Chapter Fourteen
The next morning smelled of sawdust and trouble. Chloe hadn’t even made it three steps inside the gym before the foreman beelined toward her like a man bracing to deliver bad news. His expression said it before he opened his mouth.
“Oh no,” she murmured. “What now?”
“Ms. Giordano,” Hal said, scratching the back of his neck, “I wish I had better news. Someone broke in overnight.”
The words landed like a dropped barbell on her chest. Kayne stiffened beside her. She felt his presence at her back, warm and steady as bedrock, an anchor her nervous system latched onto without asking permission.
“What did they take?” she asked, surprised her voice didn’t shake.
“Tools. A lot of them.” Hal blew out a breath. “Thousands of dollars’ worth. Power saws, drills, nail guns, sanders, compressors. Pretty much everything. They knew exactly what to grab.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t one of the crew?” Kayne asked.
“I’d like to believe it wasn’t,” Hal responded.
“Were there signs of forced entry?”
“Oh, there was forced entry.” Hal gestured toward the side door. “The lock was pried clean off.”
Wonderful. Another violation. Another reminder that whoever was stalking her wasn’t slowing down but growing bolder.
Chloe folded her arms to contain the tremor racing up them. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. They’re targeting me, and now the gym.”
Kayne’s hand brushed her elbow in a soft touch, but it was enough to halt her self-blame speech before it gained momentum. “Chloe, this isn’t on you. It’s on whoever thinks they’re gonna get away with terrorizing you.”
The certainty in his voice steadied something fragile inside her.
“Where exactly were the tools stored?” Anja asked.
“Some were in here. The rest were in the back lot trailer.”
“Show me.”
Chloe followed as the three of them stepped outside. The trailer door hung crooked, its hinges twisted as if wrenched apart rather than cut. Kayne crouched, running a fingertip over the damaged metal. His expression darkened.
“Clean,” he muttered. “Too clean.”
“What does that mean?” Chloe asked.
“They were fast,” Anja explained. “In and out with no prints or debris. This wasn’t opportunistic, it was organized.”
Kayne bent down and picked something off the ground. It looked like a link, similar to the one he’d found in her office.
“Was there a chain around the trailer?” he asked Hal.
“No. I don’t know where that came from.”
Kayne pocketed it and lifted his gaze to Chloe, green eyes heavy with knowledge he didn’t want her to carry. Her stomach dipped. She knew that look now.
Anja disappeared as Kayne guided her back to the gym.
“This wasn’t some teenager looking for scrap to pawn,” Kayne murmured.
Before she could respond, a familiar voice chimed in behind them.
“I passed the construction crew on the way in.” Leo strode over, wearing a don’t-even-think-about-lying-to-me expression. “Break-in?”
Chloe nodded.
Anja returned with two bags. She unshouldered a sleek duffel. “Cameras go up today.”
“I have experience with electronics,” Kayne said. “Do you need help putting them up?”
“Yes.”
Chloe opened her mouth to ask why he wasn’t taking the lead, but she realized he was keeping his cover as boyfriend, not bodyguard, since Hal and a couple of the other construction workers were nearby.
“I’ll help too,” Leo offered.
Kayne took the second bag from Anja, and the three of them went to work,
“You’re installing cameras?” Chloe asked.
“Everywhere,” Anja said. Her light eyes softened a fraction. “Inside. Outside. Roofline. Parking lot. If a squirrel sneezes in the wrong direction, we’re gonna know.”
Kayne shot Chloe a look over his shoulder. “Your gym’s about to be the safest damn construction site in St. Louis.”
She’d planned to install a security system when the renovations were finished. That timeline just got aggressively revised. And she had no doubt that what Kayne and Anja brought with them wasn’t something you picked out online after reading reviews.
“None in the locker rooms,” she called out. Her clients needed to know they wouldn’t be spied on while they showered and changed.
Kayne was already scaling a ladder he found somewhere, a box of motion sensors tucked under one arm like a man born to do this.
Anja mapped the perimeter, calling out placements and coverage zones.
Leo kept up with them, positioning cameras as instructed.
At one point Anja turned back, her voice low but unyielding.
“This wasn’t random, Chloe.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And we’re not letting them get any closer.”
Chloe swallowed hard and nodded. Between the break-in, the stalking, the threats, and the way her life had shifted so far off balance she barely recognized the horizon, she should have been shaking.
But watching Kayne move with unflinching purpose, Anja lock down every blind spot, and Leo’s fierce expression as if he’d bulldoze St. Louis if it meant keeping her safe, she exhaled for the first time that morning.
Someone was hunting her, but she wasn’t alone anymore. And whoever had broken in last night? They weren’t going to like how well this place recorded their face next attempt.
This time, she’d be ready to look back.
#
Kayne turned the chain link over in his palm once, just enough to feel the cold bite of the metal and the faint burr where it had been snapped free.
It was the same cheap steel and the same message as the other one he’d found in Chloe’s office.
His pulse never changed, training saw to that, but something deeper went still, as if a blade had locked into place.
This wasn’t theft. This was theater. Someone was demonstrating proof of access and patience.
This was the type of person who left something behind because he wanted to be felt more than feared, wanted Chloe to lie awake wondering when he’d been close enough to touch her and chosen not to.
Kayne slid the link into his pocket and closed his hand over it, mouth tightening by a fraction.
He didn’t need to tell Chloe yet. He’d carry this part.
He always did. But whoever had dropped it had just crossed a line from nuisance to personal, and Kayne did not lose what was his to protect. Not ever.
The cameras were almost installed. Anja was finishing setting them up in the IT room, muttering Swedish profanity to herself.
Kayne was shadowing Chloe across the construction floor as if it was second nature because by now, it damn well was.
She insisted on checking progress herself, even though every fresh noise made her flinch before she pretended she hadn’t.
He kept a palm near the small of her back without touching her, the urge to steady her almost painful.
She didn’t need a bodyguard, she kept saying.
Didn’t need coddling or for him to hover.
Yeah? Tell that to the universe, which seemed hell-bent on dropping an anvil on her head every twenty minutes as if she were Wile E.
Coyote, falling prey to the Road Runner’s convoluted antics.
Chloe stepped beneath the open second-story landing, flipping through notes on her tablet, oblivious to the worker above her shifting equipment.
There was a loud scrape and wobble, then a shouted curse. Kayne’s instincts went ballistic.
He looked up and saw the metal ladder tipping off the edge directly above her as if he’d manifested it by thinking of the old Warner Brother’s cartoon.
“Chloe!”
He lunged without thinking.
One second she was reading measurements, the next she was airborne, arms trapped against his body as he slammed them both to the ground, twisting so he took the brunt of the hit. The ladder crashed to the floor with a metallic scream inches from where her skull had been.
Silence.
Then the foreman’s horrified voice spilled out in a rush. “Oh, my God, Miss Giordano, Kayne, I’m so sorry, it slipped, it wasn’t secure. Jesus, is she okay?”
Chloe trembled above him, tiny shivers running through her like aftershocks. She tried to push upright, but her legs were staging a full-scale rebellion.
Kayne hauled her into his lap before she could argue. “Cher, breathe,” he murmured, low enough for only her. “Just breathe for me.”
“I’m fine,” she whispered, breath stuttering.
“Bull.” He tipped her chin up, ignoring the audience. “You’re shakin’ outta your skin.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted again, the words wobbling like a bad lie.
The foreman hustled closer, mortified. “Kayne, Chloe, I swear, we check everything. I don’t know how this happened.”
Kayne cut him a look fierce enough to singe bone and muscle. “We’ll talk about it later.”
He wasn’t ready to pull his attention off the woman unknowingly clinging to his shirt. Her breath was warm against his throat. Her heartbeat thudded wildly beneath his palm, matching his. Relief hit him so hard it hurt, but something inside his chest cracked anyway.
She tried to sit back, but when her gaze snagged on the bent, twisted ladder lying exactly where she’d been standing, her face drained of color.
Kayne’s arms tightened before he could stop himself. “Hey. Look at me.”
She did, blue eyes wide, shaken straight through.
The world tunneled down to her face, her breath, the vulnerability she hated anyone seeing.
“Don’t scare me like that,” he said softly, even though none of this was her fault.
Her mouth pursed as her armor slid back into place. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You almost got crushed.”
“You caught me,” she whispered. “As always.”
That right there was what did it. He didn’t plan to kiss her.
He just did.
It wasn’t soft or careful. It was messy and desperate, days of fear, restraint, and the hellish idea of almost losing her detonating all at once. His mouth found hers as if it had been searching for it all along.
Chloe gasped, fingers curling in his shirt, pulling him closer. Her mouth opened beneath his, and every remaining scrap of good judgment he had went up in flames.