37. Rafferty
Rafferty
H er word hangs in the air, a promise and a brand. My cock, still half-hard, twitches at the finality of it. Yours. We’ve claimed her, marked her, and she’s claimed us right back.
I shift my weight, my body aching in the best fucking way.
Venetia’s asleep, her breathing deep and even, her face finally free of the tension that’s been her constant companion.
She looks so fucking small nestled between us.
My hand rests on her hip, the skin warm and soft.
I want to keep her like this forever, safe and sated in our bed.
“She’s out,” Viper grunts, his voice low. He’s propped up on an elbow, his gaze fixed on her, watching over his prized possession.
My phone buzzes in the pocket of my discarded pants, and I climb off the bed to answer it. I know exactly who it is before I even check. I’ve been expecting it.
“Dad,” I say, answering it quietly with the phone pressed between my ear and my shoulder as I pull on my pants. I leave the room, so I don’t wake Venetia. “Are you all caught up?”
“Yeah,” he says. “What the fuck? I leave the country and go off the grid for three days, and I come back to a total shitstorm.”
“I know,” I say with an eye roll. “We’re handling it.”
“How?”
“By playing defensive. We aren’t leaving St. Seb’s. That arsehole wants us, he has to come to us.”
“Cravenmoor,” he growls. “I always knew there was something weird about him.”
“Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
“Hindsight won’t help us now,” he grunts. “What do you need?”
“Eyes on Cravenmoor’s movements. We’ve cut off his surveillance here, so he’s blind, but we are too. We need to know when he’s coming and with what.”
“I’ll put the network on it. They’ll have something for you within the hour.” He pauses, and I know what’s coming next. “The girl. What’s her part in this beyond being the target?”
My grip on the phone tightens. I glance back at the closed bedroom door, the image of her fucked and wrecked is burnt into my memory. “She’s not a part of this,” I say, my voice low and final. “She is this. She’s the whole fucking board.”
My dad is silent for a moment, absorbing the weight of my words.
I’ve spent my life as a player, discarding one relationship after another, so he knows something else is going on here.
What he doesn’t know is that Venetia is the woman who has given me a reason to keep moving and not fall completely into the assassin’s ice-cold grip that takes so many of us.
He doesn’t know that she gives me the kind of love and attention that I’ve been craving for years now.
He doesn’t know that I will die for her if it comes to that.
“Whatever you need to keep breathing, you’ve got it,” he says gruffly. It’s probably the most caring thing he has said to me since I was a child.
“Start with what I asked for.”
The line goes dead. Nothing else needs to be said. The Warrick Consortium is now officially at war, and the target is Jonathon Cravenmoor. This just tipped the odds more in our favour, which makes me feel a bit less unsettled about this shitshow.
I shove my phone back in my pocket and lean against the cool stone wall, the adrenaline finally starting to fade, leaving a deep, satisfying ache in its place. We have a plan. We have allies. And we have a queen who isn’t afraid to get her hands bloody.
I push off the wall and head back into the room. Viper is pulling on a pair of jeans, his movements economical and precise. Blake is already dressed, standing by the window, his gaze fixed on the quad below, no doubt calculating angles and kill zones. Venetia is still asleep.
Good. She needs the rest.
“My dad’s in,” I announce, my voice a low rumble in the quiet room. “The Consortium’s resources are ours. He’s putting his network on Cravenmoor. We’ll have intel on his movements within the hour.”
Blake turns from the window, a flicker of satisfaction in his green eyes. “Good. That gives us a timeline.”
“A timeline to do what?” Viper grunts, shrugging on a black tee. “Wait for him to show up?”
“No,” I say, a slow smile spreading across my face as I grab my tee.
“A timeline to prepare the welcome party.” I look from Blake’s calculating expression to Viper’s barely contained violence.
We’re a fucking perfect trio of destruction.
Strategist, brute, ghost. “We need to check those tunnels Peter mapped out. Cravenmoor will know them like the back of his hand. We need to as well.”
Viper’s answering grin is pure, vicious promise. But then he scowls. “I have to do laundry first.”
I blink slowly. “What?”
“Venetia has no clean clothes,” he points out. “I told her I’d get on it.”
“You her maid now?” I joke.
“Fuck you,” he growls. “Would you rather she saunter about here naked?”
That wipes the smile firmly off my face. “Fine. Laundry first, tunnels after.”
“You go ahead,” he says. “We don’t really have to stick together for laundry.”
“No, but we might need you underground.”
“Rats,” he snarls and starts shoving Venetia’s laundry into a holdall bag. “I’ll pass. Off you go.”
I exchange a look with Blake. He just shrugs, his face impassive. Viper’s got his own way of doing things, and arguing with him when he’s in this mood is like pissing into the wind. Besides, someone needs to stay close to Venetia. I trust him with that more than anyone.
“Your loss,” I mutter, grabbing a couple of torches from the desk drawer. Blake follows me out, closing the door softly behind us. The corridor is quiet, but it’s uneasy. It feels like the calm before the storm, the deep breath before the plunge.
Peter meets us halfway down the stairs. “Apart from the access you already found in the Admin Building, there are two others I’ve found,” he says without bothering with pleasantries.
“Show us.”
Peter nods and turns, heading down a floor and then going back on ourselves.
“Are they stable?” Blake asks Peter’s retreating back. “Any signs of collapse? What’s the ventilation like?”
“They’re original castle escape routes, but they’re rock-solid,” Peter replies over his shoulder.
He stops in front of a large, faded tapestry depicting some ancient battle scene. It’s dusty and forgotten, the kind of thing you walk past a hundred times and never really see. Peter pulls the heavy fabric aside, revealing a stone wall that looks like all the other stone walls in this place.
But he runs his hand over the surface, his fingers searching for something I can’t see.
He presses a section of mortar between two stones.
A low grinding sound echoes in the corridor as a section of the wall swings inward, revealing a dark, gaping hole that smells of damp earth and centuries of disuse.
“Clever,” Blake murmurs, his eyes already assessing the tactical implications of a hidden entrance right off a main stairwell. “Easy to defend, impossible to find unless you know what you’re looking for.”
“And easy to get trapped in,” I add, flicking on my torch and shining the beam into the oppressive blackness. The passage is narrow, stone-cut, and slopes downward sharply. The air that drifts out is cold enough to raise goosebumps on my arms.
“We need to map this,” Blake says, already pulling his tablet out.
I take point, moving into the tunnel silently, my other hand resting on the grip of my gun.
The sound of our breathing is swallowed by the thick, cloying darkness.
The torch beam cuts a sharp, lonely path ahead, revealing dripping walls slick with moisture and the occasional skittering of probable rats, which makes me grateful Viper isn’t here and shooting at them.
“How far does it go?” I ask Peter, my voice a low whisper that still sounds too loud in the confined space.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” he murmurs.
The beam of my torch picks out chisel marks on the stone, ancient and weathered.
Every shadow could hide a threat. This is a fucking deathtrap if Cravenmoor’s set it up right.
One man with a gun could hold this chokepoint against a dozen.
I glance back. Blake is tapping away on his tablet, mapping our progress in real-time, his face illuminated by the screen’s glow.
He looks completely unfazed by the claustrophobic darkness.
“The air’s still good,” he observes, his voice steady. “There must be ventilation shafts somewhere. Probably hidden in the stonework of the outer walls.”
We press on for what feels like an eternity, the only sounds our soft footfalls and the steady drip-drip-drip of water seeping through the rock.
The passage opens into a small, circular chamber, no bigger than a broom cupboard.
Two more tunnels branch off from it, identical dark maws leading deeper into the earth.
“Fuck,” Peter breathes from behind me. “This complicates things.”
“Not really,” I say, shining my torch down one path, then the other. They look the same. “We split up. Cover more ground.”
“Absolutely not,” Blake counters immediately. “Standard tactical error. We have no idea what’s down there. We stay together.”
He’s right, of course. Splitting our small force is idiotic.
But the thought of leaving one of these paths unexplored, a potential backdoor for Cravenmoor’s forces, makes my skin crawl.
This isn’t just about defence anymore. This is about knowing every inch of our battlefield better than the enemy does, and that means taking risks. “So left or right?”
Blake closes his eyes as his brain does that thing that no one else’s does. “Right. It leads towards the walls. Left will simply take us deeper under the castle grounds.”
“Let’s fucking go then,” I say, taking the lead and heading down the right passageway, hoping we make it out of here alive and back to Venetia.