Chapter 12
12
HAWKE
H awke didn’t like the way Vanessa was pacing.
She stood before the whiteboard, which someone had dragged into the safe room’s corner two days prior; half was covered in plot points and color-coded sticky notes, the other half blank. Her hair was up again, pencils jammed through the knot like weapons, and her mouth moved as she silently debated some internal plot twist he didn’t understand and didn’t need to.
What he understood was the tight line of her shoulders.
“You’re not a hostage,” he said, crossing his arms as he leaned against the reinforced steel door.
She didn’t stop pacing. “No, I’m a glorified caged bird with Wi-Fi and aftercare.”
“You’re safe.”
“I’m suffocating.”
His jaw flexed. She’d been patient. Disciplined. Sharp when she needed to be, soft when she let herself. But she was also used to control—over her words, her world, her space. And this vault wasn’t hers. Not really.
“Say what you want,” she added, “but I haven’t slept in my bed in nearly a week, and I’m behind on two deadlines. I have notes scattered across three hard drives and an entire outline I can’t even think about finishing because I can’t concentrate in this place.”
“You’re alive.”
“Great. I’ll put that in the acknowledgments,” she snapped.
He didn’t move. Didn’t react. Just waited.
She exhaled hard through her nose and dragged her hands down her face. “I’m not asking to go into the dungeon. I’m not even asking to go into the lounge uncollared.”
“I’m glad you understand as soon as I can find one worthy of you, I’ll buy it, but you’re not going anywhere uncollared.”
“Neanderthal,” she quipped with a grin.
“Brat,” he returned with no malice.
“I’m not even asking to go to a grocery store or have Amazon deliver. I just want to go home. With you, with a security team, with both… whatever it takes. I need my space, Hawke. I need my rhythm.”
“And if he’s watching?”
“Then let him watch me take my life back. That ought to piss him off. And didn’t you say he was going to have to get angry before he made a mistake?”
“No. That’s what Dawson said, right before I decked him.”
Vanessa rolled her eyes, but his gaze never wavered. Not because she wasn’t making sense—but because she was. She was right, and he hated it. Hated that he couldn’t lock her down without hurting her and the growing bond between them.
He pushed off the wall and walked toward her. “You want to go home?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Then I’m going with you. You don’t open a curtain. You don’t step onto the porch. I’ll rotate my team in shifts. Three outside, one inside with you at all times. Motion sensors at every window. Facial recognition tracking across your entire block.”
She didn’t flinch at the list. “Okay.”
“And if you so much as roll your eyes at protocol, I will put you over my knee and remind you who you belong to.”
Her lips curved slightly. “Promise?”
He grabbed her jaw and kissed her hard.
Three hours later, Hawke pulled into Vanessa’s driveway, the black SUV sliding smoothly into her garage like it had been there a hundred times. The gates had let them through without issue—code changed, surveillance adjusted, security system fully synced to his backup net. She had said little during the drive. Too busy looking out the window like the world might look different now that she was back in it.
It did. Everything did.
He killed the engine, glanced over at her, and reached for the rear latch as four Silver Spur bodyguards—all former special forces—exited the waiting black SUV in the drive. Hawke pulled into the garage and closed the door behind them.
“Wait for me to clear the house.”
But before he could open the door, his phone vibrated. He checked the screen. Gavin.
He answered on speaker. “Talk.”
“He’s awake,” Gavin said without preamble.
Hawke’s spine straightened. “Charles?”
“Yeah. Banged up, full of painkillers, but lucid. And he’s talking.”
Vanessa leaned in. “What did he say?”
Hawke didn’t take his eyes off the windshield. “Go on.”
“He confirmed it was Miles Brenner,” Gavin said.
Vanessa froze.
Hawke’s pulse kicked up. “Brenner was banned from the Iron Spur two years ago. I signed the file myself.”
“Charles says he’s the one who contacted him. Fed him the threats. Paid him to get close. Blackmailed him when he didn’t play ball.”
Miles Brenner. Tech consultant. Freelanced backend work for the Spur’s original operating system. Polished. Well-educated. Brilliant behind a keyboard. Too smooth on the floor. No active violations in the beginning, but the red flags had stacked fast—Dom arrogance with no foundation. Got obsessed with power, not connection. Vanessa had informed Gavin and the rest of the guys after Brenner cornered her post-scene and tried to start something she hadn’t consented to. She’d shut him down fast.
He hadn’t taken it well.
“Where is he now?” Hawke asked.
“No fixed address,” Gavin said. “Someone scrubbed all his contact data, but Reed’s digging. We’ll find him.”
“Find him faster.”
“I’ve already pulled the security request logs,” Gavin added. “He had brief admin access six months ago—claimed it was maintenance, but Reed thinks he built in a ghost line. An open tunnel into our system.”
Hawke’s jaw locked. “That’s how he’s been tracking us.”
“Looks like it.”
“Shut it down. And find him.” Hawke killed the call.
Vanessa clenched her fingers in her lap. “It was him.”
He nodded. “It fits.”
She blinked hard, her voice steadier than he expected. “Then I want to be the one to end it.”
“You won’t have to,” Hawke said. “Because I will.”
He pushed open his door and stepped into the garage. Every nerve in his body was alive again. Finally, they had a name. A target. A direction. And that meant Brenner’s game was almost over.
Hawke swept the first floor of Vanessa’s house in silence—corner to corner, room by room. Lights on. Blinds closed. He didn’t bother with words. His presence said enough. He didn’t move like a guest. He moved like someone who belonged there, who had every right to be inside her space, inside her world, guarding what was his.
Once the perimeter was clear, he returned to the garage, opened Vanessa’s door, and offered his hand.
She took it, her fingers lacing with his without hesitation.
“I’ll feel better once the system’s synced,” he said.
“I’ll feel better once he’s in the ground,” she replied, dry as ever.
They stepped inside together, and he waited for the door to shut and lock before tapping his phone again. He’d already preloaded Reed’s secure patch system, which would run diagnostics on the house’s existing surveillance grid. Her place had a solid consumer-grade setup, but that wasn’t enough anymore. Not for a man like Miles Brenner.
As the sync began, the screen lit with an incoming message from Reed. One word.
Confirmed.
Hawke tapped to expand.
Brenner installed backdoor access through SpurNet six months ago. Rooted himself into archived security data. Schedules. Club logs.
He felt the burn behind his eyes before he processed the rest. This wasn’t just a leak. It was a pipeline, straight into everything they’d tried to protect.
Another message followed, this one a compressed file. Encrypted video logs. Access reports. A trail of digital breadcrumbs. Hawke thumbed through the data fast—partial footage downloads. Interior shots. Times. Dates.
Every one of them tied to Vanessa.
Her arriving at the club.
Leaving her house.
Crossing a parking lot after a reading downtown.
All with timestamps. All saved in a folder labeled with her name.
Vanessa stepped in behind him, close enough to read the screen.
Her voice came low. “He’s been watching me that long?”
“Longer than we thought.”
She didn’t ask for the device. Didn’t need to see more. She turned and walked into the living room, arms crossed, gaze flicking to every shadowed corner like she was seeing it differently now. Because she was. Hawke followed her, pocketed the phone, and waited.
“Months,” she said. “He’s had months to build whatever story he wanted.”
“We’re going to dismantle it.”
“Piece by piece?”
He stepped in front of her. “No. All at once.”
He pulled out the device synced to the Spur’s internal system and dropped it onto the kitchen island. It lit instantly with a stream of code. Reed’s back trace pulling up log-in attempts from the original patch Miles had slipped into the network. The file had been dormant—quiet enough to avoid tripping red flags. But now that they were looking for it, the trail was there.
“He accessed archived footage, event logs, reservation systems, transport manifests,” Hawke said. “He knew your scene history. Your partners. Your preferred nights.”
Vanessa’s jaw clenched. “He’s trying to become the story.”
“No,” Hawke said. “He thinks he already is.”
He tapped a folder marked Jan—Security Override , and the screen flooded with another layer of code.
“This one,” he continued, “is more recent. Reed thinks it was an attempt to bypass Silver Spur’s lockout protocols. If he’d succeeded, he could’ve overridden camera feeds in real time.”
She blinked. “He was trying to walk back in.”
“Or watch without us knowing.”
She leaned on the island. “Tell me you have a plan.”
“I always have a plan,” he said. “And this one starts with me finding him before he realizes we know.”
Vanessa’s gaze met his. There wasn’t fear in it. There was fury.
“Find him,” she said. “Then give me five minutes alone with him before you finish the job.”
Hawke’s truck cut through the dark like a blade, headlights sweeping across the parking lot of Silver Spur Security headquarters. He didn’t wait for the engine to stop rumbling before he was out and moving. The team was already waiting in the upper-level war room—Dawson at the wall screen, Gavin pacing, Jesse sitting backward in a chair with a rifle case propped beside him. The team dialed Reed into the conference via the secured tablet.
“We’ve got one shot at this,” Hawke said as the door sealed behind him. “Brenner’s smart, but he’s arrogant. He wants to be seen.”
Dawson nodded toward the display. “We traced the backdoor code to an anonymous server that pinged off a commercial hub downtown. Public Wi-Fi, rerouted through three separate proxies. Whoever accessed it knew the system cold.”
“He doesn’t just know the system,” Hawke said. “He built part of it. Before we blacklisted him, he consulted on Spur’s third-gen surveillance net. He left himself an open door and walked through it like he owned the place.”
“And now?” Gavin asked.
“Now we give him a reason to come knocking again.”
Reed’s voice came through the speaker. “You want to bait him?”
“I want to end this,” Hawke said. “We plant false updates in the security logs—Vanessa moving locations. Then we leak access credentials tied to a dummy login, one that looks like someone on the inside is feeding him. It’ll lead him exactly where we want him.”
“You really think he’ll take the bait?” Jesse asked. “He’s already gotten inside her house. He’s done it before.”
“He hasn’t done it with me watching,” Hawke snapped. “Not like this.”
The room went still.
Gavin cleared his throat. “And Vanessa?”
“She’s staying put. I’m assigning a full team to her property. Perimeter guards. Internal sweeps every thirty minutes. No one gets in or out without my say-so.”
“That’s a lot of manpower,” Dawson muttered. “You expecting a war?”
Hawke turned toward him slowly. “This isn’t overkill. It’s insurance.”
“You’re not leaving much to chance,” Gavin said.
“I’m not leaving anything to chance.”
He didn’t wait for objections. The plan was already in motion. If Brenner wanted a scene, Hawke would give him one—only this time, he would control the stage.
Vanessa didn’t fight him when he told her about the added detail—at least not with words. Her mouth tightened, her arms crossed, and she paced the hallway like a caged cat.
“You’re putting four agents in my house,” she said. “One of them is sitting in my office. Do you know how impossible it is to write with someone breathing over your shoulder?”
“You’ll live.”
Vanessa snorted. “You’re not the one at risk of being smothered by alpha energy and bulletproof vests.”
He crossed the room, boxed her in with a hand braced on either side of the doorframe. “You asked to be here. You said you could handle it. That means you handle the security too.”
Her gaze flicked up to his. “You trust them that much?”
“No. But I trust myself to have their backs. And I trust them to follow orders.”
She opened her mouth like she had more to say, but then her eyes flicked down to his mouth. Her breath stilled.
Hawke leaned in. “I’ll be back in a few hours. You keep your phone on. You don’t argue with the team. And if anything feels off—anything—you call me. Immediately.”
Vanessa tilted her chin up. “You act like I’m not capable of thinking for myself.”
“I know you are,” he said. “But right now, I need you protected more than I need you empowered.”
That silenced her. He kissed her, firm and fast, and was out the door before she could find another reason to challenge him.
After getting the trap sent for Brenner, Hawke headed back to her place. The trip to Vanessa’s neighborhood was fast—faster than it should’ve been, even for him. Something had started nagging at him the second he pulled away. A cold itch at the base of his skull that hadn’t gone away.
When he turned onto her street, his gut clenched… no patrol car, no guards visible. And worse—no comms.
Hawke tapped his Bluetooth. “Bravo team, check in.”
Nothing.
“Alpha perimeter, report.”
Silence.
He killed the lights on his truck and coasted to the side of the house, jumping out before the engine even clicked off.
The side door stood unlocked. Every muscle in his body went still. He drew his weapon, low and silent, and entered.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. The hallway lights were still on, and the kitchen glowed faintly through the open archway, but he saw it as soon as he turned the corner.
Four men—his men—sat bound to the dining chairs. Each had their mouth duct-taped, heads lolled to the side. Conscious, but groggy. Their wrists were zip-tied behind their backs. Their weapons gone.
And in the center of Vanessa’s dining room table, lit by the overhead pendant lamp, sat a single white envelope.
No seal.
No stamp.
Just four words written across the front in precise, mechanical lettering:
Now it’s just us.
Hawke didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
He holstered his weapon and walked to the table. His hands didn’t shake as he picked up the note, but his blood ran cold.
Vanessa was gone, and Brenner had taken her.