Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chloe was dreaming about water. She wasn’t drowning.
Instead, she was warm, buoyant, and held aloft instead of being pulled under.
She floated on her back beneath a light-blue sky, arms spread wide, the sun kissing her face.
There was no noise or fear. No crushing weight pressing in on her.
For once, her body forgot to be vigilant.
Then her phone vibrated on the nightstand.
The sound punched straight through the dream, yanking her back into the dark with a sharp inhale. Her heart skidded, instantly awake in that way it had learned to be lately. There was no gentle transition or groggy confusion. Only alertness and bracing for what came next.
Kayne shifted beside her, a low murmur in his sleep, his arm tightening reflexively around her waist. The solid warmth of him reassured her, even as dread crept up her spine.
The phone buzzed again.
Chloe slid carefully out from under his arm and reached for the phone, already knowing deep in her bones that this wasn’t a newsletter reminder, a late-night shipping update, or anything harmless. Her instincts had stopped believing in benign.
The screen lit up. Danica.
“Kayne.”
He was instantly alert and beside her as she opened the message and the image loaded. No, not an image. A video.
Chloe’s breath left her lungs in a thin, broken sound.
Danica was tied to a chair. Her blonde hair hung loose and tangled around her face, makeup smeared, eyes too wide and shining in the dim light.
The room around her was little more than shadow and concrete, the edges of the frame swallowed by darkness.
A lone bulb glowed somewhere overhead, harsh and unforgiving, bleaching everything it touched.
A message appeared beneath the image.
Come alone and unarmed. No cops. No boyfriend. If you’re not alone, she will die.
Her lungs stopped working. This couldn’t be real. It had to be a trick, another manipulation or twisted attempt to isolate her. Danica had always loved drama and attention, loved being at the center of Chloe’s world.
Danica’s eyes stared out from the screen, terrified and unmistakably real. There was no haughty arrogance. This wasn’t exaggerated. This was pure fear, stripped bare.
“It’s a live feed,” Kayne said after a moment. “Or close enough to pass as one.”
Her pulse roared in her ears. “They want me alone.”
“I know.”
“They said—”
“I know what they said,” he interrupted gently, finally looking at her. His hand came up to cup her face, warm and solid, calming her when everything else inside her was spinning. “Listen to me. This is exactly what he wants.”
Chloe swallowed hard. “She’s my sister.”
“I know.”
“If I don’t go, she might be hurt.”
Kayne’s thumb brushed beneath her eye, wiping away a tear she hadn’t felt fall. It was a simple, steadying touch. “If you go alone, he wins. And he doesn’t stop with Danica.”
His voice didn’t rise or harden, which somehow made the words hit harder.
Her throat closed. He was right, but she hated that logic had any place in this moment when her sister’s life was hanging in the balance.
“She’s scared,” Chloe whispered. “I can see it.”
Kayne exhaled slowly. “So are you, and that’s okay. But you are not doing this by yourself.”
“They said no cops. No you.”
A humorless huff slipped out of him. “People who say that are lying, delusional, or very proud of their plan. None of those options earns obedience. We don’t take instructions from psychopaths.”
She shook her head, tears blurring her vision now. “He’ll watch me.”
“Then he’ll watch someone who’s not as easy to break as he thinks,” Kayne said. “And someone who’s not alone, no matter what he believes.”
He reached for his phone, already moving, already planning. Chloe recognized the shift, the quiet recalibration, the way his mind locked into purpose. Pieces clicked into place faster than she could follow.
This was the Kayne, who walked toward danger instead of away from it, who treated threats like problems to be solved rather than monsters to fear.
But terror still clawed at her.
“What if he hurts her because of me?” she asked, voice breaking.
Kayne pulled her into him, holding her tight. “You are not the cause of this,” he said fiercely. “You are the reason we’re ending it.”
She clung to him, breathing him in and letting his strength shore up the places in her that felt as if they were collapsing.
Danica had spent months orbiting her, resenting her, needing her, pushing her away, and pulling her back again, and none of that mattered now.
Somewhere deep beneath the fear, beneath the guilt and the panic and the terrible, twisting love she felt for a sister who had never quite loved her back, something hard and determined took shape.
She would not leave Danica in the dark. And she would not walk into it alone.
#
Kayne had been half asleep, one arm draped protectively over Chloe, when the phone vibrated on the nightstand. The sound was soft, almost polite, but it punched straight through his nervous system like a starter pistol.
Chloe made a small, broken sound, and Kayne took the phone from her before panic could take root.
“Okay,” he said, voice steady by sheer force of will. He was already standing, already thinking. “Breathe.”
The feed jittered as Danica shifted weakly, her mouth moving to form words that never reached them. Anger coiled tight and contained, the way Kayne had learned to keep it when acting on it too soon would cost lives.
Rage could wait. Precision couldn’t.
He moved fast, opening his laptop, fingers flying as Chloe paced behind him. He routed the signal through every tool he had access to, bypassing firewalls, skimming metadata, and tracking packet paths until the world narrowed to code and instinct, to patterns he trusted.
Then the map resolved.
He froze.
“What?” Chloe demanded.
Kayne turned the screen toward her. The blinking marker sat dead center on a familiar block.
“No,” she said immediately.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the gym.”
Her breath hitched. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if he wants you close,” Kayne replied. “And if he wants to control the environment.”
She shook her head, disbelief fighting terror. “There’s nowhere like that there. I’ve been everywhere, the offices, storage, locker rooms, and the mechanicals. That looks like a basement, but there isn’t one.”
“I know.” Kayne was already pulling files from his secure server, blueprints scrolling past as he accessed the original architectural plans. “According to these, there isn’t one.”
Chloe stared at the screen. “Then where is she?”
Kayne leaned back slowly, the answer settling in his bones with cold certainty.
“We’d have caught it on our security cameras if he had gone through the club. There has to be an entrance we don’t know about,” he said. “Something concealed and off-book.”
Chloe folded her arms around herself. “That place used to belong to people who hid things.”
“Yes,” Kayne agreed. “And they were very good at it.”
Good enough that even now, years later, the rot was still embedded in the foundation.
She turned to him then, eyes blazing with fear and resolve. “I’m going.”
“No.” The word came out hard, absolute.
“She’s my sister.”
“And you’re my responsibility,” he shot back. “You don’t get to trade your life for hers.”
Her chin lifted. “You don’t get to decide on your own.”
They stood there, the air between them taut and vibrating, both too stubborn to bend, both too afraid to say the thing hovering just beneath the argument.
That loving her had rewired every instinct he’d ever trusted.
There was movement on the live feed. Danica slumped further in the chair.
Chloe’s voice broke. “If I don’t go—”
“You won’t finish that sentence,” Kayne said quietly. He stepped closer, cupping her cheek and forcing her to meet his eyes. “We go together or not at all.”
She searched his face, the fight draining into something terrified and fiercely loving, the choice finally unavoidable. Slowly, she nodded.
Then the feed shifted. A digital timer appeared in the corner of the screen: 01:00:00.
Kayne’s pulse spiked. “We don’t know where to look,” he said grimly, already reaching for his weapon. “And we’re running out of time.”
Which meant someone was about to make a mistake. He just needed it not to be him.
#
Danica sat slumped in the chair, her wrists bound tight beneath the steel rungs.
The chair itself was bolted to the concrete floor and utterly immovable.
She’d tested that already, more than once.
The room smelled damp and old, of mildew and cold stone, with a faint metallic tang that made her stomach churn.
Somewhere overhead, something hummed, steady and indifferent. Maybe a light. Who knew?
Time had flattened down here, stretched thin and mean. The phone on the tripod stared at her with its unblinking black eye.
She was being recorded live. Her breath hitched, lungs stuttering as panic clawed up her throat. She swallowed hard, fighting the urge to sob before she even spoke. Crying too early felt as if she were giving up and conceding the end. She wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet.
“Please,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time, forcing the words past the tremor in her voice. “If anyone can see this, if anyone’s watching, I’m in trouble.”
Her gaze darted around the room, not that she truly thought help might materialize out of the shadows if she looked hard enough. But she couldn’t see any windows or doors, only bare concrete walls and the phone. Always the phone, watching without blinking.
It didn’t feel like a lifeline. It felt like a confession booth with no absolution.
She shifted in the chair, the movement useless and painful.
The restraints didn’t give. A broken sound slipped out of her before she could stop it, and her eyes burned.
She hated that she looked dirty, shaking, and stripped down to desperation.
Her hair was a tangled mess, and her mascara was probably streaked down her face like war paint.
Worse than that, she hated that she was begging on camera, every defense she’d ever relied on peeled away.
“I know I haven’t been a good person,” she said, the words tumbling out faster now. Urgency sharpened them. “I know that. Believe me, I do. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have and wanted things that weren’t mine. I’ve been jealous, and petty, and selfish, and, God, I know.”
Her breath caught, and this time she didn’t fight the tears. They slid down her cheeks, hot and humiliating, dripping off her chin and onto her already stained shirt.
“I told myself it was because I deserved more,” she went on, voice thinning but relentless.
“Because I was overlooked.” Her throat closed.
She swallowed hard and forced the truth out anyway.
“Because Chloe gets everything,” she said, the words brittle as glass.
“I told myself it was her fault. If she just didn’t shine so damn brightly all the time, I wouldn’t feel invisible unless I made noise. ”
Her fingers folded uselessly against the chain, nails biting into her palms as if pain might keep her alive.
“But that’s not true,” she said softly. “It was never her fault.”
Admitting it felt like stepping off a ledge, terrifying and oddly clean all at once.
She leaned forward as much as the chair allowed, bringing her face closer to the lens and whoever might be on the other side of it.
“I can change,” she insisted. “I swear I can. I’ll do better, be better.
I’ll apologize and make it right. I’ll stop competing with her and trying to be seen.
I’ll stop everything. Just please help me. ”
Her voice splintered on the last word.
She squeezed her eyes shut, gathering what little was left of herself, then opened them again and stared straight into the camera, at Chloe or Leo or anyone who might still be listening.
“I don’t want to die down here,” she said quietly. The fear in her voice was naked now, stripped of bravado or manipulation. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m scared. So scared.”
Her shoulders shook as she cried, breath coming in shallow, uneven puffs that left her lightheaded. She shook her head, hair sticking to her damp face.
“I’ll be a better sister,” she whispered. “I’ll stop pretending I’m entitled to things I didn’t earn. I’ll stop blaming everyone else for how empty I feel. I promise. Please. Someone help me.”
She slumped back against the chair, spent, lungs heaving, and eyes glassy as she stared at the phone. The red light stayed on, unwavering and merciless, offering no reassurance or response. No mercy.
Somewhere beyond the walls, the seconds kept ticking away, each one a quiet, patient threat.