Chapter 36
Dominic
The crash was loud enough to echo. A monitor hit the wall, ripped straight off the desk and thrown hard enough to shatter on impact. Dominic didn’t stop moving. His hand swept across the desk, sending everything within reach to the floor in a cascade of glass and paper.
Forty-three hours.
The number sat under his skin, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
He turned, grabbed the chair, and drove it sideways into the cabinet.
The impact slammed the doors open, hinges bending, shelves cracking inside.
His fist drove into the wall next—plaster splitting, knuckles splitting with it—but the pain barely registered.
It wasn’t the thing that was tearing him apart.
Knox had been missing for forty-three hours.
The office was wrecked. Glass crunched under his shoes as he stood in the middle of it, chest heaving, blood drying across his knuckles. He dragged a hand over his face, but it didn’t do anything to quiet his mind.
He hadn’t slept. Not once. Forty-three hours and his body should have been shutting down.
Instead everything felt too sharp. His thoughts kept looping over themselves without pause, returning to the same names, places, and half-buried connections.
Every person Mercer had ever dealt with.
Every loose thread that might lead somewhere.
He’d worked through all of them. Methodically at first. Then desperately.
The interrogations had been bad.
Usually, he knew exactly where the line was.
How far to push before it stopped being productive, how to read the moment someone had given everything they had.
This time, he hadn’t cared. If they hesitated, he pushed harder.
Hard enough that people broke in ways they weren’t supposed to break.
The rational part of his brain—the part that had built everything through precision and control—watched it happen but couldn’t make it stop.
Cassian had stepped in more than once. The last time, he’d had to physically tear Dominic off a guy and shove him backward. “Enough,” he’d said.
Dominic had turned on him instantly, the anger right there at the surface, fist already clenching. For one very real second, he’d almost hit his own cousin.
Cassian hadn’t flinched. “Go,” he’d said, voice steady in a way that meant he understood exactly what was happening. “You’re more useful on the phone. Use your connections. I’ll handle this.”
Dominic had listened. Not because he wanted to, but because Cassian was right and one of them needed to be.
Think.
He’d already thrown everything at it. Crews spread across the city, every contact activated, people leaned on, favors called in, money thrown at every crack and corner where information might be hiding.
Nothing.
Forty-three hours of nothing.
What was he missing? There had to be something. There always was. Mercer wasn’t smart enough to vanish like this. He was desperate, sloppy, burning through resources and goodwill. Desperate men left traces. Dominic just had to find the right one.
He stood in his ruined office and thought about Knox on his knees, looking up at him with those pretty blue eyes.
He thought about Knox in his kitchen wearing his shirt and eating his food.
He thought about Knox in the dark saying I think I’m bi like it was the bravest and most terrifying thing he’d ever done.
His chest constricted so hard it felt like something physical breaking.
I have to find him.
He dragged a bloody hand over his face and reached for his phone just as it buzzed. A name flashed across the screen, one of the contacts he’d reached out to earlier.
Dominic answered instantly. “Tell me you have something.”
“I have an address.”
“Send it.”
“It’s already in your messages.”
The line went dead.
Dominic checked the message, grabbed his gun, and walked through the wreckage without looking back.
* * *
He stood across the street, hands in his pockets, eyes locked on the building like he could see straight through it.
Everything in him pushed to move, to go in and tear the place apart until he found Knox.
The violence pressing against his ribs was physical and it took everything he had to stay exactly where he was.
Mercer wasn’t stable; he was desperate. Desperate men made reckless choices. If Dominic went in too fast, Knox would be the one who paid for it. That thought settled deep enough to anchor him in place when nothing else could.
The building looked dead from the outside.
Two stories, narrow windows, brick darkened by years of rain and neglect.
Nothing about it drew attention, which was exactly the point.
Men like Mercer always ended up in places like this: half-rotted structures in forgotten corners of the city, the kind no one looked at twice unless they had a reason.
Movement at the far end of the street pulled his attention, but he didn’t turn. Doors opened in quick succession, followed by footsteps approaching with purpose.
Cassian was the first to reach him. “You waited.”
Dominic gave a short nod without taking his eyes off the building. Then he turned, gaze landing on the men behind Cassian. “You four. Spread out. Find every exit. No one gets out.”
They moved instantly, breaking off in different directions without a word.
Cassian stepped up beside him. Rafa moved to his other side—silent, composed, and one of his best shots. Exactly who he wanted at his back for something like this.
“Our priority is getting Knox out alive,” Dominic said. “We don’t know how many men are inside, but Mercer won’t be alone. Anyone in our way goes down. Mercer lives. I’m not done with him.”
He crossed the street in a straight line, Cassian and Rafa falling into step beside him. The door didn’t budge—locked. Cassian crouched at it, working the lock with quick, practiced movements, and within seconds it clicked open.
They slipped in with guns raised and silencers fixed. The air inside was stale, heavy with damp and a metallic smell underneath.
A man rounded the corner, confusion barely starting to form on his face.
Dominic fired. A soft thup. The bullet punched through his forehead and he dropped where he stood.
Nobody spoke.
Cassian dragged the body out of sight, tucking it behind a stack of crates against the wall. Rafa moved ahead, clearing the next corner with practiced precision. Dominic followed, focus already pushing forward as Cassian fell back into position, covering their flank.
They swept through the front of the building quickly, finding nothing but dust and silence.
But it didn’t last. Voices drifted from deeper inside, rising into careless laughter that had no business existing in a place like this.
Dominic followed the sound, pushing through the doorway with the other two right behind him.
Three men looked up; they didn’t get a chance to do anything else. Dominic fired twice, Cassian once. The laughter died with them. Rafa moved through the space, confirming what they already knew. “Clean.”
They stepped back into the corridor, and there was no mistaking where it led: a long, narrow stretch of concrete drawing the eye to a heavy metal door at the far end.
Everything about it felt wrong, but Dominic moved toward it anyway.
As they got close, faint voices began to carry through the metal.
Mercer, talking like he had all the time in the world.
He didn’t.
Dominic reached the door and slammed it open hard enough to crack it against the wall. All three of them entered at once, weapons raised.
And there he was.
Knox.
He was strapped to a chair in the center of the room, marked in ways that made his vision flicker with rage.
Bruises layered over each other in dark, ugly patterns.
Blood streaked down his side, skin broken and burned.
There was a smell in the room—copper and something charred underneath.
Dominic’s brain recognized both instantly, even as his body tried to reject the reality of what they meant.
But Knox was upright.
Looking at him.
Alive.
The relief hit Dominic like a punch, but it didn’t soften a single thing. It twisted instantly into rage, violent enough to taste. A burning clarity settled over him: Mercer was about to suffer an extraordinary amount of pain. He was going to pay for this in ways he’d never imagined.
Mercer stood a few feet from Knox, a knife hanging loose in his hand, like he’d been mid-sentence when the door crashed open. He didn’t move. Didn’t even seem to breathe with three guns pointed at him.
Dominic didn’t say a word.
He pulled the trigger twice.
Both shots were clean, kneecaps blown out in an instant. Mercer collapsed with a choked scream that broke on the way out, the knife slipping from his hand as he hit the concrete.
Dominic was already moving, dropping in front of Knox like everything else in the room had ceased to exist—Mercer screaming on the floor, Cassian moving to secure him, Rafa covering the door—none of it mattered. None of it reached him.
Knox was barely holding himself upright, body slack against the restraints, every line of him drawn tight with pain. But his eyes—those beautiful eyes—found him immediately.
Still there.
Still him.
“Dom…” It came out rough, dragged through whatever it had cost him to hold on this long.
Dominic’s hand came up, steadying Knox’s head as it started to dip, finding a place on his jaw that wouldn’t make the pain worse. “I’m here,” he said.
Knox let out an uneven breath. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah, you are.”
Up close, every injury was impossible to ignore: the dark bruises, the cuts still seeping, the angry red burn below his ear. Dominic’s jaw locked so tight it ached. He took it all in and filed it away—that would be revisited on Mercer’s body in detail.
Knox’s gaze flickered but held. “Didn’t tell him anything,” he said, as though that was the urgent thing. As though, with blood drying on his skin and shock working its way through him, the thing he couldn’t bear was Dominic thinking otherwise.
“Shhh, I know,” Dominic said.
“Hurts,” Knox admitted, barely above a breath.
Dominic’s thumb moved against his skin. “I know, baby.”
Knox blinked slowly, fighting to stay present. His focus drifted in and out, his body trying to shut down now that it finally felt safe enough. “I knew you’d find me,” he whispered.
“Always.”