Chapter Five
Rowan
The drive back feels heavier than the one out.
Not because of the weight in the van, but because of the weight in our chests.
The kind that squeezes and tightens until every heartbeat feels like pressure you have to swallow down.
Berk is already on her phone, firing off encrypted messages to the people she trusts, getting a burner vehicle lined up, making sure our wheels won’t lead anyone back to us.
She works fast, thumbs a blur, and every movement screams determination.
By the time we pull into the safe house driveway, Emerson and Berk look ready to walk straight past us and bury themselves in the war room again.
They still reek of the dumpster, of rot and grease and hot metal, but neither of them notices or cares.
They’re running on fumes and panic. If we let them, they’ll burn themselves out before we find Kimber.
Ronan and I step in front of them in the hallway, blocking the war room door. Two walls they can’t push past.
“No,” Ronan says, firm.
“Shower,” I finish, just as firm. “You’re not stinking up the house.”
Berk’s eyes narrow. Emerson frowns. They both open their mouths to argue. But one whiff of each other shuts them up.
Ronan waves a hand dramatically in front of her face. “Pix, I love you, but you smell like a corpse rolled in onion rings.”
She sputters, indignant, but too exhausted to fight.
Emerson cracks a tired smile and tugs her toward the hall.
They don’t even try to split up, leaning into each other like two people barely holding it together.
Berk mutters something about us being controlling assholes, but her voice is frayed at the edges.
The bathroom door shuts behind them, and only then do I release the breath I’ve been holding. We need them clean and rested—minds sharp, not unraveling.
Because Kimber needs all of us at full strength.
Ronan and I head straight to the hardware table.
The drive sits there like a wounded animal—dented, filthy, half-dead—but still clinging to life.
We work in silence, the kind that says everything we don’t voice.
I unscrew the casing. Ronan sterilizes the adapter.
We move around each other with the ease of people who have bled together more than once.
The moment Ronan connects the cables; a faint light flickers. Weak, but alive.
It’s enough to send a surge of adrenaline through my veins.
I start digging. Corrupted lines snarl across the screen, each one a gut punch. Most of the data is shredded beyond recovery, chewed up by compression cycles and days of decay. I try again. Then again. On the third pass, the system coughs up a survivor—a small pocket of intact data.
A wire transfer log.
One line. One name.
Horizon Logistics.
My stomach drops. Ronan mutters a curse under his breath that could peel paint off the walls.
That shell company again.
The one Micah mentioned. The one our fathers have kept hidden from us, operating just below the surface of everything they’ve touched.
I lean closer to the screen, reading the details twice, then a third time. It’s clean—too clean. Whoever ran this account knew how to disappear in plain sight.
Berk will see it. She’ll recognize how far the line runs, spot the patterns beneath the polish.
I glance towards the hallway. The shower has stopped. The muted hush of voices inside the bathroom drifts into the quiet of the house. Emerson’s low murmur. Berk’s softer tone. They’re clinging to each other, trying to stay upright, and it hammers into me again how much we all stand to lose.
I tap the screen and nudge Ronan. “We should show her this the second they’re done.”
He nods once, jaw clenched, the muscle ticking. “It’s not enough,” he says.
“No,” I agree, “but it’s more than we had an hour ago.”
It’s a crack in the wall. A sliver of light breaking through in the dark, and right now, a sliver is the only thing that keeps us from falling apart.
The bathroom door cracks open, spilling steam into the hallway before Berkley and Emerson step out.
They look… steadier. Not rested, not healed, but scrubbed clean enough to breathe again.
Her damp hair clings in streaks of purple and blonde along her neck, droplets tracing slow lines down her collarbone.
Emerson’s shirt is wrinkled and half-damp, sticking to him where he holds her close, one arm locked around her as if letting go isn’t an option he’s willing to entertain.
Berk leans into him without thinking, head brushing his shoulder, her eyes heavy but clearer than they were an hour ago. Emerson presses a soft kiss to her temple—careful, lingering—and I can see the way her body melts into him for that heartbeat of contact.
He lifts a tied-off trash bag in his free hand. “I’m going to toss this outside and burn it.”
Before he takes a single step, Ronan lunges in and snatches the bag from him with a disgusted grunt. “Absolutely not. This scent is going to haunt me forever. You stay. We found something you need to hear.”
Emerson’s hand twitches, ready to swing, but Ronan dips in first and kisses Berk—quick, warm, a spark of connection they both needed—then leans in and plants a fast kiss on Emerson’s cheek just to piss him off.
Emerson swears, half growl, half laugh, and takes a swipe at him.
Ronan dodges with a smug grin and jogs down the hall, the trash bag swinging wildly behind him.
A breathy sound leaves Berk—something between a laugh and a sigh.
When she walks into the war room, she doesn’t hesitate; she slides into the chair beside me like she belongs in its orbit.
The glow from the monitors washes over her face, catching the tiny flecks of exhaustion beneath her eyes and the steel blooming underneath.
Her hand rests against my thigh as she leans forward—not intentionally, just grounding herself—and a pulse of heat flickers through me.
“What did you find?” she asks, voice low, steady, focused.
I drag the salvaged data closer. “Not a lot survived. But this did.” I tap the only viable entry, zooming in on the transfer record. “A wire transfer from a shell company. Horizon Logistics. Ever heard of it?”
Berk’s brows draw together, her lips pressing into a thin line. She leans in, studying the name with a frown like she’s trying to force recognition that refuses to come.
“No,” she says after a long moment. “I’ve never seen it.”
Her fingers hover over the keyboard, tapping once, twice, before she sits back and folds her arms, thinking.
Emerson moves behind her, placing both hands on her shoulders, his thumbs rubbing slow circles into her muscles.
She exhales, leaning back into him instinctively, and he bends down to kiss the top of her head again.
Ronan returns just then, shaking off the ghost of the trash bag smell and sliding in beside us. His eyes lock instantly onto the screen.
Berk’s fingers start tapping again, faster this time. “If it didn’t run through their usual channels, then it’s new. Something… hidden.” She turns her head slightly, eyes sharp despite the exhaustion weighing her down. “Which means it matters.”
I nod. “Yeah. It does.”
She shifts closer to the monitor, studying the faint remnants of the file with a narrowing focus, as if she’s trying to peel back the residue of secrets she hasn’t figured out yet.
Her jaw tightens. Her breath draws slowly.
She hates the feeling of something slipping past her, even when the information’s buried deep enough that no one could have caught it.
“This isn’t familiar,” she says. “But the way it’s structured… that’s deliberate. Someone spent a lot of time burying this. Which means it’s important enough to keep invisible.”
Ronan leans back, arms crossed, watching her with a hunter’s stillness. “A threat or another secret.”
Emerson squeezes her shoulders. “Either way, we follow it.”
Berk nods once, a spark catching behind her tired eyes. “We will.”
She may not recognize the shell company, but she knows what to do with a crack in their armor. Whatever Horizon Logistics is hiding, it won’t stay hidden for long. Not from her. Not from us.
We keep working long after the sun sets and the sky turns the color of bruised steel.
The war room hums around us, every monitor flickering with lines of code, half-finished searches, dead leads we refuse to abandon.
Emerson sits forward with his elbows braced on his knees, muttering possibilities under his breath.
Ronan curses softly every time a trace collapses into nothing.
Berk, stubborn as hell, is tapping so fast it sounds like she’s fighting the keyboard.
We are all strung tight, nerves scraped raw.
Hours pass like that, us pressed shoulder to shoulder, swapping theories and snapping them together into a jagged and desperate puzzle.
“Try cross-referencing Jory with Horizon Logistics again,” Emerson says, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“I did,” Ronan mutters. “Came back clean.” His jaw flexes. “Too clean.”
“Which means dirty,” Berk murmurs, refusing to look away from her screen.
“Exactly,” I say, jotting notes on a scrap of paper. “Nobody scrubs that well unless they’re hiding something.”
The air tastes of frustration, sharp and stale on my tongue. My eyes burn, gritty from exhaustion. None of us have slept since the day before, and even then, it was only for a few miserable hours.
Berk gives a sharp sigh and leans back—too far. Her chair shrieks across the floor as it tips, and she yelps, flailing for balance.
I’m moving before she can hit the ground.
“Easy,” I catch her by the waist, pulling the chair upright with one hand and her with the other. She ends up half sitting on my lap, breath stuttering, eyes wide.
“Damn it,” she mutters sheepishly.
I shake my head, more fond than annoyed. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?” she asks, still catching her breath, clutching onto me.