Chapter 18 Phoenix #2
I force my voice flat, cold. He doesn’t get to see how hard he shakes me. “Are we done?”
He straightens but doesn’t back up.
“We’ll be around,” he says louder, so it carries. “Investigating the disappearance of Sarah.”
Right. Sarah. The perfect cover story.
He grabs my arm again and walks me back to the others, grip loosening just enough to look harmless. All four Titans see it. All four stare at his hand on me with murder in their eyes.
The cops leave a minute later, the door closing with an infuriatingly soft click.
The air shifts at once. Dead quiet blows open into chaos. Storm mutters under his breath. Conrad flips through the warrant like he’s hunting a legal grenade to lob later. Atticus is already on his phone, checking camera feeds for whatever they captured.
But I’m looking at Maverick.
The cuffs are gone, but angry red rings mark his wrists. His shoulders are still tight, tension radiating off him like heat. He stands, but it’s the kind of standing that means he’s holding himself back from doing something reckless. His chest still moves in counts of four.
I want to go to him. I want to get him out of this room, away from the stink of smug cops and threats wrapped in official paper. I want to run my hands over those marks until the only thing left on his skin is my touch.
But I don’t move. Not yet. If I take one step, all four will see what’s on my face. They’ll know that this is my fault. They’ll see the fear and the guilt.
I can’t let them see through me. Not now.
Inside my head the cop’s words repeat.
Might want to start answering your phone…not even your Titans can save you.
The debt collectors didn’t just send a message tonight. They sent it wearing a badge. They made sure I understood exactly how vulnerable I am—and what I have to lose.
Who they can take from me.
Now I know that living in this tower with these men changes nothing. They can still get to me.
They can still hurt me. I might as well still be in that broken-down trailer.
No matter where I go, or who I’m with, I am not untouchable.
We don’t have long to dwell on the debacle with Beavis and Butthead Cop. As soon as I emerge from the kitchen, the lawyers enter and begin running interference.
At the same time, Con’s phone rings, and whoever’s on the other end tells him something that makes him rake a hand through his hair in frustration and utter a clipped, “Be right there.”
He gives the guys a loaded look and speaks low, so the cops can’t hear. “A group of kids is having another of those fucking parties on eighteen. I’m headed to shut it down.”
Maverick rubs his wrists. “I’m coming with you. If I stay here another second I’m going to pick someone up and toss him over a balcony.”
I follow as they stride toward the door. Maverick glances back and opens his mouth to say something. I give him a pleading look, and he closes it after a brief flick of his eyes toward the asshole who took me in the kitchen. “Stay close.”
Con agrees with a single clipped nod.
We pile on to the elevator.
We ride in silence, floor numbers blinking by.
When the doors part on eighteen, sound hits—bass thudding, laughter too loud, glass clinking, the stale-sweet bite of spilled liquor and vape pens.
Kids who should know better, and some who clearly don’t, tangle in the rooftop common area.
Con and Maverick split without a word, each angling toward a different cluster to start putting out fires.
I hang back, scanning.
A girl in a glittering, too-short dress wobbles on heels that aren’t hers. I catch her arm before she kisses the tile and steer her to a couch and press a bottle of water from a nearby cooler into her hand.
Another is crying about a lost phone, her mascara streaking down her cheeks. I set a house phone on the bar for her, ring the concierge extension, and tell her not to go anywhere alone.
My heart’s still hammering from the kitchen encounter with the cop, but busy hands beat replaying that scene on a loop.
There’s a rip of cooler air as someone props open the service door near the ice machine and air conditioning floods the area. The smell changes—bleach, metal, something mechanical. I glance over.
Two men move through the crowd with their heads down, broadcasting the kind of anonymity you only get by careful practicing. They’ve got a girl between them, their arms hooked beneath hers, her feet dragging, her shoes skittering and catching on the floor.
She’s wearing the Titan Wynn housekeeping polo under a cardigan that’s slipping off one shoulder, the hem of her uniform peeking below a too-short skirt. Her head lolls. For a second I don’t place her, and then I do—she’s one of our junior housekeepers, Katie.
Katie’s cute, but I always had the impression that she didn’t like me for whatever reason.
Her mouth now is slack. Her eyes barely open to slits. Her knees knock when the men holding her try to quicken her pace.
My stomach drops. Roofied, doped—whatever it is, Katie didn’t do this to herself. The men angle her toward the service door like they’re very familiar with it.
I don’t think. I move.
“Hey.” My voice comes out sharper than I expect as I stride toward them, pitched to be heard over the music and hum of conversation taking place all around us. “Hey! What are you doing with her?”
The men continue, opening the door into the service hallway and stepping through. The door begins swinging closed behind them.
One of the men acts like he doesn’t hear me.
The other flicks his eyes at me, then past me, already calculating.
I plant my hand on the service door handle and hold the door open, wedging my foot so it can’t latch.
The common area stays at my back—noise, witnesses, light.
I keep my shoulder inside the party, not the hallway.
I’ve seen this corridor before, in daylight with a coffee in hand, pushing a laundry cart, naked with Conrad. I’ve idly mapped blind spots because this place has them like scars. The cameras don’t catch the patch between the corner and the service elevator at the other end for a good twelve feet.
“Go back to the party, little girl” the taller one says. He has some kind of accent—Russian, maybe? He smiles like he wants me to think this is a completely unnecessary scene. “You don’t need to worry about her.”
Little girl. My blood ices in my veins, but I don’t take my eyes off of them. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”
“No, no…it is work accident,” he says. “She sick.”
“Funny,” I say, but I don’t feel funny at all. “She didn’t punch out.”
The girl lifts her head, a sluggish attempt to focus. When she sees me, something like recognition stirs and fades. Her knees buckle again. The man on the right jerks her up too roughly, fingers biting into the tender inside of her arm. She mewls.
“Let her go.” My voice goes low. I’m not Con. I don’t have his authority. I’m not Mav with his growl and his power. All I have is me. “Let her go, now.”
Behind me, movement ripples through the crowd. I don’t look away from the men, but I feel it—the change in the air when my men notice I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Con’s attention is a weight when it lands. Maverick’s is heat.
The taller man takes a step and I take one back, keeping the door open. I’m not giving them the enclosed hallway, not even for a second. “She’s just drunk,” he says, more patient now, like he’s humoring me.
“No, you drugged her,” I counter. “You’re trying to hurt her.” I flick my eyes once toward the black dome camera over the door, inside the commons area. “You want to explain that to security? Or the cops we just left in the penthouse?”
That lands. It’s small—the set of his jaw, the angle of his shoulders—but I catch it.
He glances over my head, and in that sliver I see them the way a camera would.
They’re wearing wrong shoes for hotel staff, jeans too stiff, the tag still creasing the pocket.
Matching black jackets light on the body but heavy at the waist. The logo on the chest is nothing, a sporty brand anyone could buy.
The look in the eyes, though—cold, impatient, already past me to the next problem.
“Con,” I say without turning. I don’t raise my voice. “Mav.”
They’re already coming. I hear Con first—the clipped pace, the way people get out of his way without thinking about it. Maverick is a faster thunder, the floor almost vibrating under his boots.
Con’s hand lands on my shoulder with the lightest touch, enough to slide me behind him and take my spot at the threshold.
The electricity in him is controlled, leashed, terrifying in its calm.
Maverick takes two more steps and squares his shoulders with the taller man, a smile that isn’t a smile cutting his face in half.
“Let her go,” Con says. It’s not loud. It doesn’t have to be.
The men freeze—the kind of still that comes before a bad decision. I see them choose. The shorter one curses in Russian. They drop her like dead weight and bolt down the service corridor toward the freight elevator, shoes slapping concrete, shoulders skimming painted cinderblock.
Maverick surges, but Con snags a handful of his shirt and gives a short shake of his head. “Don’t,” he warns, eyes flicking to the camera, the open crowd, the fact that we’re a few steps away from a blind spot that could turn into a bad headline.
“I’ve got her.” I’m already folding forward to catch the housekeeper before her skull meets tile.
She’s heavier than she looks, dead-limbed.
I ease her down, prop her against the wall so her airway stays open.
Her eyes flutter, the whites glassy. There’s a chemical sweetness on her breath that makes my throat close.
“Hey,” I say softly, tugging her cardigan up to cover her. “You’re okay. You’re safe. Stay with me.”
Con’s voice is a blade beside me, low and lethal, talking into his comm. “Lock down service on eighteen. Freight included. No one in or out without my say. Pull the last hour on every camera facing eighteen’s back hall and the laundry junction.”
Maverick drags the service door fully open so it can’t latch, then plants himself in it like a barricade. He looks at me, then the girl, and something dark flashes in his eyes. He scans the hall, a wolf scenting prey. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks Con.
“They’re on foot,” Con says, his normal calm fraying at the edges. “They won’t make the dock if security isn’t asleep.”
The girl’s fingers twitch, a tiny, panicked flutter. Her lips move. I lean close, push damp hair off her forehead.
“What?” I whisper. “Tell me.”
Her voice is a scrape. “Laundry,” she gets out. “Chute. Not…alone.”
My scalp prickles. “What? How many?”
She swallows. Her eyes roll, then focus hard on mine for half a second like she’s trying to pin me in place. “Two,” she whispers. “Already gone.”