Chapter 22
ZANE
I wake up on my back, the cold damp of the earth seeping through my clothes. My head pounds, a slow, insistent throb at the base of my skull. My limbs feel heavy, sluggish, like I’ve been out longer than I should’ve been.
I push up onto my elbows, groaning as a wave of dizziness hits. The world tilts before settling into focus. The lake stretches out in front of me, dark and unmoving. The air is thick with the scent of damp leaves and something metallic—blood.
My phone lies a few feet away, the screen cracked, the faint glow of a missed notification flickering. I reach for it, wincing as my fingers brush something wet near my temple. Blood. My blood.
Voices drift through the trees, urgent, searching.
“Mia. Ella! Emma!” Asher calls out. “Emma! Ella!”
“Asher,” I rasp, my throat dry as hell. I try again, a little louder. “Asher!”
Footsteps crunch through the underbrush, moving fast. A flashlight beam sweeps over the area before settling on me. Asher steps into view, his jaw tightening.
“Jesus,” he mutters, crouching beside me. “What the hell happened to you?”
I shake my head, trying to piece it together. “Not sure,” I admit, voice hoarse. “One moment I was making the rounds, and the next…” I trail off, sifting through fragmented memories.
A noise. Footsteps behind me. A sharp pain at the back of my skull.
Then nothing.
Asher grips my shoulder, steadying me as I try to sit up fully. His eyes flick to the blood on my head, then to my busted phone.
“You were jumped.” It’s not a question.
I exhale sharply. “Looks that way.”
His gaze shifts toward the trees, scanning the darkness. “You see who it was?”
“No.” My frustration builds. “But whoever it was, they got the drop on me.”
He curses under his breath. “The twins and Mia are missing.”
Everything inside me goes still. My head might be pounding, my vision a little off, but none of that matters anymore.
“What happened?” I demand.
Asher grimaces. “I’m guessing the same thing that happened to you.”
“Shit.”
Asher exhales sharply, running a hand through his hair. “Can you stand?”
I nod, but the second I push up, the world wobbles. Asher grabs my arm, keeping me upright.
“We don’t have time for this,” he mutters, scanning the dark woods. “Emma ran off. Mia followed. And now—”
A scream cuts through the night.
Mia.
We push through the underbrush, each step fueled by adrenaline and barely contained rage. It takes us a few minutes to get to the main road.
The muddy road is fresh with tire tracks, deep grooves where someone took off fast.
Asher curses under his breath, kneeling to run his fingers through the grooves that came from his truck.
“Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “They took my goddamn truck.”
My stomach churns. Jason wasn’t alone; that much is clear. The ambush was planned. He wanted Mia, and he got her.
I exchange a look with him, my stomach twisting. “You keep a spare key in it?”
His jaw flexes. “Glove compartment.”
“Son of a bitch.” I kick a rock out of the way and look down at my phone. The screen flickers, then dies. “Mine’s fried. Yours?”
Asher checks his, shaking his head. “No signal.” He curses, rubbing a hand over his mouth.
We make it to the house, breathless, our boots slamming against the wooden porch.
Asher shoves the door open, and the moment we step inside, I know something is wrong.
The air feels thick, charged with the absence of the people who should be here.
The surveillance hub should be humming, screens flickering with live feeds, but when Asher flicks the switch, nothing happens.
Dead silence.
I grip the edge of the desk, knuckles white. My head is still pounding, my body aching from whatever the hell they hit me with, but none of that matters. Not when Mia and the girls are out there.
Asher moves to the counter, grabbing a notepad and a pen. “Damon’s gonna come back to a ghost town if we don’t leave something behind.”
He scribbles something on the notepad.
“M & girls gone. Comms dead. Tracking east.”
He rips the page from the pad and slaps it onto the counter. “Let’s move.”
I don’t need to be told twice. We step back out into the night, every second wasted when Mia and the girls are in Jason’s hands. And that’s something I can’t live with.
Asher curses and moves quickly to check the servers, fingers flying over the keyboard. “Everything’s down,” he says, voice tight. “They took out the feed.”
I run a hand through my hair, pulse hammering. “That’s not a damn coincidence.”
“No, it’s not.” Asher’s jaw clenches.
We move through the forest, scanning the ground for anything—a broken branch, a scrap of fabric, fresh footprints. But the storm rolling in has already begun to muddy the tracks. The damp leaves and shifting wind make it impossible to tell if someone has passed through recently.
It’s frustrating as hell.
Asher’s barely said a word since we left the house, but his tension is palpable. He wants blood, and I don’t blame him.
After another fruitless sweep of the woods, we circle back to the road. The tire tracks are still visible in the soft dirt, but without a direction, we’re grasping at straws. I glance up, scanning the tree line, and that’s when I spot it.
A structure, half-hidden by dense foliage.
“There.” I point, and Asher follows my gaze.
A deer blind. Elevated, camouflaged. The perfect vantage point to watch the road without being seen.
Asher exhales sharply, something clicking into place in his head. “Shit.”
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head, already moving toward the blind. “There was a hunter out here a few days ago,” he says. “Ran into him while I was checking the perimeter. Claimed he was just out for deer, even offered me some meat.”
I frown. “And you believed him?”
“No,” Asher says flatly. “But I didn’t have a reason not to. Not until now.”
We push through the undergrowth, making our way toward the blind. My pulse picks up. If this so-called hunter had anything to do with Jason, if he was out here watching us—hell, if he was working with him—then we’re already playing catch-up.
We reach the base of the blind. The wooden ladder is old but sturdy. Asher grips the rungs and starts to climb while I stay below, scanning the area, my gun in hand.
A few seconds later, I hear Asher curse. “Son of a bitch!”
“What?” I climb up behind him.
I get my answer as soon as I step in.
“This isn’t a deer blind,” I mutter, stepping inside. The space is too tight for both of us to move easily, but that’s not what sets my nerves on edge. It’s the gear. “What the fuck?”
Professional-grade surveillance equipment is crammed into the small structure. A laptop, its screen dark. A parabolic microphone with a long-range attachment. Night vision scopes. A fucking signal jammer, humming that makes my head throb.
“Jesus Christ,” I exhale. “This wasn’t some random hunter. This is a fucking stakeout.”
Asher’s jaw is tight. “And he was watching Mia.”
I follow his gaze to the laptop. It’s open, but the screen is in sleep mode. Asher presses a key, and the screen flickers to life.
A live feed of the lake house.
My blood turns to ice. The angles aren’t from our security cameras. These are different. Someone had installed their own surveillance on us.
There’s no feed of the house’s interior, just the surrounding areas—the porch, the driveway, the backyard, even the upstairs windows. It was all being monitored remotely.
“This is how they knew our routines,” Asher says, voice low with anger. “They’ve been watching this whole time.”
A sick realization settles over me. “And we never saw them.”
Asher doesn’t reply. He just clicks through the feeds, his shoulders stiff. Then he stops.
A paused frame of Mia and the girls, taken earlier today.
My stomach clenches. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. They were waiting for an opportunity.
And now, they had one.
Asher yanks the laptop’s hard drive out, disconnecting it from the power source. “We’re taking this back. Maybe I can pull something from it.”
I nod, but my mind is already racing ahead. My head is spinning, my pulse hammering in my throat. They didn’t leave. They were taken.
Jason has them. Mia. The girls.
I grip the edge of the surveillance desk so hard, my fingers go numb. My chest feels hollow, like someone scooped out my insides and replaced them with ice.
Where did he take them? What does he plan on doing?
I don’t need to ask why. Jason is obsessed. Possessive. He’s been playing the long game, waiting for the right moment to strike. And now, he’s got her. Them.
I exhale sharply, forcing my mind to focus. Think, Zane. Think.
Jason isn’t the type to just vanish without a trace. He’s arrogant. He leaves breadcrumbs, even when he doesn’t mean to.
But that sick feeling in my gut says he’s had this planned for a long time.
A low curse from Asher snaps me back. He’s pacing now, rolling his shoulders like he’s ready to tear someone apart. “We need to move,” he says, voice dark with frustration. “Every second we waste—”
“I know.” My voice comes out rough. My eyes drop to the laptop, the feeds of Mia and the girls still frozen on the screen.
I never got to tell her.
That this isn’t just attraction, but more. That she’s not just a client, not just another mission.
I should have told her the first night she let me touch her. Should have told her the moment she started looking at me like maybe—just maybe—she felt it, too.
Rage crashes through me like a goddamn wrecking ball. Mia. The twins. Jason has them.
I don’t think, I just react. My fist slams into the surveillance desk, then again. The brittle crunch of plastic splitting under my knuckles barely registers. The buzzing hum of the jammer is still going, feeding the static that’s been drowning us since this nightmare started.
Fuck this.