Chapter 15 #2
Could I really hurt her? I didn’t even blink at the answer. Yes. I’d do anything to protect my people. Anything.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“You murdered him,” she said. Her voice might have been steady, but her hands trembled against the restraints.
I sneered at her. “Say that word again and we’ll see how brave you are when it costs you.”
Her gaze stayed on me; steady, assessing, as if she was filing me away instead of flinching. Then she backed off. She knew where the line was.
Smart girl. She wasn’t just beautiful. Sloane was calculating and dangerous. That was the problem. It was why I liked her.
I stepped back and tapped the table once. A clean sound. A command dressed up as nothing. “Tell me this. Is Sloane Ramsey your real name?”
She hesitated for a second. “Yes.”
A lie could live in a second.
The air fryer clicked off. I walked over like I didn’t have a chained woman in the living area and removed my dinner. The steak hit the plate with a heavy thud.
“Damn.” I inhaled. “That smells fucking good.”
I cut into it, checking the center. Medium rare. Perfect. I took a bite and chewed slowly, deliberately, letting the silence do the work.
Her stomach had growled when she was out cold. Twice. Loud enough that she’d hate it now, if she remembered.
I didn’t offer her a single drop of water. I just ate. Her attention was a resource. And tonight, I controlled all of it.
I watched her from the corner of my eye as I chewed, measuring the tension in her shoulders, the way her breathing tried to steady itself. Stubborn, like I’d seen at the Ritual. The kind that thought endurance was armor. It wasn’t.
I set my fork down with care and opened my laptop. The hinge thunked, the screen glow washing the table in the light. The internet out here was trash, weak, stuttering, but it would work. It had to.
I typed Sloane Ramsey into Google. The results popped up, but none of them were her.
I stabbed another piece of steak like it had personally offended me and chewed while the page loaded and reloaded, while my patience frayed.
I tried variations. Middle initial. City.
Hospital. Anything that should have snagged.
Nothing. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t “private person who hates social media” normal. That was scrubbed.
A cold, ugly thought tried to climb up my spine. I shoved it down deep enough to hurt. Not yet. Don’t spiral. Spiral later. Fix this shit now.
I closed the browser and went where the truth lived.
To the quiet corners where people didn’t pretend.
The dark web loaded slow as molasses, the cursor blinking at me.
I started digging. Threads. Records. Cached remnants.
The kind of footprints you only had if you existed loudly enough to make enemies.
Minutes later, my fork clinked against the plate. I stared at the screen. Then it hit like a fist to my goddamn throat. My jaw locked so tight it ached. “Jesus. Fucking. Christ.”
Sloane Ramsey wasn’t only a woman who’d stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time.
She used to be a detective. Even former cops had friends. Former cops still knew how to report a crime in a way that stuck. She was a goddamn detective who’d witnessed me kill someone.
Heat rushed through me. Anger first, sharp and immediate, as if it could cut its way out of my chest. Then the fear rode in hot on its heels. The kind that didn’t show up as panic, but as math. Calculations. Worst-case scenarios stacking like bricks.
A detective didn’t disappear without noise. Not unless someone had the power to make the noise stop. If she had even one person expecting a check-in … one partner. One supervisor. One friend who knew her patterns.
Death and Kip didn’t just become suspects.
They became targets.
My stomach rolled, not from the food, but from the mental image of it—cops.
Cameras. Questions. Warrants. A leash tightening around our throats because I hadn’t seen her fast enough.
Because I’d been arrogant enough to think we could handle whatever walked through that warehouse door.
I could bury a body. I couldn’t bury a mistake that goddamn big.
My palms went slick on the keyboard. My heart ticked up, fast and angry, thudding as though it wanted out of my ribs. I forced my breathing to stay even because if I lost control, if I started making choices from emotion, people died. The wrong people.
I kept digging anyway, because stopping didn’t make this shit less true. The more I pulled up, the more the edges of my control started to splinter.
Who the hell are you, Sloane Ramsey? And why did you end up in my world?
I swallowed hard, my vision blurry from the screen glare and something meaner. This wasn’t a coincidence. It couldn’t be. Not with a scrubbed history and a badge and the timing of her showing up like a ghost at the exact moment we were already bleeding risk.
My fingers hovered over the keys for half a second, just long enough for the dread to whisper:
If someone sent her … then they already knew where to aim.
I exhaled through my nose, slow, controlled, lying to myself like I always did.
Fine. Let them try.
Then I kept going, deeper, searching every file, every footprint, every thread that could tell me what I’d brought into our lives, and how fast I needed to end it before it ended us.
I scrolled slowly, seeing news articles about her, her job, and her accomplishments.
Three years ago, all information on her stopped.
Why? People didn’t go dark unless they were running …
or someone made them. And I didn’t know which was worse.
And why the hell was she following me?
My skin hummed with anxiety as I closed the lid of my computer and turned to her. “Who the fuck are you?” I growled.
The expression on her face looked mildly entertained. “From the tone of your voice, I’m guessing that you found out already.”
“A detective.” Shit. This was so bad. So fucking bad. There was no way I could get away with covering up her murder on my own. At this point, I had zero problems ending her.
“I used to be. That ended a few years ago.”
Used to be was irrelevant. I had to make sure she wasn’t working with the cops still. I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
“Who do you work for?”
“I don’t. I have an off the radar organization called Red Thread. A few others work with me. We work on missing person cases, cold cases, etc. Most of the time we help the cops by sharing information, but not all the time.”
Red Thread. It was mentioned in what I’d just read.
“Why am I on your radar?” I leaned in enough for her to feel it. “Decide, Sloane. Do you want to talk … or do you want to bleed?”
She responded with silence.
I stood and paced the small space in front of her, debating what to do with her.
Letting her go was too risky. Even if she wasn’t a detective anymore, she had connections.
That also meant if she was missing for long, people would be looking for her.
The wrong kind of people. I snatched her phone off the table and stormed over to her.
I swiped the screen up, activating the face recognition as I held it in front of her.
“Who would be looking for you?” I sneered at her.
“Jade and Eli. My two closest friends. They work at Red Thread with me.”
I knelt in front of her, searching for any hint of a lie. “Anyone else?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
The grief in her words caught my attention. I recognized what grief sounded like. For a second, I allowed myself to wonder what she meant. Then the reality of what she’d seen, what she now knew about me, settled in my chest like a stone.
I scrolled through her contacts, and read some of the newest messages, taking in how she talked to them.
Her tone. Her words. My brain clocking patterns.
Once I figured that out. I messaged them both that she wanted some time to clear her head and was camping.
Apparently, she loved the outdoors and training.
It made sense with how well she moved over the terrain during the games.
After I was done, I shoved the phone in my back pocket.
“Don’t think they’ll see your car either. I took the liberty of moving it after I took your keys.”
Her nose twitched slightly as if she were about to tell me to go fuck myself but then thought better of it.
Smart girl.
“You get one chance,” I said. “One lie, one dodge—anything that smells like bullshit—and I stop asking questions.”
I let the silence stretch. “Because I’ll bury you fucking alive.”
The threat tasted wrong in my mouth. Regardless, it was necessary.
I shoved the feeling down and leveled my stare. “If you want to live, answer me. Why am I on your goddamn radar?”