Chapter Ten
The first sign that something was wrong wasn’t violence.
It was silence.
Not the gentle hush of early morning, when the world held its breath before waking. This silence was deliberate—pressed flat, like a hand over a mouth. Luca surfaced from sleep with the certainty of a man who had learned the hard way that danger rarely announced itself with noise.
He lay still, eyes open, letting the house speak to him.
Nothing creaked. Nothing shifted. The old timber beams didn’t sigh with cooling air. Upstairs, there should have been movement by now—Mateo’s quiet pacing, Kol’s habitual circuit between rooms, the faint clink of a mug as someone gave in and made coffee before dawn.
There was none of it.
Luca rolled out of bed without waking Mara. She was curled toward the warmth he’d left behind, breath slow and even, hair spilling across the pillow. For a moment, the desire to stay—to pretend the world could wait another hour—hit him hard enough to ache.
But he hadn’t lived this long by ignoring his instincts.
Barefoot, he moved into the hallway, every step careful.
The lights were dimmed to night protocol and he was sure that the security system pulsed quietly beneath the floorboards, a green light flashing on a control panel by the door told him all doors were locked, all sensors were live, and all systems were reporting green.
Which was exactly what bothered him. Everything looked right but felt fucking wrong.
At the foot of the stairs, Mateo appeared, already dressed, laptop tucked under his arm like it always was. His expression mirrored Luca’s—tight, focused, listening past what was visible.
“You feel it too?” Mateo asked.
“Yeah,” Luca said. “Where’s Kol?”
Mateo exhaled through his nose. “He never went to bed. Stayed up after lock-down running delayed sweeps. He said something didn’t sit right.”
That settled badly. Kol didn’t sacrifice sleep unless his instincts were screaming.
They moved together toward the back of the house, the space Luca had converted years earlier into a hardened comm room. Screens lined one wall, dark except for a single active display that painted the room in a pale, cold glow.
Kol stood in front of it.
Not typing. Not working.
Just watching.
“What is it?” Luca asked.
Kol didn’t turn immediately. When he did, his face was drawn tight with concentration, eyes sharp and distant at the same time.
“We have a message,” he said.
Mateo swore softly. “From who?”
Kol shook his head. “That is a good question. A better one is from where.”
He stepped aside.
The screen wasn’t showing text or a recording. It was a live overlay—security footage pulled from a location Luca recognized the instant it resolved.
Not this house.
But another one he had spent many a night in. A Covenant fallback.
One of the deep ones that had been unused for months. Supposedly dormant, its access buried under layers of permissions that shouldn’t have been touched without setting off alarms.
The camera showed the interior of a garage. Clean. Empty. Lights on.
Then the image shifted.
Slowly. Intentionally.
The camera tilted, as if someone had reached up and adjusted it by hand.
Mateo went very still. “That feed shouldn’t be accessible.”
“It isn’t,” Kol said quietly. “Not from the outside.”
Luca felt the cold settle in his gut. “Meaning?”
“Meaning whoever did this didn’t breach us,” Kol replied. “They walked through. Used keys that already existed.”
The feed cut.
In its place, a single line of text bloomed on the screen.
You’re Looking In The Wrong Direction.
The room seemed to contract around them.
Mateo dragged a hand down his face. “They’re not threatening us.”
“No,” Kol agreed. “They’re correcting us. Letting us know they’re ahead.”
“And that they can reach us anywhere,” Luca said. “Whoever this prick is, he’s got an ego bigger than Texas.”
His mind raced, mapping access rings, redundancies, fail-safes. The Covenant had been built to survive external attack, but this wasn’t that. What had been done to protect them from an internal attack?
“Anything else?” he asked.
Kol hesitated, just long enough to matter. “They accessed another feed before the message dropped. A mobile signal.”
Mateo’s head snapped up. “Which one?”
Kol didn’t answer.
Luca didn’t need him to. “Mara,” he said.
Kol nodded. “They didn’t touch her. No breach attempt at all.
But they brushed her signal. Light enough to avoid alarms but heavy enough to make a point.
It also doubles down on this being an internal enemy.
They knew what her mobile signal was, we changed it after we took her in, but they knew it. ”
Luca felt heat slice through his chest. “Why the fuck would they—”
“To provoke you,” Mateo said. “To force a reaction.”
“And to show me I should have seen it sooner,” Kol added quietly.
Luca turned on him. “This isn’t on you.”
Kol didn’t argue, and it was clear that he did not agree.
“We lock everything down,” Mateo said. “No movement.”
“No,” Luca said immediately.
Both men looked at him.
“If we freeze, we give them control of the tempo,” Luca said. “They’re already inside our loop.”
Mateo’s jaw tightened. “You’re too close to this.”
“Exactly,” Luca snapped. “Which is why I know they’re using her to get to me.”
Kol looked back at the darkened screens. “For whatever reason, they wanted you aware of all of this,” he said.
Luca stared at the empty monitor, the words burning behind his eyes.
You’re looking in the wrong direction.
Behind them, somewhere down the hall, a floorboard creaked softly.
Mara was awake.
Luca closed his eyes once.
This was going to hurt. And not in the way a good bloodletting usually did. This was going to leave more than a scar.
****
“What’s going on?”
Mara’s voice cut through the hall before Luca could turn around.
She stood barefoot at the end of it, one hand braced on the doorframe, hair loose and sleep-tousled, wearing one of his shirts like she belonged there. Which, annoyingly, made the knot in his chest tighten instead of ease.
He turned anyway. “Go back to bed.”
The words came out wrong—too sharp, too automatic.
Her brows drew together. “No.”
Mateo and Kol were still in the comm room behind him. He felt their attention without looking, felt the shift when Mara stepped closer instead of retreating.
“Something happened,” she said. “I could tell from the tone in the voices I could hear. Don’t do that thing where you pretend everything’s fine.”
Luca rubbed a hand over his face. “This isn’t for you.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said calmly. “I woke up because you weren’t there,” she said evenly. “You don’t just disappear on me and call it protection. Try again.”
The quiet stretched. Kol cleared his throat once, subtle, and stepped back toward the screens. Mateo followed, the unspoken agreement obvious—this is yours.
Luca turned fully toward Mara. “They pinged your signal.”
Her stomach dropped. “What does that mean?”
“It means someone inside the Covenant wanted us to know they could get to you,” he said. “They didn’t take you. They didn’t touch you. They just ... knocked on the door.”
She took that in, jaw tightening. “And you’re pissed.”
“Understatement,” he practically growled. “I’m fucking furious.”
“I can tell,” she said. “You’re doing that thing where your voice goes flat and your shoulders lock.”
He laughed once, humorless. “You think you know me that well?”
“I do,” she shot back. “And I don’t like being treated like a package with a tracking number.”
That did it.
Luca’s temper snapped—not loud, not explosive, but sharp enough to cut. “You are a target, Mara.”
Her eyes flashed. “I know that, Luca! I have been a target since I decided to not walk past a situation I did not agree with at work. But that doesn’t mean I’m not smart enough to make a damn decision, or to know what the hell is going on with my safety!”
“I understand what you are saying, Mara, I do,” he said. “But right now, you’re the lever they’re pulling to get to me.”
She stepped closer. “So, what’s your plan? Lock me in a room? Move me again without telling me why?”
“Yes,” he said immediately. “If that’s what it takes.”
The words landed hard.
She stared at him, disbelief giving way to something colder. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I absolutely do,” he snapped. “Because if they take you, it’s on me.”
Her voice dropped. “That’s the problem, Luca. You think this is all about you. That this is a situation that only you can solve, that I am a problem only you can fix. I am not anyone’s problem to fix!”
He opened his mouth, then stopped.
She pressed on. “You talk about choice. About consent. About me not being owned. And then the second something happens that you can’t control, you start issuing orders.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive!”
“So am I,” she said. “But I am not going to do that by becoming the kind of liability that gets people hurt.”
He scoffed. “You don’t understand how this works.”
“Then explain it,” she demanded, “instead of deciding for me.”
The silence that followed was thick and ugly.
Finally, he said it—the thing he didn’t want to admit. “If I lose you, I lose my edge.”
Her breath caught.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “You can’t push that shit on me, and it is not on me to be your fucking edge.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s true.”
The argument didn’t soften. It swelled.
Mara’s hands curled into fists at her sides, nails biting into her palms as if pain were the only thing keeping her anchored.
“You don’t get to cage me because you’re afraid,” she said, the words tearing out of her now, raw and sharp.
Heat climbed her chest, burned behind her eyes.
“I won’t survive that. And neither will we—because whatever this is between us dies the second you decide my life for me. ”
Luca shook his head once, hard, like he could physically dislodge the reality she was throwing at him. His jaw was locked so tight she could see the muscle jumping. “I’m not risking you,” he said, each word clipped, final.
“And I’m not staying where I’m managed,” she shot back, stepping into his space instead of retreating. “Where I’m locked down and moved like cargo because it makes you feel better. You want control? Fine. Do it without me.”
She moved past him, heart hammering so hard it drowned out everything else—the house, the men, the Covenant itself. “I’m leaving.”
Mateo moved instantly. Not aggressive. Not blocking her path—just placing himself there, solid and steady, giving the moment weight instead of resistance. “If that’s what you want,” he said calmly, eyes never leaving hers, “I’ll take you somewhere safe. You cannot be out there alone.”
The words landed like a door opening.
Luca spun, fury and disbelief crashing together. “Mateo, what the fuck—!”
Mara didn’t look back. “Yes,” she said. “I will not stay here.”
She turned and went upstairs, footsteps sharp on the wood as she headed for the bedroom to pack.
Behind her, the room was silent for a moment, then came the sound—raw and violent. A crack like bone on brick.
Luca’s roar tore through the walls. “Fuck!”
Plaster dust drifted. The echo of his fist in the wall lingered long after she shut the door.