Dare (BLOOD Brothers #5)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

GRACE

He smiled like he’d been expecting me.

For a second, the whole room went soundless — no hum in my comm, no air from the vents, no breath in my chest. Just that half-ruined face, the white of his blind eye catching the dim light like a coin on the bottom of a river.

The scent hit next. Not smoke, not cologne, but the phantom reek of oil and iron tangled in vicious knots with the memory of his hands. My fingers twitched, reaching for the weapon I didn’t have. The bag was by the desk, six feet away, a thousand miles.

My brain knew the steps: pivot, distance, draw, strike.

My body forgot every single one.

It was like waking up inside a nightmare I’d already survived once. Muscles I’d trained to obey me just… refused. My knees locked. My breath stuttered. My heart was a hammer behind my ribs and every hit made my vision flare white around the edges.

He took another step. Slow. Deliberate. The way you move toward a frightened animal you think you still own.

“You look good,” he said. His voice rasped like gravel in a glass. “Did you miss me?”

The words slid under my skin, finding all the old bruises that had never really healed.

I tried to answer, but my tongue was thick, my mouth dry. Somewhere, someone was shouting my name — Bones? Voodoo? — but it was like the sound came from underwater. The comm was still in my ear, and I couldn’t make my hand rise to touch it.

He tilted his head, that smile widening just a little. “Still so quiet. I always liked that about you.”

A flicker of movement — his hand lowering toward his side, not to draw a weapon, just to remind me who’d always had the power.

Something inside me cracked then. Not courage. Not even rage. Just the thin, splintering sound of the line between then and now snapping clean through.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. I wanted to remember how to fight.

Instead, I stood there, every nerve raw, and stared at the man I’d thought was gone forever. The one who had taken everything from me — and had the audacity to smile like he’d found a lost pet instead of a person.

He moved ever closer, the limp still there, subtle but real. His shadow reached me before he did.

“You didn’t really think you could escape forever, did you?”

The tremor in my chest climbed my throat. My lips parted, but no sound came out.

The air was thick, cloying, like it had settled in my lungs without asking permission.

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. My fingers curled into fists, nails biting into palms, but they didn’t reach for anything.

Not the desk, not the bag, not the flash drive.

They might as well have been carved from stone.

Another step. That blind eye gleamed in the dim light, his scar catching shadows like it was alive. Every step he took made my stomach twist, like the ground itself was betraying me.

I remembered the way he’d touched me. Not just the physical, but the ownership, the hunger to make me small, pliable, obedient. And all at once, months of training, months of planning, months of knowing exactly how to disarm and escape… evaporated.

I was just a lost girl in his presence.

My knees shook. My heart was a jackhammer inside my chest, pounding out a rhythm I couldn’t control.

It didn’t matter that I’d killed, snuck, lied, stolen, survived — none of it meant anything here.

Not when he looked at me like I was exactly what he wanted.

Like he still owned me in some private ledger only he could see.

I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to shrink into the chair. I wanted to disappear. Every muscle in my body coiled tight, frozen between fight and flight, and yet unable to do either.

“Look at you,” he murmured, slow, satisfied. “You’re even more… beautiful.”

The words weren’t compliments. They weren’t harmless. They were chains. Every syllable wrapped tighter around me, knotting the pit of my stomach. My mouth opened, closed, opened again. Soundless.

I could feel the sweat on my back, the cold of the office seeping through my blouse, my pulse hammering in my ears louder than his voice.

The past and present collided, and I couldn’t tell which was which.

The months of planning, the team outside, the safe, the drive from Alexandria…

it all felt like a dream I had forgotten the ending to.

And then he smiled again. That same twisted curl, the kind that had haunted my nightmares.

“You’ve been a good little pet, haven’t you?”

God. The word made my stomach twist even harder, coiling my intestines into a knot that burned with nausea. My hands trembled at my sides. My legs felt heavy, cemented to the floor.

I tried to tell myself I was still Grace. That I wasn’t the scared girl who woke up in that horror show. That I had skills, weapons, allies.

But none of it reached me. Not now.

He moved closer. Slow. Certain. Watching me. Happy to see me scared. Happy to see me… here.

I could only breathe shallowly, heartbeat a drum of panic in my ears, and feel the raw, unfiltered terror that reminded me — he didn’t need to strike me. His presence alone was enough to undo every hard-won inch of control I thought I had.

Yet, my feet seemed sunken into concrete. I was shackled in place like I wore that chain around my ankle again. All I could do was stand there, frozen, waiting for the next move, every instinct screaming at me to survive while my body refused to listen.

His hand moved again. Just a fraction of an inch this time, but in my world it was seismic. Every nerve ending in my skin screamed before he even touched me. My vision narrowed to him—the scar, the blind eye, the ghost of his smile—and the rest of the room became a soft blur.

I could feel the air shift as his fingers hovered over my arm, the faint brush of fabric sending sparks of panic up my spine.

It was unreal. I wanted to jerk away, to shove him, to strike, to do something, but my body didn’t belong to me anymore.

My muscles twitched, useless, and my thoughts were a riot of broken memory fragments.

Waking up to that hell. The gut-wrenching cries of despair and pain. Skin slapping against skin. The odors of bodies, sex, and sweat. The sticky feeling of his release all over me. The suffocating smell of his cum staining the air.

Each memory collided with the present, folding around his hand as it descended toward me. It moved like slow water, inevitable and unstoppable.

The tip of his finger brushed my cheek. Just a touch, feather-light. I felt it in every cell. My stomach lurched, bile rising. My knees threatened to buckle, but I stayed upright, rooted to the floor by some cruel twist of fate.

His smile widened. “Still so tense… I like it.”

I could feel the phantom of his hands where they’d held me before, the ownership, the violence, the control. My body responded—adrenaline, fear, nausea—a symphony of sensations I couldn’t smother.

Everything slowed. My pulse was thunder in my ears. Every breath was deliberate, hot and rasping. My skin tingled, hairs on end. His hand brushed again, slightly firmer this time, and it was like fire on my veins, a lightning strike I couldn’t escape.

Remember. Breathe. Move.

My mind tried, weakly, to summon the Grace I had spent the past several months becoming.

The woman who could take him down, who could fight like hell, who could and would fight without choking on terror.

But she seemed a distant memory and so alien from the one standing here as to be from a different galaxy.

I was small.

Scared.

Trapped.

In a nightmare all over again.

Had I ever actually escaped?

That scraped open another layer of horror, ripping me apart.

His hand lingered, cupping my cheek and filling my nostrils with the stale scent of tobacco. He’d been smoking. It was acrid. Made my eyes water. My nose run. I wanted to sob, but even my tears abandoned me.

“My beautiful pet,” he said, possessive pride in his claim of ownership.

My stomach twisted into itself, nausea clawing up my throat. My vision tunneled even tighter. All I could see were his fingers, the scarred knuckle, the curve of his wrist, and nothing else existed.

His other hand moved closer. Slow. Casual. Watching me. Measuring. Enjoying. Even as that awareness I was frozen in the gravity of it, trapped between every instinct I had ever had and the pure, raw terror that had returned to claim me.

Fight. Run. Scre—

The words died before they formed. My tongue felt like sandpaper. My throat contracted. And all I could do was let him close that last inch, let him touch me fully, and endure the moment where control was no longer mine, where fear ruled everything.

Because if I didn’t fight, it gave him no reason to hurt me. If I could control the interaction, then I wasn’t a victim. Even as those thoughts played through my head, there was something deeply, intrinsically wrong with them.

That wasn’t right.

The stroke of his rough thumb over the line of my cheekbone froze my soul in place. One milky eye and one narrowed eye seemed fixed on me. The taut band inside of me snapped and warmth spread along my legs. The stink of urine filled the room as the man dipped his head.

“Grace, status—” Bones’ voice cracked through the comm.

The wrong sound at the wrong time. The dark man’s good eye narrowed abruptly and his grip on my face turned brutal.

He jerked my head to the side to see the earpiece.

Pain lanced up my jaw where his fingers dug in, a white-hot flare that snapped through the fog.

The shock of it pulled a sound out of me—a choked gasp that wasn’t quite a scream.

He yanked my head sideways, the skin at my temple burning under his grip. “Who are you talking to?” His breath was hot against my ear.

Somewhere in the house, a door banged open. Not in my head. No, it was real. The thud reverberated through the floorboards. A muffled scream came from downstairs. A woman. There was a housekeeper. Then another crash, closer, the sharp splinter of wood giving way.

His head jerked toward the noise, and for the first time I saw something like confusion cut across his ruined face.

“Grace!” Bones again, louder now, raw. “We’re in! Hold—”

The rest of it vanished under the crack of another door giving way downstairs and the echoing bark of Voodoo’s voice.

The man snarled, fingers tightening until spots bloomed behind my eyes. “Who did you bring here?”

My pulse roared. Every sound blurred into one long, rising wave—boots on tile, shouted commands, the dull thud of something heavy hitting the floor below.

Then his hand left my face only to slam against my shoulder, shoving me backward. My head hit the corner of the desk. Pain exploded, bright and electric. The world tilted; the edges of my vision went white, then red.

Instinct finally found me. My body lurched, unsteady, more reflex than reason. I stumbled sideways as he reached for me again, his curse lost in the noise of another crash—another door being kicked in. The sound was unmistakable as wood cracked and shuddered.

The air filled with chaos: footsteps pounding the hall, someone shouting “Clear!” The comm crackled against my ear, a thread of sound in the storm.

My legs wouldn’t cooperate; they were rubber and fire at once. The copper taste of blood spread across my tongue where I’d bitten it. It was almost deja vu all over again. Only then, he’d dragged me out of the bedroom and into the utilitarian hallway with its bare concrete floors and walls.

He’d run like a rat, fleeing a sinking ship, hauling me with him. But pain. Pain and terror had locked me in place then too. I’d frozen. When the gunshots came—he’d fled.

Then…

He turned toward the door, muscles coiling, and for an instant he looked almost startled, as if he never thought to find himself the prey instead of predator.

Only, he’d been prey before. That reality floated up from the deep morass where it had sunk. When he jerked me upward, I didn’t fight the roll of my stomach this time.

I threw up on him.

Every ounce of food and drink I’d had that day spewed out of me. Not that it had been much. It was mostly bile. It all burned, but he swore as he took it in the face and the chest. When he slapped me, I took the blow and stumbled sideways, but I didn’t go down.

The voices on the comm were constant now. They were coming.

AB was talking to me. He was letting me know they were coming. The world that had slowed down to a painful crawl slammed into fast forward and I grabbed the first thing on the desk my fingers touched.

A hard marble paperweight.

I threw it.

Ignacio. That was his name.

It rushed back into the void along with sound and fury. His name was Ignacio. I threw the paperweight as the door to the office slammed with a hard kick.

One.

Two.

Then cracked under the fierceness of the blows, the wood splintering and the lock sheering away.

But I’d already grabbed the next thing off the desk and threw it even if I didn’t need to do another damn thing. Ignacio was already dead, even if he didn’t know it. And his death? It would be brutal as fuck. As he’d soon find out.

My guys were here.