Bonus Chapter
Dominic Volkov
Brendon asks me not to kill her, so I don’t.
That deserves a medal or at least a fucking certificate, because by the time I find Celeste, I already know three easier ways to make her disappear and at least two of them would let me sleep better tonight.
Instead, I sit in my rented car with the engine idling low, fingers drumming once against the steering wheel, and remind myself why I’m here.
Eli. Mila. Brendon.
Not necessarily in that order, which is its own problem.
Brendon doesn’t ask me for much; that’s one of the things that makes him dangerous to me.
He doesn’t push unless it matters, so when he looked at me over the rim of his coffee mug and asked, very quietly, “Can you help make sure she can’t come back and hurt them again?
” I heard the weight of it. Not vengeance, blood, or even punishment, really. Just finality. Safety.
So, I track her down, and for once, the ending isn’t a body bag.
The motel she’s holed up in looks exactly like the kind of place people go when they think they can stay temporarily enough to outrun consequences.
Peeling paint, flickering vacancy sign, two rusted ice machines out front, the kind of parking lot where every car looks one missed payment away from being towed.
I wait until she comes back with a plastic bag from the convenience store on the corner and unlocks the motel room. Then I give her ten seconds to settle, fifteen because I’m feeling generous, before I get out of the car and head for her door.
I don’t knock.
The cheap lock gives fast under my shoulder, the frame splintering with a crack that echoes down the walkway. She screams before she even sees me properly, stumbling backward and dropping the bag. A carton of milk hits the stained carpet and tumbles. Something in glass shatters under her heel.
“What the fuck?” she shrieks, hand flying to her chest. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I step inside and shut the busted door behind me with my foot. The room smells of stale air conditioning and cheap body spray trying to cover decades of nicotine. Her phone is on the bed beside an open duffel bag. There are clothes everywhere, no real unpacking, just mess spread around.
She snatches a lamp off the side table and holds it up between us with both hands. It would be funny if she didn’t look so serious.
“Back the fuck up,” she snaps, voice shaking. “I mean it. I will crack your skull open.”
I glance at the lamp, then at her. “You can try.”
That’s when she really looks at me, even though I don’t give her much to work with: hood up, cap low, black mask over the lower half of my face, and black gloves.
Nothing she can hand to a sketch artist that’ll help.
But it’s not my face that gets her; it’s the fact that I’m not impressed.
She knows that kind of calm. Predators always know when they’ve found another one.
She takes one step back. Then another. “Who sent you?” she asks, and there it is. No denial or confusion. Straight to the point because somewhere deep down she knows this isn’t random.
I lean against the door. “Take a guess.”
Her eyes flick fast, working through possibilities. I watch the moment the right one lands and her mouth tightens. “Eli,” she says.
I don’t answer. I don’t have to. Her expression shifts anyway, defensiveness sliding over fear. She’s done this before. Reframed herself as the victim, sold her version first, counted on people being too polite to interrupt.
“He has no right,” she starts, anger giving her a little steadiness. “You hear me? No fucking right to send anyone after me. That baby—”
I cross the room before she finishes the sentence.
The lamp clatters to the floor when I hit her wrist. I catch the front of her hoodie in my fist and slam her back against the wall hard enough to rattle the framed motel art. Her head misses it by an inch.
“Careful,” I tell her, voice low and flat behind the mask. “You don’t get to talk about Mila unless I decide you do.”
She goes very still. Her eyes, wide now, lock onto mine. Good. Let her see exactly how close the edge is, even if she doesn’t know my name.
“You’re fucking insane,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I say. “And you abandoned a baby on a doorstep with false paperwork after raping her father. Between the two of us, I’m not the one who should be shocked by bad decisions.”
She swallows, throat bobbing under my fist. I ease the pressure just enough that she can breathe properly, not because I’m soft, but because I need her conscious and listening.
“I’m not going back,” she says quickly. “If that’s what this is, I’m not going near them. I don’t want the kid. I don’t want him either. I’m done. I left, didn’t I?”
“Not good enough.”
Her jaw tightens. “What the hell do you want from me then?”
I let the silence stretch. That’s something I know how to do better than almost anything. Most people rush to fill the quiet because it makes them nervous. I let it sit until it climbs all the way up someone’s spine and starts making their imagination work against them.
By the time I speak, she looks pale.
“I want you scared enough that if Eli Matthews’s name ever even crosses your mind again, your stomach drops.”
She opens her mouth, and I loosen my grip on her hoodie, stepping back just enough to make her miss the pressure. With a huff, she rubs at her throat and glares at me, but the glare is weaker now.
“You’re doing too much for some college guy and a kid that isn’t yours,” she says, aiming for cruel but landing somewhere closer to desperate. “What are you, his boyfriend?”
I laugh once. She really still thinks she’s in a position to needle. “That line usually works better when you aren’t cornered in a motel room with a broken door.”
Her eyes flick toward the bed again, toward the phone, toward escape routes that don’t exist. I follow her glance and shake my head. “Don’t insult me.”
“What do you want me to say?” she snaps suddenly, fear breaking open into temper. “That I’m sorry? Fine. I’m sorry. You happy?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
I look at her and think about Brendon’s face when he asked me for this—sad in that deep way he gets when someone innocent gets pulled into someone else’s mess.
Brendon doesn’t like what I am, but he understands the use of fear when it’s aimed at the right target.
He asked me to help, not to ruin her for sport.
So I keep my hands to myself and make the words do the work.
“You’re on borrowed time already,” I tell her.
“There are wanted posters with your face on them. Your name is circulating because of what you and your sorority sisters did. The only reason you’re standing here having this conversation instead of bleeding out on this carpet is because somebody good asked me not to do this my way. ”
Her face changes as she realizes there was another ending to tonight and she’s not in it. “I don’t…” Her voice thins. “I don’t know what you think I was going to do.”
“I don’t think you were gonna do anything, and that’s the fucking problem.” I take a step toward her again, and she flinches so hard she actually bumps the wall behind her. “You don’t get off easily just because you’re a woman.”
Her breathing gets louder, and her face empties out in a way I recognize. It’s the moment somebody believes you. For the first time since I walked in, she stops posturing.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks quietly.
I step back fully and gesture toward the bed. “Pick up your phone.” She hesitates, but I don’t move. “I’m not repeating myself.”
She grabs it with fingers that aren’t steady anymore. Her thumb shakes when she unlocks the screen.
“Good,” I say. “Now get your bag.”
She looks up sharply. “Why?”
“Because you’re leaving.”
Her eyes narrow. “Where?”
I glance at the busted door. “You’ll see.”
I see the calculation happen as she thinks about running.
She even shifts one foot, testing the distance between us and the bathroom window behind me, maybe wondering if she can dive through glass and make it to the parking lot.
I take one step forward and let her see exactly how badly that would go.
Instead, she shoulders the bag without another word.
The drive is quiet except for her breathing and the occasional wet sniff she clearly hates herself for. I make her sit in the back seat with the child locks on. She notices halfway through and goes even paler.
“You said you weren’t killing me,” she says after a few blocks, trying to sound calm.
“I said I wasn’t doing this my usual way.”
“That doesn’t actually make me feel better.”
“Not my problem.”
She goes silent again after that.
I know the nearest station with a night desk. I’ve been past it enough times to know which entrance has the fewest cameras angled out toward the street and which side alley lets me pull up without getting a clear shot of the car. I’m not doing anything clever tonight. Just careful enough.
When I stop, she looks out the window, and her whole body goes rigid.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says and twists toward me from the back seat. “You can’t just dump me at a police station.”
“Actually,” I say, killing the engine, “that’s exactly what I’m about to do.”
“They’ll arrest me!” she says, her voice sharpening with panic now.
I look at her in the rearview mirror. “That’s the idea.”
She jerks at the handle even though she already knows it won’t open. “No. No, fuck that! I’m not going in there. Let me out somewhere else.”
I climb out of the car, walk around, and open her door from the outside. She doesn’t move, and we just look at each other. She’s curled in on herself now, all the fire burned off, left with the ugly little core of self-preservation that was probably driving her the whole time.
“Please,” she says, and now she sounds frightened. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
I lean down so she can hear me clearly. “You’re a rapist. That’s exactly where filth like you belong.”
She cries then, not hard, not dramatically, but enough that it pisses her off. She wipes at her face angrily and glares at me like I’m supposed to fold under female tears. Wrong guy. I was raised by the worst one.
“You can walk in,” I tell her, “Or I can drag you in. Your choice.”
After a long second, she gets out. I keep my face angled down, cap low, mask up.
No hero shots tonight. No accidental witnesses getting a clean look they can hand over later.
I walk her to the side entrance, one hand on her upper arm, not tight enough to bruise but firm enough that she knows exactly how little room she has to try something stupid.
Inside, the fluorescent lights buzz. The officer at the desk looks up with the kind of tired irritation night-shift cops wear like a second uniform, and that irritation dies fast when he gets a good look at her face.
I stop a few feet short of the desk.
“This woman’s got active alerts out,” I say, keeping my voice flatter than usual. “Celeste Van Rensburg. Figured you’d want her before somebody else finds her.”
The officer straightens, eyes narrowing as he reaches for the keyboard. Celeste says “wait” in that tone people use when they still think there’s a chance I’ll reverse course and save them from consequences. I don’t bother to look at her.
The officer glances between us. “You are?”
“Leaving.”
That part, at least, makes him look annoyed again. “Sir, if you’re involved in—”
“I’m not,” I cut in. “I found her. You can take it from here.”
He starts to say something else, but another officer has already appeared from the back, recognition dawning as he looks from the screen to her face. They move fast after that, and she twists once to look back at me, fury and fear warring in her face.
I finally turn my head enough that she can see my eyes. Then I leave before the desk sergeant can decide he needs a statement or a name or anything else that would complicate my life.
Outside, the air feels colder. Cleaner too, which is stupid because police stations smell like stale coffee and old paper and everything unpleasant bureaucracy does to people. Still, something unclenches in me when I hear the door shut behind me and know she’s not walking back out anytime soon.
Brendon got what he asked for, which is probably why my chest hurts.
It’s never just about the thing itself with him.
Never just track someone down, scare them, hand them over, done.
It’s the fact that he asked and I listened.
The fact that I did something ugly in a way he could live with, and that somewhere between all the filth, violence, and bad instincts, there’s now a line I’ll redraw for him because he wanted it drawn differently.
That’s more dangerous than murder.
I drive to my hotel room slower than I drove out. I know if I go too fast, I’ll get there too early, and then I’ll have to sit with what tonight says about me and the fact that I didn’t have to kill to feel useful for once.
I kill the engine in the parking garage and sit there a minute with both hands on the steering wheel, the same way I always do when something under my skin won’t settle.
Celeste is out of the picture. There’s no blood on my clothes from her and nobody to call for cleanup. I should feel better. Instead I feel wired and hollow at the same time.
When I finally go inside, I toss my keys on the nightstand, peel off the hoodie, cap, mask, and gloves. I walk to the bathroom and wash my hands even though there’s nothing on them, then I stand at the sink longer than necessary with the water running over my knuckles.
I look up. “You’re going soft, Volkov,” I mutter to my reflection.
Maybe I am, or maybe this is just what it looks like when the one person I never wanted to matter starts changing the rules I live by, and I let him.
There are fates worse than a grave for people who survive by controlling the story. Celeste will sit in court while evidence speaks. She will watch as the world believes the man whom she assumed no one would believe simply because he’s a man.
And if the law ever fails, if some judge decides time served is enough, if she steps outside and turns her attention toward Eli or Mila again, she’ll discover that Brendon’s request didn’t end tonight.
Neither did my promise.