Chapter 4
Knox
Knox woke with the uneasy, suffocating feeling that he was late for something.
His eyes snapped open, breath catching halfway in his chest as disorientation hit him all at once.
For a split second, nothing made sense—only the echo of a gunshot still vibrating through him, and the weight of a deep voice reminding him of a debt he didn’t understand.
His heart pounded hard enough to hurt. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t know if he’d made it out of that alley, if any of it had been real.
Then the ceiling came into focus. The thin crack running above the light fixture.
The faint hum of the refrigerator bleeding through the wall.
Pale morning light leaking through the blinds, striping the room in uneven lines.
Home.
He dragged in a slow breath and forced it out through his nose, staring up at the ceiling until the panic lessened enough to manage. It didn’t disappear, but it receded enough to function.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat there for a moment, elbows braced on his knees, hands dangling uselessly between them. His fingers were steady now, but he could still feel last night in his body. The tension hadn’t left. His muscles felt locked, like they hadn’t gotten permission to relax.
He clenched his jaw and pushed to his feet, forcing himself into motion. If he stopped for too long—really stopped—he had the uneasy feeling he wouldn’t be able to start again.
He paused outside his mother’s bedroom door, listening.
Nothing.
She was probably still knocked out, like most mornings—buried under the familiar mix of wine and sleeping pills. Relief flickered through him, brief and ugly.
He moved toward the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it straight down. Then another. His stomach churned, but hunger felt distant and irrelevant. He had just set the glass down when the buzzer cut through the apartment, the sound piercing and sudden.
A jolt shot through him with enough force to root him where he stood, breath caught somewhere it couldn’t escape.
It rang again, longer this time, more insistent. No one buzzed this early. No one buzzed at all. His pulse kicked hard, a familiar spike of adrenaline flooding his system before his brain could catch up.
You owe me now.
The words slid back into place as though they’d been waiting. He swallowed and moved toward the door, each step slower than it should’ve been. He leaned forward and looked through the peephole.
His stomach dropped.
The man from the alley stood on the other side, perfectly still, his presence as composed in the morning light as it had been in the shadows. He looked even more out of place here, too commanding for the worn-down building behind him.
Another man stood beside him, similar in height and build, but looser in the shoulders. His gaze roamed the building like he was memorizing exits out of habit.
For a moment, instinct screamed at him to step back, to pretend he wasn’t home, to let the buzzing continue unanswered until they gave up. But they didn’t look like men who left without answers.
The man’s gaze lifted and locked directly on the peephole. Knox jerked back as if burned, his heart slamming against his ribs. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth, forcing himself to steady. Running wouldn’t help. Hiding wouldn’t help.
Slowly, he reached for the lock and opened the door.
“Good morning,” the man said, calm as ever, as though they were meeting for coffee instead of revisiting a murder.
Knox didn’t respond.
Up close, there was nothing to soften him.
The light stripped away the shadows but did nothing to diminish the severity of his features.
His skin held a warm olive tone, his face was cut from hard lines, and the dark stubble along his jaw made him look even more dangerous.
His white shirt was crisp, sleeves rolled up enough to expose his forearms. Dark ink traced over his skin in intricate patterns before disappearing beneath the fabric.
His hazel eyes were fixed on Knox in a way that made it difficult to look away. There was something disturbing about that kind of attention.
Knox swallowed, his grip tightening on the doorframe. “You—you said—”
“I said you owed me,” he replied evenly.
Knox’s fingers curled against the wood. “I didn’t say anything. I swear.”
“I believe you,” he said. “That’s why you’re still standing.”
That reassurance did absolutely nothing to calm his nerves.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” the man continued. “Somewhere private.” His gaze shifted past Knox, down the hallway. “Do you live alone?”
Knox stiffened. “My mom—”
“She won’t be involved,” he said, cutting him off without raising his voice. “But I’m not having this conversation where we can be overheard. Follow us.”
Knox hesitated. Every instinct screamed not to go, not to give them anything more than they’d already taken. But the alternative—slamming the door in their faces—wasn’t an option. So he grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door, fingers unsteady despite the effort to control them, and followed.
They led him to an SUV parked along the curb. He got in because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Because not getting in felt like a worse idea.
The two men slid into the front seats, their movements casual, as if this was just another routine pickup. The guy in the passenger seat turned, reaching back over the console, and held out a black cloth hood. “Put this on.”
Knox stared at it, the air in his chest catching. “No.” The refusal came fast and instinctive. He shook his head, pulling back. “I’m not doing that.”
The man didn’t withdraw his hand. He simply waited, arm outstretched, patient as ever.
Then he spoke from the driver's seat, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “If I have to put it on you, you won’t like how that happens.”
Knox’s heartbeat faltered, then surged again, harder than before. He shrank back into the seat, his eyes on the back of the man’s head, searching for anything that might suggest a bluff.
There was nothing. Only the promise of force if he pushed.
He reached out clumsily and took the hood. The fabric felt heavier in his hands than it should have, its weight disproportionate to what it was. He hesitated before pulling it down over his head.
Darkness swallowed everything. The world shrank to sound and sensation—the noise of his own breathing, the subtle shift of bodies in the front, and the violent rhythm of his pulse in his ears.
“Good,” the man said.
The engine turned over, and the SUV pulled away from the curb and merged onto the road.
Knox’s spine stiffened, bracing for the unknown.
Without sight, everything else sharpened.
He was aware of every inch of himself, every fear prickling beneath his skin.
The seatbelt cut a hard line across his chest. Each turn threw him off balance, one way then the other, with no way to prepare for any of it.
He had no idea where they were taking him. No idea who they truly were beyond what he’d already seen. And still, he’d gotten into the car without a fight.
His pulse refused to slow, but beneath it, something else stirred. There was a dangerous curiosity that wove itself through the fear. It was the same instinct that had kept him standing in that alley when he should’ve run. The part of him that always leaned toward trouble, even when he knew better.
He should have been fighting this, clawing for some kind of control, some distance between himself and whatever was coming. Instead, he sat still. As if some part of him had accepted that whatever came next wasn’t something he could avoid.
The gunshot had terrified him.
But this part of himself—the part always drawn to the unknown—felt far more dangerous.
* * *
After what felt like twenty minutes—though time had long since lost any real shape—the SUV began to slow. The tires rolled over rough concrete, the vibration cutting through the floor and straight up his spine. Somewhere ahead, a garage door groaned open, the sound deep and mechanical.
They were pulling into a building, somewhere he wouldn’t be seen. The engine idled, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the hood was yanked from his head.
Fluorescent light slammed into his eyes, forcing them shut before he could stop it.
He squinted as his vision adjusted, the world returning piece by piece.
There were gray concrete floors, steel columns, and rows of parked cars.
The space was wide and industrial, enclosed enough that every sound seemed to carry.
The front doors opened, and both men stepped out without a word.
Knox climbed out after them. The air inside the garage was cooler, brushing against his skin and raising a faint shiver along his arms. Neither man looked back to check on him.
They moved forward with certainty, as though his compliance had never been in question.
They crossed the ground level, passing a glass-walled security hub filled with monitors and blinking lights. Knox caught snippets of what the screens displayed—hallways, doorways, loading bays, each marked with time stamps and location tags.
This place missed nothing.
They led him down a flight of stairs into the basement, where they stopped in front of a plain steel door. It had no markings, no window, nothing to indicate what lay beyond it.
“Get inside.”
Knox’s throat tightened as he stepped over the threshold.
The room was exactly what he expected and somehow worse for it.
It was small and bare, the walls a flat gray that seemed to swallow sound.
A single table sat in the center, surrounded by four chairs, all positioned beneath a buzzing fluorescent light.
An interrogation room.
The door shut behind him with a final click that settled heavily in his chest.
The second man leaned back against the wall near the exit, his posture relaxed to the point of appearing disinterested. But his eyes stayed on Knox, steady and attentive, watching without interruption.