocated her," Juno corrected gently.
"You moved her to a secure facility in Manchester without consulting me!" Rowan stepped forward, her face pale, her eyes blazing with that incandescent rage I’d seen at the stadium. "I am not a client, Juno. I am a partner. You do not move my family without my consent."
"We didn't have time for a committee meeting," Stephen said, not looking up from his tablet. "Vance’s scout was sitting outside her door. He had a line of sight into her living room."
"I would have handled it!" Rowan shouted.
She wasn't vibrating with anxiety now; she was shaking with fury.
She looked magnificent and terrifying. "I have protocols!
I have a safe contact in Surrey. I could have arranged a transfer that didn't involve an ambulance showing up in the middle of the night and scaring her half to death! "
"Your protocols rely on civilian cooperation," I said, stepping out of the kitchen.
Rowan spun on me. "You." She pointed a finger at my chest. "You were there. You went there and you didn't tell me."
"I secured the perimeter."
"You breached my trust." Her voice cracked. "I explicitly told you, if my family is involved, I make the call."
"And if you had made the call," Juno said, his voice cutting through the noise, "your mother would still be sitting in that house while you drafted the perfect email."
Rowan turned on him. "Excuse me?"
Juno pushed off the mantelpiece. He didn't look ethereal now. He looked sharp.
"You analyze," Juno said, walking toward her. "You weigh the risks. You check the legal liabilities. You would have spent four hours finding a perfect solution, Rowan. Your mother didn't have four hours."
"That is not your decision to make!" Rowan screamed. "My mother is not an 'asset' in your game. She is a person. And you treated her like cargo!"
She was hyperventilating. The scent of her distress, peppermint burnt by acid, was flooding the room.
"We treated her like a target," Juno snapped. "Because that is what she is. We acted. You hesitated. That is why you agreed to work with us."
"I didn't—"
It happened in a split second.
The argument pushed Juno. I saw his jaw tighten, his composure fracture under the weight of Rowan’s pain. He stepped closer to her, intending to soothe, intending to dominate the narrative, but the stress redlined his system.
His scent spiked.
It wasn't the white tea and sandalwood he usually smelled of, it was burnt sugar.
Sharp. High-pitched. Clawingly sweet.
It was the scent of distress. But it wasn't normal distress. This smelled like a bakery burning down. It smelled like need.
I looked at Stephen.
Stephen had gone absolutely still. His tablet was lowered. His head was tilted, his grey eyes locked on Juno with a laser-like intensity. His nostrils twitched. He smelled it too.
For a heartbeat, the room hung in a terrifying paralysis.
Juno didn't panic. He didn't flinch.
He moved his hand to the side table, grabbing the small silver pill case and shook one of the contents out. Dry swallowing the small white pill his throat working hard against the lack of water.
"Can we focus on the actual problem," Juno said.
It wasn't a question. It was a verbal flashbang. His voice was scraped raw, stripped of the melodic manipulation.
The scent cut off. The chemical suppressant slammed the door shut on the sweetness, replacing it with the sterile, metallic void of the blocker.
The moment passed, but Stephen and I knew what was coming, the only question was when.
Rowan blinked. She was too wrapped in her own fury to clock the biological shift, or maybe she filed it away in that terrifying brain of hers, in the 'unprocessed data/glitch' folder.
"The actual problem," Rowan hissed, her voice trembling, "is that I am standing in a room with three people who claim they want to protect me, but don't respect me enough to give me the truth."
"I need to call her," she whispered. "And then I need you to stay away from me."
She stormed out. The door slammed. The sound echoed in the sudden, heavy silence of the penthouse.
I looked at Juno.
He was staring at the floor, his hand gripping the mantelpiece so hard his knuckles were white. He looked pale.
"Juno," Stephen started, his voice cautious, probing.
"Drop it," Juno whispered. He looked up. His eyes were hard, warning us off. "Go to her. She’s shaking."
I didn't argue. I looked at the closed door.
"Go," Juno commanded. This time, he sounded like himself.
I went.
I didn't knock. The lock on her door was heavy, but I had the override key. I didn't use it. I just turned the handle. She hadn't locked it.
Rowan was sitting on the edge of the bed. She wasn't crying. She was shaking.
It was a full-body tremor. Her hands were gripping her knees, her back was rigid, and she was vibrating with a rage so potent it felt like it was heating the air in the room.
She looked up when I entered.
"I said stay away."
"You said a lot of things," I rumbled, closing the door behind me.
"I hate you," she said. It sounded like I'm scared. "I hate that you were right. I hate that I would have hesitated."
I didn't apologize. Apologies were for mistakes. Saving her mother wasn't a mistake.
"I know," I said.
I walked over to the bed. I didn't ask for permission. I sat down next to her. The mattress dipped under my weight, tipping her slightly toward me.
"You stripped my agency," she whispered, staring at the wall.
"I removed a vulnerability."
"It's the same thing to me."
"It’s not," I said. "Agency is useless if you’re being leveraged. We took away the leverage. Now you can fight."
She let out a choked sound that was half-laugh, half-sob.
I reached out. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. She was stiff, resistant, buzzing with tension. I didn't pull away. I pulled her in.
Heavy pressure. It was the only language her nervous system understood right now.
I hauled her against my chest. She fought for a second, her hands pushing against my ribs, but it was token resistance. Then, the string cut.
She collapsed against me. She buried her face in my shoulder, her hands fisting in my shirt, and she shook.
"I'm so angry," she mumbled into the fabric.
"Be angry," I said, resting my chin on her head. "Be incandescent. Just don't be alone."
The door opened again.
Stephen walked in. He didn't speak. He took off his glasses, set them on the nightstand, and sat on the other side of Rowan.
He reached out and took her hand. He interlaced their fingers. He began to rub circles into the back of her hand with his thumb. A logical, rhythmic motion.
"The legal transfer of the deed is complete," Stephen said softly. "Vance can't touch the house. It's in a blind trust now."
Rowan made a noise in her throat. Acknowledgment.
Then Juno.
He hovered in the doorway, a shadow with a secret. He looked exhausted.
Rowan lifted her head from my shoulder. She looked at him.
"You smell like chemicals," she said, her voice rough.
"Better than burning," Juno murmured.
He walked to the foot of the bed. He crawled up. He didn't sit; he lay down, curling around Rowan’s legs, resting his head on her thigh.
It broke the geometry of the room. It turned us from a meeting into a pile.
Rowan stiffened for a second, then her hand moved. She dropped her fingers into Juno’s hair, scratching lightly at the scalp.
Juno let out a long, shuddering breath.
We stayed like that. Four bodies on a bed, in a city that wanted to eat us alive.
I held her. Stephen anchored her hand. Juno grounded her body.
It wasn't sexual. It was structural. We were building a wall around her with our own mass.
Slowly, the shaking stopped. Rowan’s breathing leveled out, matching the rhythm of my chest.
"I still haven't forgiven you," she whispered into the dark.
"We can negotiate terms in the morning," Stephen replied softly.
"No negotiation," she murmured, drifting. "Just... stay."
"We aren't going anywhere," I promised.
I felt her relax completely, the fight draining out of her.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the three of them breathe. Rowan was trusting us. She was letting us hold her after we’d hurt her.
I felt a small shudder run through her.
"What?" I asked quietly.
"It terrifies me," she whispered, barely audible. "I trust you. I trust all three of you with my life, with my mother's, but I barely know anything about you. It's all just instinct."
She squeezed Stephen's hand. She pressed closer to me. Her fingers tightened in Juno’s hair.
"Vance scares me," she confessed. "But this? Needing this? This scares me more."
I tightened my hold.
"Good," I said into her hair. "Fear keeps you alert."
But as I closed my eyes, smelling the fading chemical tang of Juno’s suppressant and the peppermint warmth of Rowan, I knew she was right.
We were the most dangerous thing in her life. Because Vance could only break her career. We could break her heart.