Chapter 20
twenty
I love my knife.
There’s no rush with a blade. It’s quiet. No flash or bang. Just pressure. Pull. Patience.
He’s zip-tied to a chair, wrists bound behind him, shoulders already dislocated from fighting the restraints. I set the tip beneath his collarbone, angle the edge, then pull slow and shallow, carving a whisper-thin line across his chest. He jerks. Whimpers.
I do it again, lower this time, diagonal, letting blood bead in clean, red lines. I’m not looking for screams yet, only the sound of fear catching in the throat. The silence that stretches before agony begins.
“I asked you a question,” I say. “Who do you work for?”
His eyes roll toward me, already glassy with pain.
I carve another line, jagged this time, dragging across his ribs.
The noises he makes are gurgled now, more breath than voice.
He’s already missing two fingers and part of his ear.
I take my time, let the silence between his sobs stretch.
Pain isn’t about speed. It’s about the space between mercy and madness.
I crouch in front of him, grab his left leg, and wedge it against the table’s edge.
“I want you to think very carefully,” I murmur, “about how important your kneecap is.”
He thrashes. Too late. The blade presses in and I peel. Skin pulls away like damp paper, exposing the white gleam of bone.
That’s when he screams. A wet, broken sound, like an animal dying in the dirt.
I step back, wipe the blood from my blade onto my jeans. My phone buzzes in my back pocket.
Sava.
I answer with a clipped, “What.”
“She’s not here.”
I don’t move. “Say that again.”
“Melinda. I shadowed her after you left like you asked. I was already nearby and had eyes on her within three minutes of you being off-site. She was sad after you left but I swear everyone was trying to help her have a good time. I watched her on cams and from the service corridor until I had to step out for a five-minute call. It couldn’t wait.
When I came back, I heard Caleb tell Adrian she was heading home.
Logan was right behind her. She texted when she got to her car. ”
My chest hollows out. “How long.”
“No one’s seen her in thirty minutes. Mavik pinged her ring and phone to the fucking parking garage.”
“She wouldn’t leave me without telling me.” I hang up. I lean close enough for the bastard to taste blood on my breath.
“It’s your lucky night.” I drag the knife across his throat.
She wouldn’t leave. Not without telling me. Not without trying to reach me. She took her coat and her purse. But her fucking phone was left in the parking garage. Her ring. The two things she knew I could use to find her.
The cold gnaws at my throat as I slam through the alley behind our offices and take the stairs three at a time. Christmas lights still burn inside the building, flickering reds and golds across the windows.
I push through the front doors. Everyone’s been corralled into the lobby—tenants, contractors, guests, staff, all clustered under garland and glass.
Uncle Leven stands like a boulder at the front, arms crossed, daring anyone to move.
Adrian is a dark plane by the elevators, cane angled, head cocked, listening to everything.
Caleb flanks him, jaw tight. Atlas has the back exit walled off with his stare.
Eland paces; Evie and Elsie make statues of themselves in his path.
Sava slips in along the service stairs, keeping the support beam between her and my family. She stands apart, jaw tight, phone in hand, eyes scanning everyone, memorizing every face. Her coat’s off. Her hair’s wild. She’s scared. Which means I should be terrified.
I move through the room like a storm. Half-drunk beers sweat on the tables, condensation pooling beneath the glass bottles.
Her scarf, red to match those sinful heels, draped over the back of the chair she was sitting in.
I pick it up, shove the fabric to my face and breathe in her strawberry scent.
The hairs on the back of my neck rise, not from panic, but calculation.
I move through the building checking the locks, the windows, the perimeter cameras. No fucking sign of her.
I slam my hand into the wall. Plaster spiders across the paint. Blood slicks the fresh letters on my now-cracked knuckles. I can’t breathe.
“Where the fuck is she?” I snarl.
Caleb steps toward me, trying to keep his voice steady. “We locked the building down. No one’s left since we noticed she was missing.”
“You were supposed to watch her.”
“She was fine—”
“You were all supposed to fucking watch her.” I shove past him.
People shrink back as I stalk the floor. I rip coats off chairs, check bathroom doors, flip the catering table. Nothing. Not even strawberries anymore. Air won’t go in. Won’t come out.
I push into the side hall where the sound dies, and the cinderblock sweats cold. I brace my palm to the wall and count like she would. In three. Out five. In seven. Again. Again. Not rage. I know rage. This is something that’s never existed for me.
Fear.
It tastes like metal. It tastes like the night I killed my father, except worse, because this time I could lose the only thing I’ve ever wanted.
Sava slips into the corridor sideways so she can watch the door and me at once.
“Breathe,” she says, clinical.
“I have to find her.”
“You will,” she replies, low. “But not if you break.”
I drag breath. In three. Out five.
“Machine,” she says. “Not man.”
My chest unlocks with a click I hate. “Copy.”
I’m steady now. I round on the room. Sava stays in the shadows, never giving anyone her full face. The why scratches my brain, but I don’t follow that fucked up thread because every wire in me is firing hot with finding my wife. “Who talked to her?” I shout. “Who saw my wife leave?” They flinch.
“These people—” Caleb tries again. “They’re just staff. They don’t know anything.”
“Someone saw something,” I growl. "And if you’d done your fucking job for five goddamn minutes, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
My voice cuts through the lobby like a blade. Silence follows. Then my burner lights up with an unknown number.
“I didn’t know, man,” the voice blurts. “I didn’t know she was yours. They didn’t tell me. You gotta believe me. She just said grab the girl. She didn’t say she was yours.”
“Where is she?”
“I can drop a pin. I swear I didn’t touch her. I didn’t fucking touch her.”
I breathe through my nose. My voice stays cold. “Send it.”
While I wait for the idiot to text where to go, Nikola, Dominic, and Marco approach.
The pin comes in and I forward it to Travis with a message.
Stand by. Do not move unless called.
The last thing I need is Travis rolling up with a bunch of fucking cops.
Nikola, Dominic, and Marco gather their own people with texts and rushed phone calls.
I’ve never called The Accord for help, never had any reason to, but it was born from us vowing to die to protect the people we love, to honor the ones we’ve lost. We protect all innocents, kill all spiders, but when something happens to our people the rules shift.
And monsters start watching their own shadows.
Sava meets me at the car, already sliding into the passenger seat. She doesn’t say a word as I drive like hell through the city. Wind howls through the cracked window. Her hand stays clenched around her phone.
“Whoever took her, they didn’t know,” I say low. “But they will.”
We pull up on a warehouse on the edge of the river, ice crusting over the cement. Lights flicker inside. I kill the engine, check the feed from the external cams. Two men. One watching the back door. One pacing the perimeter.
Sava is already moving. She ghosts along the side of the building, eliminates both guards with a quiet snap of their necks and disappears toward the back.
I go straight through the front. A third man standing inside, maybe who called me, doesn’t even have time to reach for a weapon.
I’m on him in seconds. His face meets my elbow.
His ribs catch my boot. I drag him into the center of the room, zip-tie his wrists, and take out my knife.
I cut a line under his eye. One shallow one down the side of his throat.
Then I lean in, bracing his leg, and start to carve.
I finish the last line of the peel. Blood sheets down his shin, slicking the concrete.
The skin over a kneecap is thin. Tender.
It pulls away like old wallpaper, and when I reach the bone, that’s when he screams.
I don’t waste time with questions. I don’t try to be clean or precise. I stab the fucker in his eye, hilt smashing orbital bone. He’s begging but I can’t make out the words, just his scream tearing the silence open.
“Cassius.” Sava’s voice cuts through the warehouse.
I rip my knife from his face and then jam it into his throat. Blood shoots from the hole when I pull out my drenched blade. I push him over.
I crouch low, peel his shirt back, and carve a careless spider before pulling a black-widow charm from my pocket and shoving it between his teeth. Then I stand, still holding the knife, and turn toward the door.
Melinda is with her.
Her arms are tied in front of her with zip ties. Her lip is split. Her eyes are fire.
She sees me. Sees the man at my feet, what I’ve done, and she doesn’t flinch. She steps forward.
Sava blocks her. “No.”
“I need to go to him,” Melinda says, her voice raw.
“You don’t need to see that up close.”
“I do.”
Sava looks like she might argue. But she doesn’t. She steps aside. Melinda walks past her and stops beside me. Her eyes sweep down to the blood, the blade, the ruin of the man still oozing crimson.
“He deserved to die for what he did to you,” I say, not looking away from her.
“Yes,” she says. “But I don’t deserve to stand here any longer.”
The Machine in me wants to make sure the whole city tastes this mistake. I make myself look at her instead, and a door to a room I didn’t know existed in my head unlatches.