Chapter 24
ACE
What the fuck is going on?
I’m out of the truck and crossing the parking area at a dead run, my phone still clutched in my hand, her last message sitting on the screen in letters that aren’t telling me nearly enough.
I’ll be okay. Night.
Four fucking words from a woman who just earlier was kissing me in the truck as though she were trying to crawl into my skin.
It’s the kind of sentence a person sends when they’re categorically not okay. I reach the gaming shop and slam both palms against the glass door. “Adelaide.”
The door doesn’t move, its windows blacked out from the inside, but where there’d been warm amber light bleeding around the edges when I dropped her off, there’s now nothing. The whole place has gone dark.
I hammer my fist against the door. “Adelaide!”
Nothing. The shop has been shut down, and she’s not inside.
“Fuck.”
I step back and stare up at the sign, breathing hard, my heart slamming against my ribs. No car in the parking area except mine, so I call her again.
Straight to voicemail. She turned her phone off, and something cold crawls up my spine and sinks its teeth into the base of my skull.
“Adelaide, baby, pick up,” I’m saying out loud to nobody, pacing the sidewalk in front of the shop, wired, rattled, my hands shaking. “Come on. Come on.”
I hit redial. Straight to voicemail again.
“Shit.”
I go around to the back. The rear is dim and smells like a dumpster. There’s a single staff door marked for the gaming store, so I try the handle. It’s locked. I hammer my fist against it so hard the metal rings and pain shoots up my wrist.
“Adelaide, are you in there?” Silence. A distant dog barking. A car somewhere two streets over.
She’s not in there.
She left out the back and didn’t want me to see her leave.
My chest cracks open clean down the middle, and everything inside it spills out hot and messy, and for a second, I can’t breathe.
I brace both hands on my thighs, bend forward over the pavement, and try to drag air into my lungs.
My brain is doing that thing it used to do in the old days when a job was about to go sideways and there was nothing left except the options in front of me.
Someone took her. That fucking ex. Daniel. He’s found her. He’s been watching.
Or…
She bolted with Clio. Something happened in that shop, and she ran away, because she turned her phone off instead of just ignoring me, because turning it off is a decision you make when you don’t want anyone to find you, not even the people you trust—
Either one of those versions is going to end with me burning the entire fucking island to the ground.
I straighten up, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, and start moving toward the truck. I’m running now, full sprint, and I jump into the driver’s seat, then slam the door hard enough to shake the frame. My hands are trembling so badly I have to try twice to get the key in the ignition.
I hit the button on my phone for North.
He picks up on the second ring. “Ace!”
“She’s gone.”
“Wait, what?”
“She’s fucking gone, North. The shop’s dark, the back door is locked, her phone is off, and she’s not answering. Something happened. Someone took her, or she snuck out to avoid me seeing.”
“Breathe. Talk slower. Where are you?”
“Fuck, are you hearing me? We lost Adelaide!”
“I heard,” he states, and his voice is controlled, but only just. There’s a strain under it now, tight and dangerous, like he’s holding himself in one piece by hand. “Tell me exactly where you are.”
“Shop parking area. She went inside thirty minutes ago and said she’d text when she was ready. Instead, I got one saying she’s staying at Clio’s, and when I called to check, she rejected it and turned her phone off. And the shop’s closed. Everyone’s gone—”
“Goddammit!” His breath comes harsh down the line, and I can hear movement on his end—drawers, footsteps, the crack of a cabinet shutting too hard.
Then my panic crashes back in. “I already weighed the options,” I explain hurriedly.
“Someone took her, or she ran from us. Both are catastrophic. I need Luca on cameras in the shop area. Traffic. Businesses. Street feeds. Anything he can break into. I want every car that came out of that back lot in the last hour and where it went.”
“I’ll get him on it,” North says immediately.
I yank the truck out of the lot too fast, the rear tires fishtailing on gravel before they catch.
“Ace, come home,” he says. “We coordinate from here. I don’t want you tearing around the island blind while I’m trying to find her.”
“I can’t sit in that house.”
“Ace—”
“I can’t.” My hand crushes the wheel. “I’ll smell her there, North. I can’t stand in there right now and wait for bad news to walk in. I’ll go through the walls.”
His breathing deepens, because he gets it and if he were the one out here and I told him to sit still, he’d tear the truck apart with his bare hands before he listened.
“Then move,” he says. “But you stay in touch. You don’t go dark. You don’t do anything stupid just because you’re scared.”
I laugh once, sharp and ugly. “Too late. Anyway, have you heard back from your contact about that piece of shit, her ex, Daniel?”
A whisper on his end. Luca, maybe, saying something too fast for me to catch.
North answers him away from the phone, clipped and immediate.
“Last I heard, he was still in LA, but that was days ago. Turns out he’s a real piece of shit too, using his company to move drugs, and many have gone missing mysteriously in his circles.
The guy’s the kind we’d eagerly deal with. ”
I rub my chin, thinking… “What if he’s here and found Adelaide? Forced her to send me a message?” That thought nearly takes me out at the knees.
“I’m going to find out,” he says quickly.
“Keep me posted,” I say and hang up.
The streetlights smear past, and the city is a blur. My heart is hammering against my ribs with every bit of it.
I’ve never felt like this about an Omega before. Not once in thirty-one years. There have been women, plenty of them, but never one who made my hands shake.
She’s under my skin. The first whiff of her scent in that airport lounge flipped a switch in my body I didn’t know I had, and every single moment with her since has been me discovering what that switch is wired to—my pulse, my cock, my attention, my breath, my sleep, my appetite, my fucking ability to make a decision in under thirty seconds.
I close my eyes at a red light and picture her. Her hair spread out on the pillow. The way her mouth opens when she laughs, the moan she makes when she takes the first sip of coffee.
If that asshole Daniel has laid a single finger on her, I am going to hunt him down and remove every finger slowly. And then I am going to take my time with the rest of him.
The phone buzzes with an incoming call, and my eyes snap open. An unknown number flashes across my screen.
My stomach lurches, and I immediately pick up. “Yeah?”
“Ace,” a woman with a soft, rushed voice answers. “This is Clio.”
“Fuck, Clio, is—”
“Listen—”
“Is Adelaide with you? Is she okay? Did something—”
“Hey, hey, hey, big guy, breathe. She’s safe.”
All the air comes out of me at once. I pull the truck over to the curb because my legs don’t entirely work right now. My forehead drops to the steering wheel.
“Thank fucking Christ.”
“Language.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m kidding. Use whatever language you need.”
I sit up. “Okay. Clio. Hi. I’m sorry. I am going to be calmer now. Where is she? I’m coming.”
“Well. Here’s the thing.”
My hands tighten on the wheel. “Go on.”
“So we were going to my place, and we were on the way, and she went into heat.”
“Okay, okay.”
“We’re talking full heat out of nowhere, though I suspect it’s been building for days, but it just arrived. She was in bad shape, Ace. I’m not going to lie to you. Crying, shaking, in a lot of pain.”
I tense all over because we knew her heat was so damn close. “Where is she?”
“I’m getting there. She didn’t want me to bring her to you guys.
So I took her to a heat clinic. It’s one I’ve used.
She’s got a private suite, a clinic nurse checking on her.
She’s safe but alone. And she refused an Alpha on staff, as she’s handling it herself.
” Her voice cracks. “She’s not doing great, Ace.
In her head. She’s not good, and, well, it’s your damn fault.
Okay, I didn’t mean to say that part, but it felt so good. ”
“All right, you’re gonna need to explain that.”
Silence.
“Clio.”
“I wasn’t sure if I should even call you, as she doesn’t know I am.
I’ve been sitting in my car outside the clinic trying to decide.
But I love her, and she’s my person, yet she’s alone in that room right now and her heat is hitting her harder because her scent matches are somewhere else.
And I don’t know if that’s right. So I called you. ”
“You did the right thing. You really did. I need the address, and I’ll be there.” I’m already typing in “Omega clinic” in my GPS on my truck screen to easily find it.
A long breath streams over the phone. “First, you need to know that she found something at your house this afternoon. A secret basement, lots of knives, and some masks.”
Every nerve in my body switches off. Shit! What must she be thinking? Is that why she ran from me?
“And then tonight, one of the women in our group brought in a photograph from an old newspaper. Not sure if Adelaide told you, but we investigate old unsolved cases, see if we can find any clues, and we’ve even helped out the cops on a couple of cases.
Anyway, we were looking into the disappearance of Rebecca Hana, and tonight we saw an old newspaper photo of three men walking with Rebecca Hana in the dead of night before she vanished. ”
Everything stops in my head. I no longer see the lights on the dashboard, or feel the phone against my ear, or hear the blood thrashing in my veins.
Everything just stops.
“The three men were wearing masks,” Clio says quietly.
“The same style as the ones Adelaide found in your basement this afternoon. And Adelaide said she swears those three men in the photo were you guys.” She exhales loudly.
“Look, I don’t know what shit you’ve done, but you’d better not be dragging my bestie into your crap. ”
I’m not breathing. A long silence passes.
“I’ll take that as a confession,” Clio says.
“No, but it’s fucking complicated,” he murmurs. “Where’s Adelaide?”
“You need to know that right now she is both grieving and feral, so I don’t know if this is the best time to discuss this crap with her. But as much as I hate to say it, she really needs you all. I don’t want her to suffer.”
“I’ll respect what she wants when I get there.
If she doesn’t want to see me, I’ll sit outside her door all night.
I won’t go anywhere near her without her permission, but I’m not spending tonight on the other side of the island without her having all the details about us.
I can’t. You’d ask the same if it were you. ”
She sighs loudly. “God, don’t make me regret this. And I’ll be there, so no shady shit.”
“I swear on my grave. You have my word.”
“Otherwise, I’m coming after you. The clinic’s on Kaimuki Street. ’Olu’Olu Wellness House. Pink building between a florist and a bookshop. I’ll meet you at the reception desk.” She hangs up.
I sit in the truck with both hands still on the wheel and my forehead pressed against my knuckles, my entire chest in pieces on the floor.
She must think we killed Rebecca Hana. Fucking hell!
I press my fist against my mouth, breathing through it for a long second. This has spiraled out of control so damn fast.
Then I hit North’s number on the phone.
“Anything?” he demands.
“She’s safe.”
He exhales hard over the phone, the kind that sounds dragged up from somewhere ugly. “Thank fuck.”
I tell him everything Clio told me. Every bit of it—the basement, the masks, Rebecca’s photo. Why Adelaide must have bolted. By the time I’m done, my hand is locked so tightly around the wheel that my knuckles hurt.
North goes dead quiet for half a second. Then: “Fuck.” The word cracks out of him. “I didn’t want her finding out like this. This is exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
I nod even though he can’t see me. “Yeah. Well. It happened because we ran out of time.”
Another curse, lower this time, rough with anger.
“So now we deal with it,” I say. “No more half-truths. She gets all of it. Who we were, what we did, why we left. Everything. Then we make her see the difference between that life and this one. We make her believe we’re worth staying for.”
North’s breathing steadies just enough for me to hear the control come back. “Agreed. Send me the address. We’ll meet there.”
“Copy that.”
He hangs up.
I put the truck in drive and floor it. The tires scream on the gravel, then I merge onto the road and drive like a madman with absolutely nothing left to lose, because the woman I love is sitting alone in a clinic thinking we’re killers.
While she may not be completely wrong, she needs the full truth now. And she needs to hear it from us.