Chapter Nine
Rowen
My brother drifts a little further every week—mentally, emotionally, whatever the hell you want to call it.
His mind’s been unraveling thread by thread, and the worst part?
It pleases our father. Dean watches Ronan spiral with a sick sense of pride, like watching a wild dog become feral is some kind of achievement.
Like his madness makes him more Calder-blooded.
Dean just called, frothing at the mouth over another associate being taken out—house torched with the guy still inside, cooked down to bone and smoke.
He’s on damage control now, trying to scrub our hands clean while pretending those men were not connected to us.
But they were. Deeply. He can scream “independent contractor” all he wants, but we know better.
They were cogs in the machine—our machine.
Just another part of the dirty engine Dean and Bryce have been building for decades.
Then, of course, he flipped the conversation and lit into me about Ronan. Said I should’ve kept him on a leash. That letting him fight solo tonight was reckless.
I knew it would be. I’m not stupid. But I needed the break.
Berk’s been creeping into my head more than usual lately—relentless, like a ghost with perfect timing.
No matter how many years pass, how many women I bury myself in, or how long I spend beating the shit out of a punching bag, she’s always there.
Just beneath the surface. One breath away from taking over my thoughts.
It’s infuriating, because I read that letter.
Reign’s handwriting. Her voice. Her pain. All of it poured into a confession that painted Berk as a traitor who slept with her boyfriend. And even though it gutted me—destroyed me—I believed it. Still do. Because if I let myself question it, even for a second, I’ll fall apart all over again.
But the ache hasn’t gone away. Not even close. I feel it under my skin like an itch I can’t scratch. A vibration, low and constant, threatening to blow wide open. If I don’t step back into the ring soon, I’m going to lose my shit.
Which means I’ll have to talk Ronan into letting me take his next fight.
If I can find him.
Because surprise, surprise—he’s not answering his phone.
I’ve already tried six damn times, and with another hit lighting up a piece of the business, I’m wondering what he’s hiding.
I’d never even heard of this Stanley—the so-called dealership king—but maybe Ronan had. And maybe that’s exactly where he went.
Frustrated, I switch contacts and call Em instead. It rings a few times before he picks up.
“Where the fuck is Ronan?” I say in greeting, skipping any pretense. I don’t have the patience for small talk. Not tonight. Not with everything burning down around us.
There’s a beat of silence, then a low sigh crackles through the line. “If you’re calling me for that, I guess you haven’t found him either.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, jaw clenching. “He’s not answering you either?”
“Not since he left us earlier,” Emerson says, voice tight. “He was supposed to be done by now. His match should’ve ended an hour ago. Unless he picked up a last-minute one, which… you know him.”
Yeah. I do. Ronan lives for chaos. Hell, he is chaos.
He’s always been the first to throw his fists into something bloody without asking for the reason.
But lately, that reckless edge of his has been sharpening into something worse, something feral.
And after the stunt he pulled last week, I wouldn’t put it past him to fight just to blow off steam.
“Think he’s still at The Underground?” I ask, already turning back toward my car, tension tightening across my shoulders.
“Either there or on his way to torch another problem,” Em mutters. “But The Underground’s our best bet. If he’s not still in the ring, someone there’s bound to know where he went.”
“Remind me again why we split up earlier?” I ask rhetorically. “Alright. Meet me there. Let’s track his ass down before Dean’s all over us.”
“You driving angry or tactical?” Em asks, and I can hear the smirk in his voice, one of the few signs he’s still holding onto any calm at all.
“I’m driving fast,” I mutter as I slide into the car and slam the door. “We can worry about tactical once we find him.”
“Copy that. On my way.”
The call ends, and I grip the steering wheel hard enough for the leather to creak.
Whatever trouble Ronan’s waded into tonight, I feel it in my bones—steady and relentless, like a warning drumbeat I can’t shake.
It’s bad.
And if it’s tied to the undercurrent in the air, that restless, electric hum that whispers her name—Berk—then God help us all.
When I pull into the lot, Emerson’s already there leaning against his car, arms crossed, his expression tight with thought. He pushes off the door the second I step out of mine, the low rumble of my engine barely cutting through the buzz of tension hanging between us.
We greet each other with a brief nod and a quick clasp of hands—nothing flashy, nothing soft.
Just the familiar, wordless exchange we’ve always shared.
We were raised in a world where affection isn’t shown, only understood.
But the way Em’s eyes narrow as he scans the lot tells me everything I need to know. He’s just as tightly wound as I am.
We don’t waste time.
No small talk.
Just straight to the shit that matters.
“That hit earlier,” Em mutters, gaze flicking toward the skyline. “That wasn’t random.”
I grunt in agreement. “No chance. Whoever’s behind it? They’re not just setting fires. They’re aiming to cripple the business—piece by piece.”
We toss theories back and forth as we walk toward the entrance of The Underground. There’re a million reasons someone might want to burn our empire to the ground. Decades of enemies. Generations of sins. Hell, take a number and get in line.
Pinpointing who’s actually behind it? That’s the problem.
But the funny part—the twisted, poetic irony of it all—is that our hands are clean. For once. Whoever this is, they’re doing our dirty work for us. Executing a version of our plan without even knowing it.
“They even got Stanley,” Em says, arching a brow. “Dealership king. You know much about him?”
I shake my head. “Next to nothing. The name didn’t mean shit until Dean started bitching.”
Emerson’s jaw ticks, the same thought running through both of us.
We suspect the dealerships were being used for more than just moving cars.
Probably drugs. Weapons. Maybe even people.
And Stanley? He wasn’t some harmless vendor.
He was a cog—one that Dean and Bryce clearly valued more than they admitted.
“I’ll have to press Dean,” I mutter, dragging a hand down my face. “If he plans to hand us the keys to this empire of rot, then he needs to stop hiding the skeletons. We don’t need surprises. We need leverage.”
“Agreed,” Em says. “We don’t want to inherit this cesspool, but if we’re stepping in to burn it down, we need to know what we’re standing on.”
These hits are working in our favor, but that doesn’t make them welcome. Because if someone else is playing the same game we are, we need to know who they are, what they want, and how the hell they’re so precise.
And most of all, we need to know where Ronan fits into it, because I have a feeling, he’s closer to the flame than either of us realize.
We shove through the doors of The Underground, and the air slams into us like a solid wall—sweat, blood, stale adrenaline, and a tension that clings to the skin like smoke.
The moment we step inside, people start shifting out of our path, clearing space without even realizing they’re doing it.
I catch more than a few wide eyes and uneasy glances.
They’re not sure if I’m Ronan or not—and they’re smart enough not to ask.
Ronan, me, or Emerson—doesn’t matter which of us you’re looking at—we all know how to hit hard and leave marks that don’t fade.
As we move deeper into the place, we ask around about Ronan’s fight. Unsurprisingly, he won. Fast, brutal, efficient—just like always. But what raises every red flag I have is how quickly he vanished afterward. Didn’t hang around to cool off or bother with a drink.
The guy working the back edges closer, his eyes flicking around like he’s debating whether opening his mouth is a bad idea.
When he finally speaks, he tells us Ronan had been asking questions—too many of them.
About Cupcake. How her fights get booked.
Who sets them up. Whether anyone knows her real name.
Where she goes between matches, and where she came from before showing up here.
We press him. “And? Do you know?”
But they don’t give us anything we didn’t already expect. No real name. No phone number. No address. She was the one who reached out—that’s all they know. No trail to follow. No paper left behind. Just a voice out of the dark asking for a fight, then vanishing again until the next one.
She’s a ghost.
But Ronan? He doesn’t chase shadows for nothing. If he’s asking that many questions, it means he’s found something—or thinks he has. And now that he’s gone radio silent, my gut says he followed whatever trail he sniffed out.
The thing is, Ronan doesn’t follow people.
He’s not the type to waste his time, especially not on women.
I’ve seen him sidestep more advances than I can count, shutting them down with that cold, detached stare that makes it clear he’s not interested.
Hell, even when we were younger, he’d avoid the clingy ones like they carried the plague.
But this girl? She’s different. She’s the only one I’ve ever seen him circle back to—not someone he’s already shared space with, but one he clearly wants to.
And for Ronan, wanting to be that close to anyone is rare enough to set off alarm bells.