Chapter Twenty-Five
Chloe surfaced from sleep slowly, warm and disoriented, the way she always did when she forgot, just for a second, that nothing about her life was normal anymore.
Kayne was sprawled around her, one heavy arm draped over her waist, claiming her in his sleep and never bothering to let go. His warmth soaked into her back, solid and reassuring. His breathing was steady and deep. She hadn’t achieved that amount of calm on her own for weeks.
For a fleeting, treacherous moment, she let herself pretend this was real. That there was no stalker or threat. No locked doors or contingency plans. Just a man in her bed who smelled faintly of soap and heat and something unmistakably him that she would recognize in a room packed with people.
Her phone vibrated on the nightstand, and her body went rigid. Calls this early were rarely good.
Kayne felt it instantly. His arm tightened reflexively, protectively, before he was fully awake. “You okay?” he murmured, voice rough with sleep.
Chloe swallowed and reached for the phone, her pulse already skidding. The screen glowed with the name Evan Calder. Had her website crashed again? That would suck, but would it be worthy of an early morning call?
“I need to take this,” she whispered.
Kayne nodded once, already alert, his hand sliding away but his presence staying close.
“Evan?” She pressed the phone to her ear, sitting up.
His voice came through strained, breathless, and edged with something she’d never heard from him before. Fear.
“Chloe, you need to listen to me. There’s been a fire.”
Her heart thudded hard. “A fire where?”
“Sandy’s house.”
Her hand flew to her mouth.
“It’s bad,” he cut in, voice breaking. “Really bad. The fire department’s here. The whole place is gone, Chloe. They’re still working on it, but,” he exhaled sharply, “Sandy and Mark lived on the top floors. We can’t get in touch with them.”
The words didn’t land all at once. They fractured, splintered, then scattered. Inside, something broke.
“No,” Chloe whispered, shaking her head even though Evan could see it. “No, they would’ve gotten out. Sandy sleeps with her phone on. She’d have heard alarms.”
“Chloe.” He said her name gently, and that was worse than shouting. “You should come. We’re all here.”
She ended the call without realizing she had done so.
Kayne was already sitting up, his gaze reading her face with terrifying accuracy. “What happened?”
Her throat felt too tight for air. “Sandy’s house is on fire,” she said, the words foreign and brittle. “The offices. The entire building. They . . . they think Sandy and her husband might have been inside.”
Kayne swore under his breath. He was out of bed in seconds, pulling on jeans and already reaching for his phone.
“We’re going,” he said, not asking.
The street was chaos when they arrived. Fire engines lined the block, lights strobing red against the dawn sky. Smoke billowed upward in thick, choking plumes, the smell of burning wood and melted insulation clawing into Chloe’s lungs the second she stepped out of the SUV.
The building was unrecognizable.
Where Sandy’s vintage Victorian home had once stood proud was now a blackened skeleton, windows blown out, upper floors collapsed inward, as if the structure had folded in on itself. Firefighters swarmed what remained, hoses arcing water into the wreckage as steam hissed and smoke churned.
Chloe stopped dead at the curb. Her body refused to move. Kayne’s hand closed firmly around hers. Anja and Leo flanked them, silent and watchful, their expressions grim in the flickering light.
“Oh, my God,” Chloe whispered.
She spotted Evan first. His shoulders were hunched, arms wrapped around himself, trying to hold his body together. He looked up and saw her, and something in his face crumpled. He crossed the distance quickly and pulled her into a hug she didn’t have the strength to return.
She stepped back, her eyes scanning desperately. “Where’s Sandy? Have you talked to her? Have they said anything? Anything at all?”
Evan shook his head, chin wobbling. “They’re still searching. It happened fast. Neighbors said the fire was already tearing through the top floors when the alarms went off.”
Chloe’s gaze drifted past him and landed on Jezzie, Aiden, and several of Sandy’s other employees.
Aiden’s hands were shoved into the pockets of his hoodie, his face lit by the orange glow of the flames.
His expression was unreadable. Jezzie couldn’t stop moving from one foot to the other, her head shaking from side to side, clearly not believing what her eyes were seeing.
Chloe started to tremble.
“Cher.” Kayne turned her gently toward him. “This is not on you.”
She wanted to believe him. God, she wanted to. But as another section of the building collapsed inward with a sickening groan, Chloe couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t an accident. That fire wasn’t just destruction.
It was a message that was somehow terrifyingly aimed straight at her.
#
Kayne didn’t believe in coincidences, which was unfortunate, because he was currently standing in the chill-damp aftermath of a burned-out house, breathing in smoke that hadn’t quite settled, while Chloe leaned into his side, her body subconsciously deciding he was home base.
The call had come too early. Those calls always did. The fire was a total loss. Sandy and her husband were possibly inside.
Chloe hadn’t cried. Not yet. She looked hollowed out instead, eyes fixed on the wreckage.
Kayne watched firefighters move through the rubble with methodical efficiency, steam hissing where water met heat and curling up from charred beams. The top floors where Sandy and her husband had lived were gone.
Just gone. As if the fire had been personal. Hungry.
Kayne shifted slightly, angling his body so Chloe was shielded from the worst of the view. He didn’t want her cataloging details the way he was. The burn pattern, the way the windows had blown outward, the unmistakable feel of accelerant lingering beneath the smoke.
He’d seen this kind of destruction before, and not from fires that started by accident, but ones that were fed and encouraged to take exactly what someone wanted gone.
He leaned down. “Cher, this wasn’t about you.”
She looked up, eyes glassy but focused.
“This wasn’t about you,” he repeated gently, every word chosen with care. “Sandy ran a big operation. Servers, data, contracts. Could’ve been electrical. It was an old house. Could’ve been—”
“An accident?” Chloe finished quietly.
He forced himself to nod. “Yeah.”
The lie tasted like ash because his mind was already sifting through darker possibilities. Was there a chain link in there? If so, it’d be gone now, melted and reduced to nothing but memory and motive.
Chloe exhaled shakily and pressed her forehead briefly to his neck. “They were good people, Kayne. Sandy helped me when I didn’t even know I needed it.”
“I know,” he murmured, resting his chin lightly against her head. “I know.”
Behind them, Evan stood with the rest of the shell-shocked, hollow-eyed web team, but Kayne noticed something the others didn’t.
Evan wasn’t watching the fire. He was watching Chloe.
Closely. Steadily. Kayne clocked the way Evan hovered just outside her space, the way his shoulders angled toward her without him realizing it, until he noticed exactly where she was.
Kayne’s arms were around her protectively, tucking her against his side.
That was when Evan’s jaw tightened. His gaze flicked to Kayne’s hands at her back, lingered a beat too long, then snapped away as if the sight had scorched him. Something feral sparked behind his eyes. It was possessive and resentful and unmistakably jealous.
Shock did strange things to people, but this felt focused.
Grief could fixate. Fear could cling. But this had the bitter edge of wanting what someone else was holding and not knowing how to ask for it back.
Anja and Leo conferred a few steps away, voices low. Kayne felt the familiar itch between his shoulder blades, the one that meant the danger hadn’t passed. It had just changed shape.
Evan stepped up beside Chloe, his hair windblown and face drawn tight with shock. He looked younger like this, stripped of control or answers.
“Chloe,” he said quietly. “I-I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
She turned to him, blinking as if she’d forgotten other people existed. “What do you mean?”
“The servers,” Evan said, gesturing helplessly toward the smoking remains.
“All of them were on-site, in the basement. Backups, the whole system, everything was housed here. It’s all gone.
We can rebuild, obviously, but the site with your content, the subscriber backend .
. .” He swallowed. “This is catastrophic.”
Kayne felt her tense, just slightly, and resisted the urge to pull her tighter. Evan’s gaze never left her face. Kayne had the feeling the man was bracing for her to fall apart.
She didn’t.
Chloe stared at the ruins for a long moment, then squared her shoulders. “That’s the least of my worries,” she said, voice steady but stripped bare. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
Evan’s throat worked. Whatever he’d expected, whether it was panic, tears, or reassurance, it wasn’t this quiet resolve. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. We’ll make a plan.”
Kayne admired the way she said we, even when the ground had just been ripped out from under all of them. But his attention stayed on Evan a second longer, filing the look away.
He was concerned, sure, but maybe something else too.
He’d learned the hard way that lines blurred under pressure had a way of turning ugly fast.
Evan exhaled slowly and stepped back to rejoin the rest of the stunned team. When Chloe finally pulled away, she squared her shoulders with that stubborn resolve he was starting to recognize as her version of armor. “I need to go to the club.”
He blinked. “Now?”
“More equipment deliveries are scheduled. If I don’t place them today, it’ll back everything up.” She huffed a weak breath. “And I can’t just stand here.”
He studied her, then nodded. “Okay.”
The gym smelled of rubber flooring and fresh paint when they arrived.
It seemed normal and blessedly ordinary, a welcome change from the smoke clinging to their clothes.
New equipment lined the walls like soldiers waiting for orders.
Chloe moved among them with quiet determination, placing treadmills, aligning racks, and answering questions.
Kayne stayed close, always close, watching the doors, the shadows, and the corners where danger tended to linger.
Still no sign of Danica. His phone stayed stubbornly silent. There was no dramatic entrance, cloying concern, or performative tears. That worried him more than her presence ever had.
“She hasn’t called,” Chloe said at one point, almost to herself. “Not even a text.”
He kept his tone casual. “She could be busy.”
“Danica?” Chloe snorted softly. “Busy usually means shopping or stirring drama.”
Kayne didn’t smile.
He followed her to the far corner, where she gestured for a row of machines to be shifted. She was good at this, and someone had already tried to take too much from her.
As she stepped back to assess the layout, she glanced at him. “You really think the fire had nothing to do with me?”
There it was. The question she’d been holding back.
He met her gaze, steady and warm. “I think right now, what matters is that you’re safe. And I’m not letting that change.”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was a promise. And promises, Kayne knew, were only worth making when you were prepared to bleed to keep them.
As he scanned the shadows between the machines, his mind still circling fire, ash, and the possibility of a missing chain link, he knew whoever had lit that match hadn’t finished burning things down.