Chapter 40 #2
And I want it.
“So,” Rook says. “Here’s where we are. Ruskin claims Damien has a meet tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got a narrow window — he’ll be at a mid-tier syndicate shell we’ve had eyes on before. Cameras are shit. Foot traffic is predictable. We watch. We don’t touch.” He pauses. “Yet.”
A slow thrum runs through the table.
Saint nods once. “We post outside. We run comms silent. I’ll watch the street.”
“Vale and I take interior sweep,” Wraith says. “Make sure there’s no second exit.”
“You’re not both leaving me outside,” Ash mutters.
“Lysander,” Saint says mildly.
Ash scowls down the table. I hide the way my pulse skips at the name. He only lets them use it when he’s not thinking about it.
Rook’s gaze cuts back to me. “You will do exactly what I say. You don’t improvise. You don’t wander. You don’t decide you’re playing hero. You move when I move, you stop when I stop, and if I say run—”
“I run,” I finish.
The corner of his mouth lifts, very slightly. “Good girl.”
Heat flashes through me so fast I have to steady myself. Wraith makes a low sound that is not disapproval. Saint looks faintly amused, like a priest who’s given up on pretending he’s above this.
Vale stretches, sated by the tension, bored of the logistics.
“So we’re all agreed,” he says. “We go watch the snake. If the snake hisses, we cut the head. If he keeps charming, we wait and slit his throat later. That sums it up. A family outing! How glorious. Clean, neat, little family outing, I’ll wear something nice. ”
Ash rolls his eyes. “This isn’t a joke, Mateo.”
“It could be,” Vale hums. “If we survive.”
Rook straightens, eyes on each of them in turn, then back to me. “We vote,” he says. “Saint?”
Saint inclines his head. “Yes.”
“Ash?”
Ash hesitates. His jaw tightens. His gaze flicks to me, and I can read the war in it — fear and devotion and calculation. “Yes,” he says finally, grudging. “With the conditions we set.”
“Wraith?”
“Yes,” Wraith says, instantly.
He doesn’t look at Rook when he says it. He looks at me. Part of me knows it’s because he believes I deserve this. The other? It’s penance for pulling the trigger. Tears sting the back of my eyes, but I keep steady as they agree one by one.
“Vale?”
Vale tips his glass toward me in salute. “Obviously yes.”
Rook nods once. “You already know mine is a yes.”
Then he turns to me. “And yours?”
My heart hammers. I taste copper and heat. “Yes,” I say. “We go.”
The decision settles in the room like a seal pressed into wax. Finished. Irrevocable.
The last of the tension bleeds from my spine, leaving something else in its place. Steadiness. Focus. Purpose. I didn’t realize how badly I needed that until it’s sitting in my bones.
Rook exhales through his nose, then nods toward Ash. “Take her after we’re done eating. Show her what you think she needs to know.”
Ash dips his head once. “Yeah.”
“Saint,” Rook continues. “Get us eyes on the site. Quiet. I don’t want Syndicate even smelling we’re watching.”
Saint answers with a lazy salute that shouldn’t look reverent and somehow does.
“Vale, Wraith — full sweep of gear. We go light, not loud. If someone other than us pulls a trigger, I want that man carried to the river and I want paperwork saying he drowned.”
Vale grins. “With pleasure.”
Wraith just nods, already in the mission in his head.
Rook looks back to me last. Always letting his attention feel like the closing of a hand around the back of my neck. “Finish eating,” he says. “You’ll need the strength.”
My mouth curves. “Worried I’ll faint?”
“I’ve seen you nearly fall over from a half-glass of adrenaline,” he says calmly. “So yes. Sit. Eat your food like a good girl. Then we make you lethal.”
I don’t blush easily. Never have. But somehow, with them? I do now.
Vale lets out a quiet, delighted, “Oh, she liked that.”
“Mateo.” Rook’s tone sharpens, but there’s no real bite.
Vale just smiles into his drink.
Dinner continues, but the mood’s different now. There’s an ease to it, a grim steadiness. Not joy — none of us are stupid enough for joy — but alignment. They argue about loadouts, approach angles and lines of fire the way other people argue about football or the weather.
I listen. I watch. I commit every detail to memory.
Saint slips me a piece of bread like I forgot how to feed myself.
I glare at him on principle, then eat it anyway.
Wraith keeps refilling my glass with water without asking.
Vale keeps smirking at me like he’s picturing me draped over something and has the nerve to wink when I catch him.
Ash just watches and memorizes, gaze flicking to me between sentences, cataloguing each micro-move like data he’ll protect with his life.
Rook just… exists at my side. Solid. Heat radiating. Control sitting on him like a perfectly fitted suit.
When dinner’s done, plates pushed back and plans set, chairs scrape and they start to break. Ash rises first, already turning toward the hall that leads down to his den of screens and steel.
“Come on,” he says to me. “We’re starting with draws from concealment. Then wrist breaks. Then—”
“She’s with me first,” a voice purrs at my shoulder.
Mateo. Of fucking course.
He’s already moved by the time I register it — up from his chair, circling behind me, too close. His palm ghosts over the back of my neck in a touch that isn’t quite a touch. My whole body tightens in response, heat flashing low.
Ash stops, annoyance flickering over his face. “We’re on a clock.”
“We are,” Vale agrees lightly. “Which is why you can spare me five minutes. Unless you’d like to watch?”
Ash’s jaw works. “No.”
“Then off you go, ghost boy.”
Ash mutters something under his breath and disappears down the hall.
Saint’s already standing, pushing his chair in with that lazy, practiced grace that hides how fast he can move when he needs to. “Play nice,” he tells Vale. “Both of you.”
Wraith lingers a beat longer. He leans in, presses his mouth to the crown of my head in an absent, possessive kiss like it’s nothing, like it’s routine now, then turns and leaves without a word. The enormous, lethal bastard is soft with me in ways that short-circuit my brain.
Rook doesn’t move. He just watches. Always watching to see how I react. Though now, it feels more like possessiveness than anything else.
Vale waits until the others are gone before he hooks a finger under my chin and tilts my face up to his.
“Walk with me, little queen.”
I should say no. I don’t.
He leads me out of the dining room and down a side corridor lit with low sconces, past old portraits and tall mirrors that catch brief flashes of us — his ink, my bare legs under Rook’s shirt he gave me, the faint red mark at my throat that wasn’t there yesterday.
That one makes his eyes flare when he notices it in passing. Good. Let him notice.
He doesn’t take me far.
Just around the corner, half-hidden in a niche in the hall, pressed between a tall window and a bookcase older than this country.
He cages me in without touching me. One palm flat on the wall beside my head.
The other settles low at my waist, not quite on my hip, not quite on my stomach.
The heat of it bleeds through the thin cotton.
His pitch-dark eyes rake over me, hungry and amused and something else under it — something that doesn’t joke.
“I’m tired of waiting,” he says softly.
My pulse jumps.
“Waiting for what?” I ask, even though we both know?
He huffs a quiet laugh. “For you to stop pretending you don’t want to taste me again.” He leans in, mouth brushing my jaw but not landing. “For you to stop giving everyone else their bite and leaving me starving.”
“You’re not starving,” I whisper.
“Mm,” he hums, grinning slow. “And yet.”
His hand at my waist tightens just enough to pull me into the line of his body. Heat spikes through my veins, instant and bright, my breath hitching in a way that has him instantly tracking it. Like he knows it was because of him, and is itching to make me do it again.
“This isn’t the time,” I say, but my voice betrays me — not scolding, not even resisting. Breathless.
“No,” he agrees, and somehow makes that sound filthy. “It’s not. Which is why I’m being very, very good right now.”
“Good,” I echo, a little strangled. “That what we’re calling this?”
He smiles against my cheek. “For me? Absolutely.”
My fingers curl in his shirt without permission. His voice drops, all mockery gone. “Listen to me, Ember Calloway.”
Hearing my full name in his mouth like that does something low and molten to me.
“You’re ours now,” he says. “That means you don’t walk into this thinking you’re bait. You don’t walk into this thinking you’re a contingency. You walk in like blood royalty. You walk in like the blade in Rook’s hand. Understood?”
My stomach flips. “Mateo—”
“Say yes.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
His eyes darken, satisfaction flashing like heat lightning. “Good girl.”
God. I hate how that works on me every time. I hate that it makes my knees feel weak and my spine feel straight at the same time.
He leans in then, finally, finally pressing his mouth to mine. It’s not soft. It’s definitely not sweet.
It’s slow, and deep, and hungry in a way that steals the thought right out of my head.
His tongue slides against mine with lazy confidence, like he’s already mapped exactly how I like to be kissed and is just reminding me of it.
His fingers tighten at my waist, pulling me flush against him, and I let him.
I let him because I want to and I’m done pretending that I don’t.
When he pulls back, I’m breathing too fast.
He looks infuriatingly pleased with himself. “See?” he murmurs. “Not so scary.”
I swallow. “You’re very annoying.”
He grins, teeth flashing. “And you’re very, very distracting, which is why I’m letting you go now before Rook walks around that corner and decides to put me through a wall.”
“Rook wouldn’t—”
He raises a brow.
I grimace. “Okay, he would. But he’s learning to share.”
“Mm, if you say so.” Vale dips his head, brushing one last slow kiss against the corner of my mouth. “Go train, little queen. Go sharpen your claws.”
He steps back.
I stay where I am for one beat longer than I should, catching my breath, pulse still hitting like a drum under my skin.
Then I push off the wall, straighten Rook’s shirt on my body, and head down the hall toward Ash’s wing — toward drills, toward prep, toward the first real move in a war that’s been circling us since the night they tore my life open.
For the first time in years, I don’t feel like I’m bracing to survive it.
I feel like I’m about to start it.