24. Silas
Silas
The operations room smells like cold coffee, stale air, and dead ends.
Three months of silence has turned the air heavy, the very atmosphere in the Op’s room is suffocating me, every screen flickering with no new leads, like a constant running joke that keeps telling me that I’ve lost my dove.
I stand in front of my laptop, my hands flat against the cold wooden edge of the table, and I stare at the map of Seattle that has now become my waking nightmare.
Ninety days of trying to trace Jack.
Ninety days of pulling bank records that lead to empty shell companies, and scouring every dark web forum for a single whisper of Dale and Ray.
They’re ghosts. They have scrubbed every trace of themselves, gone completely off the grid, leaving me with nothing but phantom leads and dead links that taunt my incompetence, and keep me away from my boy.
CJ, Deck, Mack, and Callan rotate shifts sitting with me while they work, their presence a silent, heavy anchor as I tear through the data.
I know what they’re thinking,I see it in the way they look at the wall of photos, in the way they trade glances when they think I’m too buried in my laptop to notice.
They’re starting to believe the worst.
It’s not just the silence from the monitors; it’s the pressure from the outside as well. Earlier today, CJ pulled me aside, his voice low and weary. He needs to pull staff from my case. PalMerc has clients, contracts, obligations that don’t stop just because my world has ended.
Hell, Mack and Callan have been running my own clients for months just so I could stay chained to this desk, but the well is running dry.
I’d argued with him, snarled that we needed every single person looking, that we couldn’t afford to lose a single pair of eyes, but I knew I was talking to a wall. I knew he was right.
And that only made me hate him, and myself, more.
I’ve watched hundreds of hours of illegal matches, my eyes burning and bloodshot, scanning faces in the crowds and fighters in the dimly lit rings across the Pacific Northwest. I’m looking for him.
I’m looking for the man who owns every corner of my soul, the only thing that makes the world coherent.
But the fighters are strangers, the venues change weekly, and none of them hold my dove.
My body feels hollow, wired on black coffee, protein shakes and pure, unadulterated desperation.
My hands shake, a fine, jagged tremor I can’t control. Every time I close my eyes, the memory of Jack’s ring, that gold band rubbing a raw, constant red circle into my pinkie finger, is the only thing keeping my pulse anchored to this earth.
It’s a physical ache that matches the agonising, starving hollow in my chest. I can’t decide if I want to tear the world apart to find him or just scream until my lungs collapse.
Footsteps echo down the hall, heavy and familiar, Deck or CJ, likely coming to see if I’m still breathing, but I don’t turn. I don’t acknowledge them. I can’t leave.
Leaving this room means admitting he isn’t coming back, and my mind flatly refuses to accept that math.
To stop looking is to let him die.
To give up is to stop being Silas.
Midnight in the office always carries a suffocating weight, a pressure behind my eyes that never fully fades. The rest of the guys have finally stopped trying to drag me to bed hours ago, leaving me alone in the dim, humming glow of the room.
My body still craves Jack with a vicious, consuming intensity that feels more like a possession than a desire.
It’s not just a mental ache; it’s a physical sickness.
Every nerve ending feels hyper-sensitive, raw and exposed, constantly searching for the phantom heat of his skin, the weight of his limbs, the sweet, breathless sound of my name against his lips.
Sometimes, I stare at the empty chair where he used to sit, the phantom scent of him, pine and clean skin, still lingering in the fabric of my own hoodie, and I feel a wave of such pure, white-hot rage that I want to put my fist through the wall.
I’m starving for him. I’m slowly dying, and the worst part is that I like it.
I like that he’s taking my sanity with him.
It’s a fitting fucking tribute.
Exhaustion finally drags me down against my will, a heavy curtain of fatigue that hits like a hammer to the back of the skull.
I don’t bother with a real bed. I can’t handle the empty space of our sheets, the cold, vacant stretch of mattress that screams his absence.
I collapse onto the narrow, uncomfortable cot pushed into the corner of the operations room.
I don’t deserve comfort while he’s in the dark. I don’t deserve to sleep soundly.
I lie there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the dark to claim me. I hate the sleep, but I can’t fight it anymore.
My dreams are a fever, a twisted, beautiful torture, and they are always the same.
I’m back in our room.
The lighting is soft, amber-gold. Jack kneels in front of me, his skin flushed, his eyes looking up at me with that absolute, devastating devotion that used to anchor my entire world.
I can physically feel the incredible, desperate heat of his lips wrapping around me, his throat warm and tight as he takes me deep, his fingers locking into my hips.
Every friction feels razor-sharp, a desperate hallucination of possession and survival.
I hear myself growling down at him, demanding he break for me, demanding he prove he was mine, driving into him with a wild, frantic rhythm that makes my vision blur at the edges.
Then he looks up through the sweat-matted hair clinging to his forehead, his body bleeding, his voice breaking in the dark.
Sol, please find me, Sol.
I wake with a jolt, my chest heaving, my skin slick with cold, sour sweat. The cruelty of my own mind is breaking me down piece by piece.
* * *
This morning brings no relief, just the same grey light filtering through the high windows and the endless, maddening hum of the air conditioning.
CJ and Finn sit opposite me, going through fights searching for Jack, I’m leaning against the table, my eyes burning, when the heavy metal door swings open, and Reid walks in.
He’s a good looking guy, but he isn’t my dove.
Reid’s the cliche kind of golden-boy look that belonged on a air force recruitment poster, with thick, sun-bleached blond hair kept in a slightly wavy, effortless style and piercing blue eyes that were always calculating the exit route.
But that was where the polish ended. His nose is broken, a permanent, crooked souvenir from a life spent trading blows in the ring, and his body is a slab of dense, corded muscle built for the professional MMA circuit that he’s dominated after leaving the Air Force.
He had gotten into it while serving, but when he left the military, he never lost the precision. Now, he flies for PalMerc, often taking the off-the-books contracts that required a pilot who could land on a dime and fight his way out of a dead end. A cowboy.
He was one of us, a man who carries the same darkness, the same jagged edges.
“I found him,” Reid said, his voice low, cutting through the hum of the screens like a razor.
My entire body locks up. Every breath stops. I don’t move, terrified that if I blinked, the words would vanish into thin air.
“What do you mean, you found him?” Finn asks, hope mixed with fear in his voice.
“It was an underground circuit on the outskirts. High-end, brutal stuff. I wasn’t looking for him, but…
I saw him step into the ring.” He swallowed hard, looking away, his jaw tight.
“He didn’t look good. But Silas… he was good.
Fought like a ghost trying to tear his way out of a tomb.
He just wasn’t good enough. He was half-beaten to death before two big men stepped in and stopped the fight. ”
Reid hesitated, his expression twisting with a mix of awe and sickness.
“But… God, Silas. He didn’t look like Jack anymore.
He was skin and bone, covered in fresh bruises, moving like his ribs were cracked.
He looked so tired he could barely stand, and those bastards just dragged him back out into the dark.
I tried to follow them, but they got lost in the crowd. ”
I didn’t realise I was sliding down onto the floor until my knees hit the wooden surface.
The air rushes out of my lungs in a sharp, violent sob I couldn’t swallow back.
I curl into myself, my hands clawing into my face as the tears, the ones I had hidden for three agonising months,finally shatter through my armour.
Reid freezes, staring down at me, stunned. Guys like us didn’t break. Not like this.
“Silas… fuck, man,” Reid muttered, stepping forward, his voice cracking. “I… I’m so sorry, Rook.”
I couldn’t answer. I just curl inward on the floor, the image of my broken, starving dove fighting for his life in a cage burning a hole straight through my soul.
The grief didn’t break me; it sharpened me into a blade.
The moment Reid sat on the couch, the tears stopped, drying up into something cold, heavy, and lethal. I pull myself off the floor, wipe my face, and turn back to the main console.
I was a weapon again, and we had a location, a starting point.
* * *
Within minutes, the office is wide awake.
I patch into every comms line, pull Eli, Deck, Mack, and Callan into the war room. I lay out Reid’s intel across the main screens: the location of the underground circuit, the blueprints of the building, and the shadowy network of fixers running the venue.
“We aren’t going in blind,” I told the room, my voice flat, dead-eyed, the gold ring on my pinkie finger digging a fiery circle into my skin.
“They want to hide him in the dirt? We tear the dirt apart. Mack, Callan, you’re heading down there tonight.
Find where he was held, find his locker, find anything. ”
They don’t waste a second. With Reid at the controls of our bird, they were in the air within thirty minutes. Six hours later, they were slipping into the underground holding pens of the Seattle circuit, moving like shadows while the security was distracted upstairs.
I watched through their compact, tactical cameras, my knuckles white as I grip the edge of my desk.
They move with lethal precision, breaking into the row of rusted steel lockers assigned to the fighters.
Most were filled with dirty wraps and old tape, but when they reached the last locker, Callan’s fingers brushed over something wedged behind a metal bracket.
A crumpled piece of torn notebook paper.
I watched as Mack carefully smoothed it out under the dim, flickering light of the hallway. Scrawled across the page in Jack’s shaky handwriting were words that made the breath catch in my throat:
Sol. Find Peter Sale. I love you.
I punch the name into my laptop, and stare at the name on my monitor. Peter Sale.
My fingers hit the keyboard, the code flying across the dark screens faster than it ever had before. Dale and Ray thought they could bury him. They thought they could keep my dove locked away in the dark. But they made one fatal mistake.
They underestimated my boy, and he had left a breadcrumb.
I stand up, the chair clattering loudly to the floor behind me. I look at the team, my eyes burning with a promise of absolute, unmitigated violence.
“They’re dead,” I whispered, the words echoing with a terrifying finality. “Every single one of them. Pack the heavy gear. We’re going to war.”