Chapter Thirty-One
The door slicked closed behind them with a soft, deliberate click. The sound landed heavier than if it had slammed shut.
Aiden forced Chloe to walk in front of him with the gun at her back, down several hallways and up a short set of concrete steps. Suddenly, he shoved her forward, and she stumbled into a room.
Her breath caught at what she was seeing.
A bed was neatly made with a cheerful blue comforter and pillows aligned with unsettling care.
There was a dresser with a lamp glowing low and warm, casting the walls in honeyed light.
It smelled faintly of laundry detergent and something else she couldn’t place.
This wasn’t a dungeon. It was someone’s bedroom.
Aiden stepped farther inside and turned, lifting the gun again with the same casual precision he’d used since he’d dragged her through the tunnel. He didn’t look panicked or frantic. He looked settled and frightfully calm.
Before he could speak, the question burst out of her, honed by panic.
“Where’s Danica?” Chloe demanded. “Where is my sister?”
Aiden’s gaze flicked to her, assessing and unreadable. Then he tipped his head slightly. “We’ll discuss her,” he said calmly. “Not yet.”
The casual deferral chilled her more than a threat would have.
“Sit,” he said quietly, gesturing toward the edge of the bed.
Her legs felt distant and disconnected, but she forced them to move. The mattress dipped beneath her weight. Her hands clenched in her lap because if she didn’t hold them together, she was afraid they’d shake apart.
“Why?” she asked. The word scraped raw from her throat. “Aiden, why are you doing this?”
He studied her for a long moment as if deciding how much truth she’d earned.
Then he exhaled. “Because you took it,” he said.
Her heart stuttered. “Took what?”
“The gym.” His mouth tightened. “You took it. You smiled and bought it and turned it into something clean and bright, and you never once asked what it cost.”
“I didn’t know you wanted it,” she said immediately. “I swear to you, I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t look,” he cut in, sharp now. The gun lifted a fraction higher. “You worked there for years and never looked.”
The accusation landed where her own guilt already lived.
The room felt suddenly smaller, the walls inching closer.
“Donald and Pam Scoggins,” he went on, his voice flattening. “They owned it long before you did. Before you ever filmed a workout or laughed with clients or talked about favorite movies or sports teams.”
The names struck like a blow. Her former bosses. Her onetime friends. The people who’d hugged her and brought her soup when she was sick. The ones whose arrest had gutted her world and launched everything that came after.
“They trafficked us under the gym,” he said. “Under your feet.”
Her vision blurred. “Oh no,” she whispered. Poor Aiden.
“They chained us down here,” he said, eyes burning now. “They told us it was our fault. That no one wanted us. No one would miss us. That no one upstairs cared enough to hear us scream.”
Her breath fractured, coming apart piece by piece.
“I was five,” he went on. “They kept us underground most of the time, except for one room.”
Her pulse roared in her ears.
“One room upstairs,” he said softly. “This one.”
Chloe’s gaze flicked around again, dread bubbling up in her stomach.
“They brought us here sometimes to remind us of what we didn’t deserve. A real bed and a window. Light.” His jaw clenched. “I learned how to be quiet in this room. How to disappear.”
Tears slid down her face before she could stop them. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Aiden, I’m so sorry. I would have helped you.”
“You helped yourself,” he snapped. “You took the building and then you erased everything. You turned my hell into your success.”
The words cut deep because they echoed the punishment she’d already handed herself.
She swallowed hard. “That doesn’t make this right.”
“No,” he agreed calmly. “But it makes it fair.”
Her heart slammed painfully against her ribs. “The others,” she said, voice shaking. “The people who were hurt. Robin. Sandy.”
Something flickered in his eyes.
“Robin saw me,” he said simply. “She came in early. She went looking around. I couldn’t let her talk.”
Chloe’s breath hitched. “You killed her.”
He didn’t deny it. “She wasn’t supposed to be there. Neither was Erickson.”
She gasped. Joel Erickson had died of a drug overdose . . . hadn’t he? “You killed him?”
“He saw me too,” Aiden said. “In the wrong place. At the wrong time.”
A sob broke free despite her efforts to hold it back. “Sandy?”
“She was going to fire me,” he said. “I missed too much work because I was busy watching you. Planning. Making sure you didn’t get too comfortable.”
Her stomach churned violently.
“The fire was a warning,” he added. “Just like the drone.”
Her head snapped up. “The drone?”
He nodded once. “It was easy since I was already piloting the other two for Sandy. All I had to do was add another. Nobody knew about it. I wanted you to feel how close it could come. How easily it could end. But Evan found out about it, so he had to die.”
The room tilted.
“I left you the chain links,” he said. “Chains were all I had when I was down here. They reminded me I was real. That what happened wasn’t a nightmare. I wanted you to see them. To remember.”
Chloe felt hollowed out, carved clean by the weight of it all.
“I didn’t steal your pain,” she said hoarsely. “And I didn’t mean to erase it. I didn’t even know about it.”
“But you did,” he replied. His voice softened again, almost gentle. “And now you’re going to understand it.”
The gun shifted in his grip as he stepped closer.
Her skin prickled with cold.
Somewhere beyond the concrete, she prayed Kayne was still searching, still moving, still tearing the world apart to find her, because Aiden wasn’t finished talking and Chloe wasn’t sure she’d survive what he planned to say next.
#
The silence on the other side of the wall was wrong.
Kayne forced himself to take two steadying breaths before he moved, because panic got people killed and Chloe needed him alive, focused, and thinking.
He scanned the narrow corridor once more, weapon up and senses stretched tight.
Kayne stepped past Chloe’s dropped shoe and crouched beside Evan Calder’s body.
He already knew. Still, he checked with two fingers to the neck. No pulse. Eyes fixed and empty, staring at nothing. The blood pooling beneath him was dark and cooling fast. Evan hadn’t stood a chance.
“Damn it,” Kayne muttered under his breath.
Aiden Kerr had shot him without hesitation. That told Kayne everything he needed to know about what kind of fight this had become.
This wasn’t desperation. It was execution.
He rose and pivoted toward the blank wall where Chloe had vanished. There was no handle, no seam, no visible mechanism. All he saw was solid gray, as if it had never opened at all.
A magician’s trick. An illusion.
Kayne pressed his palm flat against the concrete, every instinct screaming that she was right there. Close enough to hear if she cried out. Close enough to be suffering while he stood useless on the wrong side of a blockade.
The thought scraped something violent loose inside him.
“Hang on, cher. I’m coming.”
Anja was at his shoulder instantly, already tracking the same problem. “That door didn’t open,” she said. “It slid. Internal track, maybe hydraulics.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Kayne replied. “I’m not waiting for it to open again.”
He took a step back, evaluating the thickness, the reinforced concrete, and the way the wall met the floor. It was built to keep people in and ensure no one upstairs ever knew what was happening below.
Rage burned in his chest, stripping everything down to one purpose. “I need C4,” he said.
Anja didn’t blink. She was already turning. “How much?”
“Bricks,” he said flatly. “Enough to make a door where he didn’t plan on one.”
She was gone in a flash, sprinting down the tunnel toward the SUV, boots pounding, no wasted movement. Leo hovered nearby, pale but steady.
Kayne paced once, then twice, forcing his mind to stay focused instead of spiraling into images he didn’t want to finish forming.
He’d run background checks on Aiden Kerr, Evan, and even Sandy. All had come back clean. So why had Aiden taken Chloe?
Anja returned at a run, breath controlled despite the speed, a heavy pack slung over her shoulder. She dropped it at Kayne’s feet and unzipped it, revealing the unmistakable gray blocks.
They worked fast. No discussion. No second-guessing.
He set the charges carefully along the wall, hands steady despite the fury vibrating through his bones, calculating blast radius and structural stress. Kayne wasn’t interested in subtle. He wanted access to Chloe before the damage became permanent.
When it was done, he backed them all away, shoving Leo behind him, one arm braced out.
“Cover your ears,” he ordered. “And your heads.”
They ducked around a corner. Kayne thumbed the detonator.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world held its breath.
Then the explosion tore through the concrete with a brutal, concussive roar. Dust and debris blasted down the corridor as the reinforced slab gave way, chunks of wall collapsing inward. The shockwave rattled his teeth and thundered through the tunnels.
When the dust began to clear, there was no longer a wall, only a jagged, smoking hole leading into darkness.
Kayne didn’t wait. He surged forward through the debris, weapon up, lungs burning, and heart hammering with one singular purpose: get to Chloe.
Now.
#
“I didn’t know.”
Chloe said it again, louder this time, because Aiden was pacing now, the calm veneer cracking, words tumbling over each other in jagged bursts. His control was fraying, and the room felt smaller with every step he took.