Chapter 16
Icaught up to the truck to find Glade, Kyan, and Knight all there.
Glade was unconscious.
A wave of relief slammed into me with shocking magnitude.
She hadn’t managed to escape.
I hadn’t realised, until now, how much larger than life she always seemed. It was easy to forget, beneath the blaze of her fierce chestnut eyes, that she was shorter than us by a foot. Kyan had her scooped up like a princess, and she looked oddly small, cheek against his chest, eyes shut. Her bare legs hung limply over his arm, rich bronze skin shining in the daylight above. Her thick, black waves tumbled over his arm, damp hair still dripping as Kyan carried her to the truck.
I’d rarely seen him so tender as when he set her down on the seat, adjusting her carefully in place.
“Do we need to cuff her?” I asked.
“Nah. She’ll be out for hours.” He turned back to me, looking rather proud.
“You helped,” I said flatly.
He grinned as he hopped from the truck. “Knight lost, I won. I can touch her now.”
“You will absolutely fucking not.”
“Can someone get the goddamned key?” Knight asked from behind me.
I turned back to him, taking him in fully. He was cuffed to a dumpster, though he’d done a number on the metal holding him; it wasn’t broken but it looked pretty mangled. There was a faint trickle of blood trailing from two shallow cuts across the corded muscle of his upper arms. I opened my mouth to ask how that had happened, but then saw the glint of a kitchen knife on the ground.
Right.
Glade was not to be fucked with when it came to sharp objects.
If Kyan had seen the knife when she’d run by, and failed to mention it—actually, I was happier not asking.
“Where’s your shoe?” I asked, noting he was missing one.
“Kicked it to the other side of the van, gave me a chance to grab her.”
“Yet,” Kyan said, fetching the boot that had been tossed across the concrete. “You still fucked it up.”
We took Glade back to the warehouse where Kyan tucked her in before I made sure her cell was firmly locked, and Knight began angrily frying up cold takeout from last night.
“No one talks to her except me,” I growled.
“Can I get this straight?” Kyan straddled one of the dining room chairs. “She tricked Knight into thinking she was in heat, then ran?”
“She’s a fucking snake.” Knight didn’t look at either of us as the cap of the soy sauce flew off as he violently shook it, dumping half the bottle onto his meal. He growled, slamming the pan down and tossing the spatula at the wall. “When it all goes up in flames, that’s on you.”
One-upped by our mate or not, he was too angry—for him especially—and his side of the bond was locked down tight. “She’s a scent match,” he muttered. “She can fuck with our brains.”
“What about what she said when I got there?” Kyan asked mildly.
“What did she say?” I asked.
Knight scowled, taking a breath before he spoke. “She said she had to leave. It would be better for all of us.”
I paused.
What did that mean?
That she cared about us? After all of this? My mind rejected it. “She’s lied since she got here,” I said slowly.
“She was free. I was cuffed.” He wrinkled his nose distastefully as he emptied his ruined meal into the garbage and then stomped over to his room. “No reason for her to lie,” he said, before slamming the door on us both.
I sighed, looking back at Kyan as he stood and stretched. “Well. I’m going to go and put a bit more work into our Brotherhood tracking.” He was doing a deep dive into their movements, trying to figure out where they were, so we’d know if they got close. This warehouse was secure for now, but we hadn’t had Brotherhood eyes searching for us like we knew they would be now.
“You won’t go near her,” I said again.
He just flashed me a grin.
“Before she wakes, can you go out?” I asked, glancing back at the mangled cuffs I’d tossed on the table. They weren’t broken, but they weren’t something I trusted to hold her anymore. Not when she’d proven so intent on getting away. “I need another.” He’d got the last pair, and I didn’t know where from.
Kyan brightened. “You want me to buy her bondage?”
I rolled my eyes. “I want something that will hold her, preferably before she wakes up. I need options if the cell isn’t one.”
“All right,” he said, looking far too mischievous as he got to his feet and made his way toward the metal steps up to his room. “I’ll go later.”
“What do you think she meant when she said it’s better for us all?” I asked.
He peered back at me, closing one eye like he was genuinely considering that. “That’s a great question,” he said. “I have no idea.”
I didn’t buy it. I might not be able to read Kyan quite as well as Knight, but I knew when he was hiding something.
“Any update on the Brotherhood?” I asked. We were on the back foot. It was far easier for us to track Brotherhood movement than it was for us to know if we’d been found.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “Been monitoring the district cameras, haven’t seen anything suspicious.”
I nodded with a sigh, picking up my own laptop and slumping onto the couch as Kyan’s footfalls echoed across the open living space and he climbed up toward his room. It was a small bunk upon the roof of Glade’s cell, and was surrounded by spray-painted designs and the remains of the huge metal cage he’d dismantled to fit his bed in.
When we’d first arrived here, it had been an abandoned gym that had hosted rut fighting. There were still remnants of that in the wall of the metal cage that reached to the ceiling beside Kyan’s pad, or the climbing wall that spanned the whole place.
The steps were old and beaten up, and the last stretch was just a precarious wooden ladder that Kyan always climbed with far too much confidence.
I mindlessly opened up my usual work tabs but couldn’t focus on them. Using my foot, I nudged the coffee table door open, spotting the gun stashed within. It had been years since I’d been this paranoid, but with Glade in our home, I hadn’t been more than six feet from a weapon—if I wasn’t outright carrying. And it wasn’t a response to the threat she might pose to us. If the Brotherhood discovered us, would they negotiate? Try to take her? Or just come in guns blazing?
I wished I could say I knew my brother well enough, but the truth was, I didn’t. I never had. When we were children, he’d been… different. It was hard to put my finger on, but as we’d entered teenage years, I thought he’d grown out of it. Until the day our dad had died, and he’d taken everything.
My place in the Brotherhood, my home, and my scent match.
That was when I realised my brother had never changed. He’d just become better at wearing a mask. Glade had chosen him for power, and I doubted it took her long to realise he could never offer anything more than that.
Not like we could.
But she’d shown us all her priorities, and apparently even the power wasn’t enough in the end.
I made an effort to focus on my screen. I had a few jobs to do, and Glade wouldn’t be awake for hours. Until Kyan gave me something to do regarding the Brotherhood, I was stuck.
We made our money in cybersecurity. One of the generous gifts my family left me with was the foundational knowledge on how to manage dirty money. I was an expert at laundering, untraceable wiring, and setting up offshore accounts. Kyan did the crazy shit with computers, but Knight and I worked with clients who needed simpler expertise. We located missing or stolen money, or tested a trail to make sure it would be impossible to follow.
I picked through my latest job list absently, unable to stop my mind from crawling back to the Omega in the room behind me, like the desperate prick I was.
She’d just been so damn beautiful in Kyan’s arms. Peaceful and protected… The glow of her skin in the sunlight, the flutter of her thick lashes brushing her cheek.
A glimmer of the reality we might have had.
I couldn’t help dragging up more distant memories… Her smile beneath the stars on a cloudless night. The feel of her lips against mine… She’d kissed Kyan and Knight, but not me. Not since she’d left.
Was I jealous?
How many times had I stayed up, remembering the way her body fit so perfectly against mine, the touch of her fingers at my cheek, and the dazed look in her eyes as I claimed her? There had never been anyone else.
I hated that I felt the urge to make sure she knew that.
I hated myself for dreaming of those moments.
I hated myself for thinking of them now when she was here, and we had bigger problems to deal with.
I did need to find out when her heat actually was because we needed a plan for when it came.
Maybe Knight was right, and we should just let her go… But what if we did, and they caught up to her? A Brotherhood hunt wasn’t a joke—even less now that Ace was in charge. If she got caught by herself—a low growl rose in my chest and I stifled it, viciously rubbing my face in my hands.
Fuck me.
I could barely remember the original plan. We’d taken her for leverage, not to protect her. But if she was in my brother’s sights—and not in a good way… She’d cheated on him and he’d let her walk—what the hell had she done to provoke him this time?
Every glimpse of her was like driving a knife into an old wound, drawing fresh blood each time, but that didn’t mean I could stomach the idea of her alone, facing shit odds.
The idea of her lifeless body, abandoned in a Las Vegas alley, the rich glow of her skin fading to grey, those bright eyes dull and lifeless…
A shiver ran up my spine, a tremor in my heart, and I shoved the image away.
No.
I slammed the laptop, running a hand through my hair as I got to my feet and crossed halfway to the door to her cell before I’d caught myself.
For what?
The compulsion to go in was overwhelming. I needed to look in there just to see the rise and fall of her chest… The life of an Omega who’d haunted me for years. Who’d broken me. Who I’d come to believe I would never see again.
She couldn’t die.
I couldn’t… I couldn’t hate a dead woman, and I was nothing if not hateful.
I took another step toward her door, but saw a flash of fluff at my feet, and lost my balance as I tried not to step on it.
“Fuck!”I crashed to my ass, turning in time to see Lucy diving under the couch.
“Did you kick her cat?” Kyan’s voice sounded from up in his pad, and his head poked up and over the railing.
“She tripped me,” I snarled.
A pair of white orbs flashed from the small gap beneath the couch.
Oh…
“I’m sorry, Lucy.” She might have been the one trying to kill me, but I had been wearing my boots. I crossed back toward the couch and knelt beside it, but Lucy backed up, then darted from beneath it. I poked my head up in time to see her leaping up the mismatched metal stairs to Kyan’s pad.
Well, she clearly wasn’t hurt—not like my pride as I caught Kyan’s smug expression and Lucy vanished into his pad. Suck up.
I glanced back to Glade’s cell. My nerves had dissipated, and I didn’t feel such a pull to check on her.
Probably for the best. So far, no interaction with Glade hadn’t gone to shit. Even last night, holding her in the shower and forcing her on her knees… I’d stayed up all night, resenting that it didn’t bring me the peace I knew it should.
I’d never struggled with vengeance before now, but it just… hadn’t felt good. It should have. I wasn’t a nice person, but every second I was around her unsettled me, a whisper just out of my vision, nagging that something wasn’t quite right—that hating her was a mistake.
I shook it off, returning to the couch to finish a job just so I could prove to myself she wasn’t getting to me.
Knight was right. She was a snake, and since I was the only one of us who could be trusted to speak to her, I had to be careful.