36. CJ
CJ
We arrive at Adrian’s house, but the gates are closed. The final thing standing between Eli and me.
They are locked and towering. For a second, my heart sinks. Then Deck doesn’t even slow down.
“Climb,” he says.
No hesitation. No plan. Just action.
We grab the metal bars and haul ourselves up. My hands slip, boots scraping for grip, but we make it over. We drop down the other side and immediately run.
Deck, Silas, Mack, and I don’t stop.
The house appears through the trees, sitting there like it knows what it has taken from me. Every step feels like a countdown. My heart is in my throat. Panic tries to rise, but I force it down. If I let fear take even one inch, I’ll lose him.
We run side by side, matching pace, closing the distance to the house. Closing in on the person I promised I would keep safe.
We find Finn before we find Eli.
He’s sitting against the wall, awake but barely. His eyes open when he hears us, but there is a heaviness behind them that scares the hell out of me. Pale. Exhausted. Confused. But alive.
That’s all that matters.
“Deck?” he whispers.
Deck is on him immediately, dropping to his knees and pulling him into his arms, kissing him carefully like he’s afraid Finn will disappear if he lets go.
Finn clings to him, crying, like letting go would break him all over again. The sight hits me hard. If Finn looks like this, what the hell did they do to Eli?
“Where’s Eli, little one?” Deck asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” Finn whispers. “I didn’t see him. I woke up here. I can’t even tell you how I got here. I remember fighting them in the car, but nothing after that.”
Deck looks at me. I nod once.
He hands Finn over to Mack and Silas. “Guard him with your lives. No one gets near him.” They don’t hesitate.
Deck presses his forehead to Finn’s, murmuring something only he can hear. Then he looks at me.
We both know Eli is still out there.
We leave them to it. Silas and Mack start checking Finn over without needing to be told. Finn isn’t leaving that room. Not alone. Not unprotected.
We move fast, before thought can slow us down.
The house is silent. It’s that silence that sits wrong in my chest as we search room after room. Then I see it. The door leading out toward the beach is open, curtains shifting with the wind.
My stomach drops as I walk toward it slowly.
Then I look through to the darkness and scan. I look for my boy. And then I see them.
Two figures on the beach below.
One standing.
One on his knees.
My heart stops. Even from this distance, I know him.
Eli.
My Eli.
The world narrows to that single image: the man I love kneeling in the sand, and the man who took him standing over him.
Deck sees it too. I don’t need to say a word. His face changes instantly.
* * *
We run.
We hit the path to the beach, boots slamming against cold ground, faster than thought, faster than fear can form into anything useful. Every second drags me backward, away from him.
What if I’m too late again?
Eli’s face keeps flashing in my mind. His smile. The way he says my name. The way he reaches for me like I’m his home.
I can’t lose him. Not after finding him. Not after getting this close.
Deck runs beside me, silent, locked in, carrying the same fear I am. We don’t speak. We don’t need to. We both know what we’re running toward.
Then it cuts through everything.
The gunshot.
We stop for half a beat on the gravel path.
Everything inside me screams one word.
No.
Not him.
Not my Baby Boy.
Not my Eli.
I’m moving again before the echo dies. Deck is right beside me. Neither of us speaks. There’s no time for anything except reaching him.
The beach explodes into view.
Moonlight spills across the water. Ice-white reflections scatter under our feet as we sprint.
Two figures near the shoreline, just as we saw from the house: one kneeling, one standing over him with a gun raised.
Adrian.
And Eli.
My brain doesn’t catch up with my eyes. I heard the gunshot. I saw him from the house. What I’m seeing now shouldn’t exist.
My Baby Boy is alive.
My knees nearly give out. Seeing him alive feels like being punched and saved at the same time.
The man turns at the sound of us hitting the beach. His eyes widen. For the first time since I started hunting him, Adrian looks surprised.
Good. I hope he’s fucking terrified. The hunter has become the hunted, and I know he can feel it. Death is coming for him.
“DROP THE FUCKING WEAPON!” Deck roars, his gun raised. “NOW!”
He doesn’t. But his hand shifts, and the gun swings toward Eli. Toward the man I love, frozen in the sand, exhausted, barely holding himself together.
Everything inside me fractures.
“NO!” The scream rips out of me.
Adrian smiles, and he pulls the trigger.
The second shot cracks through the night.
Eli flinches.
The bullet tears into the sand beside him. A deliberate miss. He fucking missed.
For half a second, relief tries to rise in me.
Then I see Adrian’s face. And I understand. This isn’t hesitation or mercy. This is pure control.
A fucking game.
He wants Eli to feel it. To know exactly how close it was. To sit in the fear of the next shot, waiting, breaking under the possibility of it. The final mind fuck.
My stomach twists as clarity locks in. He isn’t trying to kill him yet; No, he wants to break him first. But another truth hits harder, one Adrian knows I’m fully aware of: he only needs one more pull of the trigger, and that one bullet will find Eli.
And that thought nearly destroys me.
But Eli is still there. Still kneeling. Still trapped in a nightmare he fought too hard to escape. And Adrian is standing over him, playing with his life as though it belongs to him.
Not anymore.
Eli is mine.
And Adrian is about to learn what happens when you touch what’s mine.
* * *
“This fucker is playing with us,” Deck says beside me, his voice deadly quiet as we move toward the two men.
Deck is too far for a clean shot. He knows it, I know it, but he raises his gun anyway. I don’t hear the shot he takes, but I know it’s a warning, enough to pull Adrian’s attention off Eli for a second.
I watch Adrian slowly turn his head toward us, the gun still trained on Eli. Eli has his back to me, but the tremor in his body guts me. He’s been holding himself together with nothing but terror and willpower.
We keep moving. Closing the distance. Step by step.
“DROP IT!” Deck calls out.
We don’t slow. We don’t stop. Each step gives Deck a better angle, a better chance.
Adrian takes a step back, then turns again toward Eli, the gun still raised, still locked on him as if nothing else exists.
Then he laughs, the sound wrong and unhinged, broken around the edges. “You don’t understand!”
We keep moving.
“You think he loves you?” he spits. “He’s mine!” He snaps his head toward me.
We are close enough now to see it clearly: the obsession, the fracture behind his eyes.
“Not anymore,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s colder than I expect.
“He came back to me,” Adrian says, his smile twitching like it’s barely holding together.
“No.”
Deck and I close in further. He hangs back just enough to cover me as I take another step forward.
“He chose Finn.”
That lands differently, and something shifts in Adrian’s face. Just for a second. Uncertainty cracks through the obsession, because the truth is finally reaching him: Eli never chose him. Not once. He chose to save Finn.
The fantasy Adrian has built his entire life around starts to collapse in real time.
“He belongs to me,” Adrian says again, harder now.
“No.”
Another step.
“He belongs to me!” he shouts. His grip tightens, then falters. The arm holding the gun dips slightly.
Another step.
“No,” I say again. “He chose me. He’s mine.”
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. It’s not meant to show ownership or possession. It is said as a promise to Eli that nobody takes him again. I just hope he is still with me enough to hear it.
Adrian snaps the gun back toward Eli’s head.
I fire.
The shot hits.
He drops.
For a second, the world goes completely still. No sound or movement. Just the aftermath hanging in the air like it doesn’t know where to land.
Then I’m moving, straight to Eli.
I drop beside him and catch him as he collapses into me. I turn him away from Adrian’s body, shielding him without thinking. Deck drops beside us a second later, wrapping himself around both of us like a barrier.
I hold Eli so tightly I’m afraid he’ll disappear if I loosen my grip. I breathe him in, like I can pull him back into himself.
He’s shaking. So am I; so is Deck.
Deck stays close, his forehead resting briefly against Eli’s shoulder, a steady presence, a shield.
“Eli…”
He feels cold in my arms. Too small. Too fragile. The desperation in his grip shatters me. He’s clinging like I’m the last solid thing left in this world.
“Baby Boy,” I whisper.
His eyes find mine, and everything he’s been holding back breaks across his face at once. Fear. Pain. Relief that hurts more than it heals.
“I’m here,” I tell him, pressing my lips to his forehead. “I’m right here.”
His lips tremble.
“CJ…”
Just my name.
That’s all it takes.
My chest caves in. Tears spill before I can stop them.
“I’ve got you, Baby Boy. You don’t have to fight anymore. You don’t have to survive this alone anymore. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
He breaks.
Not loudly. Just a quiet, shattered release as everything he’s been holding finally gives way in my arms.
And I hold him through it.
Deck holds us too.
We hold him through every tremor, every sob, every piece of him Adrian tried to destroy.
“You came,” he whispers.
I kiss his hair.
“I’ll always come for you.”