Chapter Seven
Emerson
Berk moves through the room with a quiet purpose that makes my pulse hitch. The shadows stretch long across the walls, and everything about her shifts with the falling light. She isn’t frantic, not overwhelmed. She’s sharpening.
Night is when we hunt. And she’s already slipping into that part of herself that terrifies the men who made her this way.
She finishes arranging the call for our next vehicle swap, her voice low and clipped—one burner to another, one shadow handing off to the next. Watching her work is like watching a master thief crack a safe without ever glancing at her hands.
Ronan scrolls through Jory’s criminal history on the center monitor. Nothing impressive. Petty theft. Vandalism. Minor cybercrimes that probably made him feel important for five seconds until someone bigger stole his spine and handed him a job cleaning digital footprints for monsters.
My jaw flexes.
People like that—cowards—are sometimes worse than the ones pulling the trigger. They enable horror. They help hide it.
But when I look toward Berk again, that thought dissolves.
She’s opening the drawer beneath the desk, brushing her fingers against the familiar leather case inside. She lifts it out with slow reverence, like she’s holding a holy relic instead of a collection of weapons.
Her throwing knives.
The ones that gleam like silver promises.
She flips the case open, and the blades catch the glow of the monitors, casting reflections along her cheekbones. She trails her fingertips along the cold steel with a tenderness that shouldn’t exist in the same universe as the things she’s lived through.
But it does.
It’s part of her.
“You poor babies,” she murmurs, her voice soft and almost mournful. “I know I’ve neglected you. I’m sorry—I should’ve fed you sooner.”
Fucking.
Christ.
Her thumb skims on a blade’s edge. “Don’t worry. We’ll fix that tonight.”
A laugh escapes me, rough and involuntary. She’s a storm bottled in a cute, tiny body, soft one second and vicious the next, and I swear it hits something deep in my chest.
She closes the case with a satisfied click and glides toward Ronan. She doesn’t walk so much as flow, a movement that makes you forget to breathe until she’s already reached her destination.
She slips behind him, leaning over his shoulder, her face pressing into the warm hollow of his neck like she belongs there. Ronan’s lips curve into a feral grin. He doesn’t stop typing. He just turns his head enough to kiss her without looking away from the screen.
It’s intimate, practiced.
Home.
She murmurs into his skin, “You got my list together?” Her voice turns lethal—soft and sweet, edged just enough to warn. Like a razor that looks delicate right up until it kisses your throat.
Ronan taps a key, and a document blooms open. Line after line scrolls across the monitor—every crime, every offense, every dirty dollar and foul deed stitched to Jory’s name.
He lowers his voice for her alone. “Yeah, baby. Got every sin he’s earned. Your little scripture of the damned.”
Her smile is small but cruel and breathtaking.
“And just so you know,” he adds, tilting his head enough to brush his lips against her jaw, “he’s not walking away from this. Not after what he’s touched.”
She exhales, a satisfied hum vibrating against his throat, and every muscle in my body goes tight. Her hands still rest on his shoulders, but she turns her head slightly, eyes flicking to mine.
Bright.
Hungry.
Focused.
Fuck, she gets my dick hard.
It hits me like a punch behind the ribs, sharp and undeniable.
One second, she’s gliding around the room, deadly and focused, talking sweetly to the blades she’s about to stain with blood.
The next second she turns those sharp eyes on me and I’m gone.
She looks like war and salvation wrapped in a tiny, vicious package, and somehow, she still looks at me like I’m worth her time.
Whatever she sees in me must call to her because she crosses the distance without hesitation. Her body fits against mine like it’s always belonged there. Her fingers curl into the side of my shirt, tugging me down until her face tilts to mine.
She asks, “You ready to go bleed a piece of shit?” Her voice is soft but edged, like she’s already carving the night open with it.
A slow, dangerous smile stretches across my lips. “I’ll follow you anywhere.” And I mean it. I always have. Even before I understood why.
Her expression softens for half a heartbeat—the kind of tenderness she rarely allows because softness in our world gets punished. Then she leans in and brushes her lips against mine, a brief kiss that tastes like resolve, like promises, like every dark road we’ve walked to stand here together.
Then she whispers, “We’re going to find her. I’ll do everything, even give my life, to make sure she’s safe.”
The words hit me like a blade sliding between my ribs.
I catch her chin, gentle but unyielding, and tilt her face up. “You don’t get to give your life,” I murmur, my voice low and stripped to the truth. “Not for anyone. Do you hear me?”
Her breath wavers. My pulse does too.
“I wouldn’t survive losing you again. Never again.”
I press the words into her mouth with a kiss, slow and lingering, like I can force the truth of them into her bones.
She melts against me for a moment, her fingers curling tighter into my shirt.
I feel the faint tremor in her breathing, the exhaustion she’s been hiding behind sharp edges and sarcasm.
I cup the back of her head and hold her as if I’m anchoring both of us.
That’s when movement shifts in the doorway.
Rowan.
He stands with his shoulders squared, posture solid, but his eyes betray him. He thinks he hides it—the guilt that never sleeps, the quiet conviction that he takes too much or offers too little, the fear that he’ll always hover at the edge of whatever happiness we manage to build.
He’s wrong. But guilt is a parasite; it gnaws at reason until even truth sounds like a lie.
He watches us with that familiar, tight stare. The one I know by heart—the look of someone who wants to step forward, who aches to close the distance, but is held in place by a heavier fear.
I kiss Berk again, slower, lingering, making sure she feels everything I cannot say with words. Then I pull back and tap her ass lightly with a smirk I don’t quite feel, but it gets her attention.
“Go give Ro some love,” I whisper. “He looks like he’s drifting.”
Her head turns at once—her instincts honed sharper than any blade she carries. The second her eyes meet Rowan’s, she softens. Not weakness. Recognition. Understanding. That part of her that always reaches for the hurt in the room without stopping to ask why.
She slips out of my arms and toward him, and Rowan’s whole damn face cracks open, relief and longing flickering through the cracks like light through broken glass.
My chest tightens—not with jealousy, but with a pull far deeper. Belonging. The kind that steadies and terrifies in equal measure.
Watching her move toward him reminds me why I said what I said. Why I’ll fight anyone who tries to take her again.
And why losing her would be a death I wouldn’t survive.
None of us would.
When she reaches Rowan, she doesn’t hesitate—she never does with us.
She steps straight into his space like she belongs there, like her body recognizes his before her mind does, and she tucks herself into his chest. His breath stutters, caught between surprise and need, and his arms come around her on instinct.
He holds her tight, as if he’s afraid she might vanish if he doesn’t anchor her.
He always pretends he doesn’t need comfort.
Like we’re the ones who cling while he stands untouched and solid.
But I know better. We both do. Rowan’s kept his pain buried—quiet, airless—the way a man hides a knife beneath a coat: close, rigid, dangerous if handled wrong.
And yet, with her pressed against him, whispering into the fabric of his shirt, the tension drains from his shoulders like poison finally leaving a wound.
I can’t hear the words she’s giving him, but I see what they do.
His jaw softens. His fingers dig into her hips, pulling her closer, like each inhale might take her from him if he doesn’t hold tight enough.
The look on his face—fuck. It’s the look he wore when we were kids, and she used to hug him out of nowhere.
Shock first. Then that private, desperate relief.
Like touch is something he never learned to ask for but always needed.
This is who she is to us.
The girl we hurt. The girl we lost. The girl we weren’t strong enough to save back then.
And somehow—against every reason—she forgave us anyway.
She came back and placed her heart in our hands as if we hadn’t failed her in a hundred quiet, unforgivable ways.
She lets us touch her. Love her. Hold her.
And instead of shrinking from the darkness we carry, she steps into it and sets the whole place alight.
Now she reaches up, fingers brushing along Rowan’s jaw, murmuring something against his skin that makes his eyes fall shut. She kisses beneath his ear, then the corner of his mouth, and I watch him fracture and reform in the space of a single breath. Silent. Internal. Complete. All because of her.
She calms him in ways no one else ever has. Pulls him from the places he disappears into. Reminds him he’s more than what they made us. More than the violence waiting under his ribs and the guilt that carved him hollow.
She’s our little pixie. Our bright-haired chaos. Our shield and our knife. And watching her melt Rowan—the same Rowan who stares down grown men without blinking—makes my chest ache. Makes something warm spread through me, fierce and reverent and terrifying.
Because we’re forged from iron and blood.
But in her hands?
We soften.
We shift.
We become human, breakable, and willing to kneel if she asked.
We would burn the world for her.