Chapter Fourteen
Ronan
Wrongness hits before I’m fully awake.
My body registers it ahead of my mind.
The space beside me is cold.
Too cold.
Berk’s warmth is gone.
My eyes snap open so fast they sting. For a second everything blurs, like I’m waking up underwater. The grogginess weighs me down, thick and wrong, because we were supposed to have four hours. Four. Not the ten-pound heaviness dragging at my limbs right now.
My stomach drops.
She wouldn’t let us sleep this long.
She wouldn’t leave this bed without a damn good reason.
She wouldn’t disappear.
Not again.
A violent jolt of adrenaline wipes away the fog, and I sit up so fast the mattress bucks. Both Rowan and Emerson jolt awake at the same movement.
Rowan’s voice cracks. “What—Ronan, what’s—”
“She’s gone.”
It’s all I manage.
All I need to say.
Because the second the words hit the air, the atmosphere changes. Rowan’s eyes widen, going from sleep-soft to feral panic in a heartbeat. Emerson goes rigid, scanning the room as if he expects to see her hiding under the bed.
My pulse is a hammer. My chest feels like it’s caving in, breath thinning into something sharp and frantic. For a moment I can’t breathe.
Then instinct takes control.
I’m on my feet and out the door, tearing down the hallway. The glow from the war room monitors flashes ahead just as my hand slams into the doorframe—too hard—pain flaring up my arm as I wrench it open.
Empty.
The chair is pulled back, the monitors alive with scrolling data—bright, active—but the room itself is silent. Not calm. Empty. The kind of quiet that feels like absence, like betrayal, like the past clawing its way up my throat.
“Check the kitchen!” I snap—not yelling, not panicked, but razor-edged command.
Emerson disappears instantly, footsteps pounding through the house. I hear him tear through every corner, every exit.
Rowan doesn’t move at all.
He just stands in the middle of the room, chest rising too fast, fingers clawing through his hair again and again until he looks half wild.
“No. No. No, no, no.” His voice is breaking.
“She promised. She promised she wouldn’t leave.
She said—fuck, she said—” His breath shatters. He looks like he’s drowning.
And it destroys me.
I grab him by the shoulders—hard, grounding us both—then slam my forehead to his, pressing us together like I can force air back into both our lungs.
“Brother,” I grit out. “We find her first. We lose our shit after. Do you hear me?”
He squeezes his eyes shut, drags in a shaky breath, then nods once—fractured and battered, but enough.
Footsteps return, and Emerson reappears in the doorway, face pale. “Nothing,” he breathes. “But every door and window is still locked.”
The words punch the air out of the room.
Locked.
Every exit.
Meaning she wasn’t taken, and she didn’t run.
She walked.
Willingly.
“She found something,” I whisper, not because I’m uncertain but because the truth tastes like blood.
Rowan turns toward me slowly, his expression crumbling—hope breaking apart into fear so raw it hurts to look at. Emerson’s jaw tightens, eyes going black at the implications.
Because if Berk left willingly…
Fear outweighed staying.
A priority eclipsed us.
A threat targeted someone she loves.
And the only person she would ever break a promise for…
“Kimber,” Emerson whispers, voice hollow.
The realization hits all three of us at once.
A cold, brutal clarity.
Whatever Berk found—whatever threat she uncovered, whatever twisted bait Dean dangled—she walked straight into it. Alone.
And if she went alone…we’re already too far behind.
We have to dig. We have to see what the hell she saw that made her walk out of this house without us.
My hands hit the keyboard before either of my brothers finish their next breath.
The war room hums around me, monitors glowing, casting long shadows that feel like accusations.
Bryce’s phone is still propped on the desk where Berk left it, steadily dumping data in a slow drip.
That’s my first target. If she left it behind on purpose, it matters.
I pull up the stream of incoming intel, eyes scanning line after line until something red flags at the top.
A ping. A notification from her auto-alert system. The one she set to wake her if Dean reached out.
Timestamp: six hours ago.
A curse rips out of me before I can cage it. “Fuck.”
Six hours. She has six hours on us. That means she must’ve left not long after we fell asleep.
But even as panic grips the edges of my ribs, I see what she did for us. She left Bryce’s phone online to keep the dump going. She left her own phone routing program running with a satellite tether she coded herself. She planned for us to find her trail.
My throat tightens. “Good girl,” I mutter under my breath, fingers already flying over the keys.
Rowan’s pacing cracks against my nerves like gunfire. “Ronan, what the fuck are you muttering about? Tell us what you found.”
I drag in a breath that tastes like metal and dread. “There’s a text. Came through this morning. From Dean.”
The room freezes. Air stops moving.
They don’t ask to see it. They don’t have to. I read it out loud.
“Good morning, Berkley. Bryce is gone—I assume the warehouse fire explains that. You’re much more resourceful than you were in your youth.
Hopefully, the boys haven’t loosened you up too much.
I’d love to play again. You were such a tight number before.
If you want Kimber back, I propose a swap.
You for her. You have one hour to respond.
My voice breaks on the last line. I swallow hard, but it doesn’t go down.
“She responded with, ‘What do I need to do.’”
Emerson collapses into the nearest chair like someone cut the strings holding him up. He whispers like a prayer or a curse. “No. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”
Rowan stops pacing. Stops breathing. His fists tremble at his sides, knuckles bone-white, jaw clenched so tight I hear it grind.
The silence is suffocating.
Every one of us knows it in our bones, a truth that tastes like blood and ash. Berk didn’t stumble into a trap… she walked straight into it. By choice. And she walked into it alone.
Rowan finally stops pacing and snaps toward the monitors, planting his hands on either side of me as he leans in. His breath is harsh, his voice scraping raw when he demands, “Is there anything else? Any more messages? She asked what she needed to do, but there’s no response?”
He looks between the glowing screen and my face, hoping I’ll tell him something different than what he already knows.
I shake my head slowly, jaw tight. “No. Nothing. But she tied her phone into the network before she left. She knew we’d wake up and come straight here.
My guess is our avenging angel is leaving us breadcrumbs, hoping we follow the trail. ”
My fingers fly, muscle memory sharpened by fear. “If she agreed to a swap—if she went alone—where is she meeting him? And where does that leave Kimber?” My stomach knots as the words leave my mouth. “This could be a setup.”
“You think?” Emerson snaps, already knowing the answer. Dean won’t release Kimber out of mercy. He’ll use her the same way he always does—to force Berk to bend.
I switch screens and start pulling everything her phone synced before she walked out the damn door. As the data rolls in, one thread lights up like a fuse being sparked.
“I’ve got something.” I stab a finger toward the screen. “There. An unknown number at the top of her message history. Active. The last response was less than an hour ago. She’s been talking to this number… negotiating whatever the next steps are.”
The scrolling stops, and my heartbeat slams against my ribs. “Let me pull the number into our system and cloak it. If this is Dean—and I’d bet my life it is—we can’t tip him off that we’re tracing him. We need him blind. Completely unaware.”
Rowan’s breathing changes beside me, the sound of a man trying not to explode.
I grab his wrist, grounding him. “You need to text her,” I tell him.
“Right now. Ask her where the fuck she is. If she’s already with him, he’ll be watching her phone…
and it’ll look suspicious as hell if we aren’t freaking out that she’s gone. ”
His eyes sharpen with immediate understanding. “He expects her to keep us in the dark,” he mutters. “We have to play along.”
“Exactly.”
“Got it,” he snaps, and he’s already typing before I finish breathing the word.
He fires off message after message. Some filled with fear so real it shakes his hands. Some laced with fury, demanding she answer him. Others begging her to come home before it’s too late.
Even from here, I can feel the desperation bleeding off him.
Off all of us.
And the only thing that keeps me from snapping the keyboard in half is the fact she’s still leaving us pieces of her path.
She wants us to follow.
And we fucking will.