Chapter 16
SLOANE
My brain argued with me in vicious little circles—tell him the truth or make him dig until he found it himself.
Either way, I wasn’t walking out of here.
I felt it in the way he moved. In the way he’d eaten in front of me as though I was an inconvenience.
In the way he’d searched me as if I was already a body he needed to label, file, and bury. Men like him didn’t leave loose ends.
It should have made my skin crawl.
Instead, something in me tightened. An ugly, involuntary pull toward the kind of certainty he radiated. Toward the way he decided, and the world obeyed. My fear didn’t vanish. It changed shape. Turned sharp. It wasn’t just the need for survival keeping me still.
My tongue felt too big for my mouth. The air in this place was dry and stale, heavy with cooked meat and metal and old cleaner, like someone had tried to scrub sin off the walls and only made it shine.
I forced my voice to work. “I … I want a deal. I’ll tell you what I know, but you have to promise not to kill me. Or hurt me.”
Ryker threw his head back and laughed. Not amused. Mocking. As if I’d cracked a joke at my own funeral.
“I’m supposed to believe that?” He wiped his mouth.
My attention dropped to the half-empty water bottle beside his plate and laptop. It glinted under the overhead light, mocking me.
“I need water,” I said. “Then I’ll tell you what you want.”
His smile turned sharp. “Talk first. Water and maybe some food afterward.”
Panic tried to rise, hot and fast, but I trapped it behind my teeth. I couldn’t afford it. Panic made you sloppy. Made you beg.
I lifted my arm as much as the restraint allowed. “Just a sip, Ryker. My throat feels like it’s sticking together. It’ll help me tell you what you want to know.”
For a second, I thought he wouldn’t. He’d been enjoying the control too much. Then he stood, snatched the bottle, twisted the lid off, and stepped in close enough that my skin remembered him. The heat, his hands, and the dangerous lie of safety.
He pressed the opening to my mouth. Hope flared, then he tipped it too fast.
Water surged, wrong and violent, flooding my mouth, then my nose. It burned. I choked, coughing so hard my eyes burned. It was only water, but it didn’t feel like water. It felt like glass in my throat, sharp and scraping.
He leaned down. “Talk or I’ll hold you down and you’ll have a lot more water up your fucking nose.” His voice was flat. “Don’t for a minute think you’re the one in charge.”
Cold slid through me. He wasn’t bluffing.
I hung my head, coughing until I could breathe again. A thin string of saliva clung to the corner of my mouth, humiliating and human. I scrubbed it away with my tongue, then made myself look at him. My heartbeat felt loud enough to be heard in the next room. If he wanted to make me small, fine.
Then I would use the only thing big enough to stop him. I tried to steady myself before I spoke.
“I saved your life. You fucking owe me.”
Something cracked across his face, shock then disbelief. It was gone almost as fast as it appeared. Like emotion was a reflex he’d learned to kill.
“What do you mean?”
I stilled, allowing him to feel the heaviness of the words before I even spoke them. “I was the one who saved you that night.”
His amber eyes went emptier. He flipped the switch again as if he’d trained himself to do it on command. As if feeling was a liability.
I pushed through anyway, because I needed him to hear me.
“I tried to get to you sooner, but the four men …” My voice snagged, and I hated it.
Hated how quickly my body remembered the old terror, and how I’d failed.
“If I’d run into the middle of them, we’d both have been beaten.
” The room filled with a thick silence, and I swallowed around the words that were lodged in my throat and coated with guilt.
“I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d told him sorry. Sorry for freezing. Sorry for being too late. Sorry for the cowardice that still lived in my muscles no matter how much training and grit I piled on top of it.
But it was the first time he’d been awake to hear it.
“It was four against one, and I wasn’t armed.” I told him that because facts mattered. “You were already down. When they ran, I called 9-1-1. I held your hand until the ambulance arrived.”
His throat worked several times, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He sank into the chair across from me like his legs had decided to without him.
“It was you.” The words sounded heavy coming out of him. “You were the mysterious woman telling doctors you were my sister?”
“Yes.” My pulse stumbled. “They wouldn’t let me stay otherwise. I—” I tilted my head, stretching the sore muscles. “I checked on you after. More than once.”
His gaze narrowed. “Why?”
“Because I needed you. Need you,” I corrected, hating that I’d handed him ammunition. At this point, the only way I might have a chance of living my life above ground and not in it, was by telling him the truth.
His fingers tapped a rhythm on his leg. “Before that night I hadn’t ever met you.” The pause was edged. “Right?”
“Kind of.” I licked my lips, tasting cheap plastic water. “You’ve seen me one other time. At Velvet Vortex.”
He leaned back, needing more distance. “A lot of people go there.”
“I know. You were talking to the dark-haired bartender. His name tag said Kip.”
His stare sharpened. The air changed, subtle but real like I’d brushed a live wire.
“So, you’ve been following me since then?”
“No.” I shook my head carefully. “But it was the first time I noticed you. Not long after that, you were attacked.”
His fingers flexed against the tabletop as if he was gripping a memory by the throat. “Did you see their faces?” A note of desperation slipped through his words.
“I wish.” I forced the words out as the memories of that night surfaced again. “It was dark. There was only one dim streetlight, and it was raining. Their backs were to me. I saw bodies and movement and your blood.” My stomach rolled. “That’s all.”
His shoulders slumped forward the tiniest fraction. It made him look human. Then he lifted his head again, and the human part vanished.
“At the bar and that night … your arm.” I stared at him, willing him to understand the weight of what I was about to say. “The rabbit tattoo. I recognized it.”
Silence hit the room hard and heavy.
Ryker didn’t move. Didn’t blink. The air around him felt tighter, suffocating.
“From where?” he asked, and his voice didn’t rise.
My mouth went dry again instantly. My hands tried to curl, but the restraints bit my wrists and reminded me he was the one in control.
This was the point where I could either earn another breath or lose my last one.
I chose carefully. “From a case.”
His expression didn’t change. Not an inch. “What case?”
I felt my pulse in my throat. “A cold case.”
“Whose?”
If I said it too fast, it would sound like a plea. If I said it too slow, it would sound like a lie.
So, I told him the smallest truth I could afford. “He was only twenty-nine.”
I’m not sure why, but that did something. It was subtle. Most people would have missed it. A tightening at the corner of his eyes. A shift in the line of his mouth. As if possessiveness had stirred awake in the dark, sniffing blood in the water.
My stomach flipped. “I’m not walking out alive.” Saying it out loud felt like taking a fraction of power back. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”
His lips twitched, but it wasn’t a smile. “Then why are you still talking?”
“Because I’m trying to buy something.” I forced myself to breathe, slow and steady, even as my insides shook. “Time. Answers. Maybe.” My voice cracked, but I pushed through. “Maybe a way not to die tonight.”
He stood again, and my body went rigid on instinct. Ryker walked toward me without hurrying, as if he had all the time in the world to decide how I ended. He stopped close enough that his shadow swallowed my knees. “You don’t get to bargain.”
“I already am.” I surprised myself with the steadiness. “You’re still here. You’re listening.”
He looked at my wrists, the restraints, the red marks already forming. Then back to me.
“What do you know about the tattoo?” he asked.
I tilted my head, watching him. “It’s not random.”
A faint crease appeared between his brows, then smoothed out.
I kept going, because stopping would be death. “I’ve seen it before on a photo tied to someone’s disappearance. A symbol. A mark.” I didn’t say branding because it felt too close to the truth. “I’ve been chasing it for years.”
He didn’t flinch, but the tension in his shoulders changed, coiling tighter. Like every word was a lit match near gasoline.
“You’re lying,” he said flatly.
“No.” My voice softened, not weakness but strategy. “If I was lying, I would tell you something easier. Something that makes you feel in control.”
His eyes narrowed again. “You’re playing a game.”
“I’m trying to survive,” I shot back, and the fear finally bled through the edges of my voice. “There’s a difference.”
Something in his expression wavered. An almost-imperceptible struggle, as if rage and curiosity were fighting for the same space.
He leaned down until his face was level with mine. “Say his name.”
The command landed with a hand around my throat.
My tongue felt heavy. My heart thudded once, hard. I didn’t want to give him more than I had to. But he’d asked, and refusing would be similar to lighting a fuse.
“Nate,” I whispered.
Ryker didn’t blink. Not once. But something in his expression tightened—as if the name had found a seam. “Who is he to you?”
I hated the way the answer broke me.
“My brother.”
Ryker held my gaze like he could rip the truth straight out of my skull. “And you think I’m connected to him.”
“I don’t think.” My words were shaking loose now that I’d started. “I know the tattoo is connected. I know the men who attacked you weren’t random. I know you weren’t supposed to live.” I sucked in a breath. “And I know someone wanted me to find you.”
His head tilted, sharp. “Who sent you?”
I hesitated long enough for him to notice.
He straightened. “Don’t bullshit me.”
The man who’d broken into my house could find me anywhere. He’d proven that. Ryker was dangerous, but he was standing right in front of me, and I could see his face. That made him the lesser evil. I was betting my life on it.
“I don’t have a name,” I explained quickly. “Only messages. Numbers that change. Instructions that don’t make sense until they do.” My stomach churned. “And the one thing they kept pushing over and over was you. Find Ryker.”
His gaze flicked to the laptop and then back to me.
“You followed me tonight because of a text.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I followed you because I’m trying to put the puzzle pieces together.
” My shoulders tensed. “Because you keep showing up in the same places my case does. Because the rabbit keeps circling you like it’s driving your decisions.
” I forced the next part out. “And because if I’m right …
you’re not just a man who kills people.”
His face went still.
“You’re a man someone tried to break,” I said quietly. “And I think they tried to break Nate too.”
Ryker’s hand came down on the table behind him with a dull, controlled thud. “Tell me exactly what you saw. Start with the tattoo and the case. Then why the fuck a missing person file would be tied to me.”
Something in me flinched. Then worse—hope. He still might kill me. I could feel it sitting in the room with us, patient and hungry. But he wanted answers more than he wanted my blood. That was my only leverage.
So, I gave him another thread. Not the whole rope. Not yet.
“I can. But you need to understand something first.”
He didn’t blink. “What?”
“If you kill me.” I shifted in the chair.
“You lose the only person who has been chasing that rabbit long enough to recognize it. You lose the only person who saw you that night and lived to connect it to something bigger.” I paused.
“And you lose the only person in this room who’s trying to help you, even though you have a knife ready to fucking cut my throat. ”
His amber gaze held mine, and for a second I saw it. It wasn’t mercy.
It was possession. It was as if he didn’t like the idea of me dying because he hadn’t decided it yet.
“Talk.”
I drew a shaky breath, braced my voice, and started at the beginning. Carefully. The wrong truth, at the wrong time, would get me killed faster than any lie. “If you want to understand the rabbit, you have to understand what it was attached to when I first saw it.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s connected to the cold case I lost my job over. They thought I was obsessed, and they weren’t wrong. It consumed me. Drove my every thought and decision.”
“What happened to him?” he asked again with an edge to his voice.
I swallowed over the emotions and struggled to speak. If I let the grief out, he’d smell weakness.
Monsters always did.