Chapter 29
PORTIA
T he car smelled like vinyl and tension.
I sat in the backseat, arms wrapped around myself, eyes fixed on the crumbling estate in the distance—Blackthorn Hollow, as Caroline had called it.
The name alone sounded like something from a Southern gothic ghost story, all decay and bloodlines and whispered regrets.
The gravel drive snaked beneath moss-covered oaks, their branches clawing the night like warning fingers.
I couldn’t see Silas anymore. Not since they’d pulled him out of the car, his wrists zip-tied like he was a real prisoner. He hadn’t looked back at me. He didn’t need to. His fingers had brushed mine in the dark before the door opened, his grip firm, a silent promise he’d come back.
My heart hadn’t stopped racing since.
The man who stayed behind with me—one of Caroline’s team—stood a few feet away, his silhouette backlit by the moonlight slashing across the driveway.
He was tall, quiet, professional. The kind of man who didn’t flinch at a scream.
He hadn’t said much beyond the terse, “You stay in the car. Don’t move unless I say. ”
So I stayed.
At first.
I watched the sway of trees, the shadows crawling across the roof of the house.
The building itself looked like it had been forgotten by time—columns crumbling, shutters hanging askew, windows like dead eyes.
It reminded me of places from my childhood.
Abandoned things. Haunted things. Except this wasn’t haunted by ghosts. It was haunted by the living.
Focus , I told myself, dragging in a breath through my nose. Focus on what you know. What you can control.
I tried to conjure the wedding logistics like armor—centerpiece counts, final timelines, the arrival times for the musicians.
Had Anna’s seamstress confirmed the emergency hem?
Did the florals for Claire’s archway get rerouted after the supplier mix-up?
The thoughts helped, but only barely. They didn’t drown out the deeper panic, just muted it—like stuffing cotton in a wound that needed stitches.
I thought of the others. The brides. The Dane brothers.
If they knew what was happening right now—if they knew Silas had gone into the mouth of hell alone—they wouldn’t be silent.
Marcus would’ve had a weapon already drawn.
Elias would’ve tracked us within the hour.
Even Atlas, with his quiet steadiness, wouldn’t have let me sit in this car by myself, fingers trembling. And the women?
God. The women.
They were all power, each of them forged by fire in different ways.
Claire, who’d survived captivity and refused to be broken.
Sloane, who’d been held for leverage but never gave her captors the satisfaction of fear.
Vivienne, who had walked into a den of thieves with Elias at her side and come out the other end victorious.
Isabel, who had stood on the beach when the explosion rocked the ground and didn’t flinch.
They were strong. Just like me.
Stronger, maybe.
And suddenly, it didn’t feel so impossible to keep breathing. I wasn’t alone. Not really. I was one of them now—battle-tested, love-bruised, still standing.
I pressed my palm against my knee to stop it from shaking.
My phone was dark. No signal out here. Figured.
I chewed the inside of my cheek, a voice rising in my head, louder and louder the longer I sat still. It was my own. The version of me from Atlanta—the professional, the planner, the woman who made miracles out of messes and didn’t blink when shit got real.
She was screaming now.
You shouldn’t be here.
You’re out of your depth.
You love a man at the center of a war and think that makes you strong, but it might just make you dead.
I didn’t need her commentary. I already knew.
My eyes snapped up as movement caught my attention—the man beside the car pressed a finger to his earpiece, listening hard. His posture stiffened.
Then he turned, pulling the door open.
“They’re asking for me inside,” he said. “Stay put. I’ll be back.”
“Wait—what do you mean, they’re asking for you?” My voice sounded small, brittle.
“Something’s happening. I don’t know what. Stay here.”
And then he was gone, jogging into the darkness, his figure swallowed by the tree line.
I stared at the now-empty road.
Something was wrong. I could feel it.
The silence was a weight pressing against my ears, too heavy, too loud. I couldn’t hear anything—not the crunch of gravel under his boots, not the low murmur of voices inside the house. Just the wind through the trees and the thud of my own heart.
I reached for my phone.
The signal bar blinked weakly—one notch, then none. Then one again, like the tower itself was uncertain. I stared at it like it might decide to cooperate if I looked desperate enough. My thumb hovered over the screen.
Should I call them?
The brothers.
Ryker, who had the tactical mind of a soldier and the instincts of a predator.
Marcus, who didn’t flinch in a crisis—whose hands could cradle or destroy depending on what the moment required.
Elias, with his soft eyes and hard resolve.
Noah, who could read a situation ten moves ahead.
Charlie, the quiet strategist with a temper no one ever saw until it exploded.
Atlas, with that steady stare, always calculating.
They would want to know. They would need to know.
And they’d come. I didn’t doubt it for a second. Not one of them would leave Silas alone in the lion’s mouth, no matter how badly he wanted to handle it himself.
I should call.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and opened my contacts. My hands trembled as I tapped Ryker’s name. It rang once. Then twice. A sharp crackle came through the speaker. Then silence.
“Portia?” His voice was faint, distorted, like it was traveling from the bottom of a well.
“Yes—it’s me,” I whispered, pressing the phone harder to my ear, heart hammering.
“Where are—what—Silas?—?”
Static. Then a snap like a wire breaking.
“I’m at—Blackthorn—Caroline’s plan. It’s—Ryker, I think it’s bad—” I got out in a rush, before the signal splintered again.
Another voice in the background, too muffled to place. Then Ryker: “Stay—don’t move—Portia, listen to me?—”
The line went dead.
“No—no, no, no?—”
I stared at the screen as the call dropped completely. One bar. Then none.
I tried again, redialed, heart in my throat.
Call failed.
Of course.
I tossed the phone into the seat next to me with a frustrated breath, my fingers digging into the leather-wrapped steering wheel like I could squeeze the panic out through pressure alone.
At least he knew. At least one of them knew.
But it didn’t feel like enough. Not with Silas inside a house that looked like a mausoleum for the damned. Not when my gut twisted tighter with every passing second.
I leaned forward, straining my eyes against the dark, willing myself to hear something—anything.
All I heard was the sound of my own breath, and the rising drumbeat of my pulse.
Stay in the car , the man had said.
Stay safe.
Stay still.
Seconds passed. Then a minute. Then three.
The silence buzzed in my ears.
And then?—
Pop.
A gunshot cracked through the air. Sharp. Distant.
My pulse exploded.
Another shot followed. Closer this time.
Then another. And another.
The night wasn’t quiet anymore. It was screaming.
And so was my body. Every instinct I had clawed to the surface at once. Run. Get help. Stay down. Hide. But none of those made sense.
Because Silas was inside that house.
I looked at the door handle like it might burn me if I touched it.
And in that moment—heart pounding, every muscle pulled tight, dread thick in my throat—I saw everything I hadn’t let myself want before.
A future.
With him.
I used to say I didn’t believe in forever. That marriage was a luxury for people who didn’t understand how easily it could all fall apart. I built a business on other people’s fairy tales, on rented bliss and curated joy, but I’d kept myself locked out of the narrative. Safe. Separate. In control.
But none of that mattered now.
Not when Silas might be bleeding out on the other side of that door. Not when the man who made me feel more alive than anyone else ever had had walked willingly into a fire to keep others safe.
I loved him.
Not in the pretty, comfortable way the world sold it. Not with brunches and well-lit engagement photos. I loved him in the jagged, breathless way. In the way that remakes you from the inside. In the way that demands something raw and real and terrifying in return.
And I knew— I knew —that if I had to, I would burn the whole world to the ground to get to him.
If he asked, I’d marry him in a heartbeat.
No plans, no dresses, no perfectly arranged florals.
Just us, and the ashes we’d both crawled through to find one another.
I wanted mornings with him, and late nights, and bruised knuckles and laughter that shook our walls.
I wanted the messy kind of love, the dangerous kind—the kind you bleed for.
Silas Dane had become my truth. My storm and my shelter.
And I wasn’t going to lose him.
So, I opened the door.
The night air hit me like a slap—briny, laced with smoke. I crouched beside the car, my breathing shallow, trying to see where the shots had come from. But it was impossible. The trees moved too much, and the dark was too thick.
What the hell am I doing?
But I already knew.
I was running toward the door before I could talk myself out of it.
My feet barely made a sound on the gravel, but my heartbeat was a drum in my ears. I passed the oaks, the wrought-iron gate that had been flung open, the body of one of the guards face-down by the hedgerow. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. There wasn’t time to be afraid.
The porch was slick with dew. The front door hung ajar.
A breath caught in my throat.
I stepped inside.
Smoke stung my nose. The foyer was massive—dark wood, shattered glass, blood smeared on the marble. Furniture overturned. The chandelier above me swung on its chain, creaking with every shift.
Gunfire rang out again, closer now. I ducked, heart thundering, eyes scanning for movement.
I didn’t have a weapon. Didn’t have a plan.
All I had was the sound of Silas’s voice in my memory—the way he’d said he loved me like he meant it with his whole goddamn soul—and the knowledge that if he was bleeding out on some floor in this cursed mansion while I sat quietly in a car, I would never forgive myself.
I moved down the hall, stepping over a fallen vase, glass crunching underfoot. Doors stood open to the left and right—sitting rooms, maybe, or studies—but I kept going. The gunshots had come from the back of the house.
Then I heard it.
His voice.
Low. Rough. Agonized.
“Get her out of here. Now.”
A door slammed.
I ran toward the sound, skidding around a corner. My breath hitched. A body slumped against the wall, blood painting the wallpaper. Not Silas. Not anyone I recognized.
Footsteps above me. Shouts. The crack of something breaking.
Then—
A scream.
Not his.
Mine.
Because around the next corner, in the center of a wide room that had once been a ballroom, I saw him.
Silas.
On his knees.
Hands bloody.
Face wild.
His shirt was torn at the shoulder, blood blooming across the fabric. Beside him lay a man with a bullet wound to the chest. Another man aimed a weapon at Silas from across the room.
And there, standing in the shadows behind the gunman, was Caroline.
Her eyes locked with mine the second I stepped into the doorway.
“Portia,” she said. “No?—”
But it was too late.
The gunman turned.
And aimed straight at me.
Silas roared.
Everything after that happened in a blur.
He lunged. Caroline moved. A shot rang out.
And I screamed his name.