Chapter 47
Rook
It’s colder down here than upstairs. Upstairs is old English stone and money chill — the kind that sits in the bones of the manor and whispers legacy. Down here it’s deliberate.
The air in the lower level is kept a few degrees below comfort on purpose, and the walls smother any sound. The corridor lights are low and recessed, bleeding amber across concrete and brick. You don’t hear footsteps back here. You feel them.
We built this level for extraction work. Containment. Interrogation. Finalities.
Most people never see it, with good reason. But, Ember walks in like she was born to. She doesn’t hesitate when we reach the steel door at the end of the hall. Doesn’t slow.
Her chin is high, that copper hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes pale and bright and unflinching. She’s not wearing armor — leggings, one of my shirts, plain canvas. She looks wrong in this setting. Soft where the room is hard. Warm where the room is cruel.
And she doesn’t flinch.
I’m going to think about that later. Carefully… Quietly... Alone. There’s something ridiculously hot about it, that level of quiet confidence.
Right now, all I can do is watch her. And god… she’s fucking brilliant. Wraith’s at her left shoulder. Saint’s just behind her right, splinted wrist close to his chest, his other hand loose and ready. Vale prowls along the wall like a pacing animal. Ash is silent and watchful at my side.
I key in the code and palm the lock, and the door releases with a low hydraulic hiss.
We step into the room, and my eyes immediately land on our guest. Damien is strapped to a heavy chair bolted to the floor, surrounded by concrete, reinforced glass, anchored metal, and purpose.
Wrists secured. Ankles secured. Chest strapped low so he’s upright whether he wants to be or not.
Clean restraints. Padded. Not because I care about his comfort.
Because I care about the state of his body when I’m done.
Bones break in predictable places. Bruises tell stories.
I don’t want accidental stories. I want control.
He looks like he’s been through hell and still believes he’s above it.
Cheeks flushed. Hair out of place. Split lip. One eye slightly swollen. Jaw clenched hard enough to crack a crown. He’s alert, even exhausted. Too alert. Still thinks there’s a version of this where he walks out.
He looks up when we enter, but his gaze snags on Ember first. And for one flicker of a second — fast, but it’s there — I watch something like discomfort cross his face.
Then he pastes on the controlled anger, the authority. The “you’re all making a mistake” mask.
“Calloway,” he rasps, like this is a debrief and not a cage. “You don’t know what you’re doing, girl.”
I don’t get to respond. Because Ember laughs. Not hysterical.
It’s low and sharp. Anger written all over her face—like she’s a goddess claiming the spoils of war.
It hits me so hard I almost smile. There she is.
Damien’s eyes narrow, as she walks forward.
She doesn’t wait for permission. She slides right past me and steps into the light like I’d put her there myself, and Wraith shifts with her — immediate, instinctual — shadowing her left side, one step back, ready to put a body between hers and impact in under a heartbeat.
She stops in front of Damien, close enough to be personal. Close enough to be intimate.
The restraint in Wraith’s shoulders is visible. Every muscle in his body goes tight, like a loaded weapon waiting on my command.
“Hi, Damien,” she coos.
Damien exhales through his nose, disdain wrapped in patience. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why,” she asks calmly. “Because this is men’s work?”
I hear Vale’s low laugh behind me. Dark. Pleased. Hungry.
Damien sneers. “Because you have no idea how far this goes. You think these animals can protect you from what happens when you involve yourself in shit that doesn’t belong to you?”
For the first time since we walked in, Ember smiles. It’s not kind. “I don’t need them to protect me from you,” she says.
He barks a laugh. “Don’t play brave, girl. You’re leverage. You have been leverage since the night you were born. You were a tool to pull Owen. You’re a tool now to pull me. You’re not a player at this table, you’re the—”
“Do you remember Marcus,” she asks, cutting him off with a single name. He goes still. Quiet. Eyes wide like he hasn’t heard the name in years and almost forgot it existed.
He doesn’t hide it fast enough.
My entire body goes still. Beside me, Ash’s head lifts slowly.
I feel rather than see the shift in him — that focused quiet that means whoever we’re talking about is already dead in Ash’s mind, the rest is just logistics.
Saint’s expression doesn’t change, but the muscle in his jaw ticks once.
Wraith makes a low sound that doesn’t belong to any human vocabulary.
Vale leans forward like someone just turned his favorite program on.
“Marcus,” Damien repeats, cautious now.
Ember tilts her head, like she’s thinking, like she’s scrolling through a pleasant memory.
“My first handler,” she says. “Do you remember him?”
Damien’s eyes flicker. “This isn’t—”
“He used to take me out,” Ember goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Alone. When Owen was on assignment and I wasn’t cleared for field work yet, remember? I wasn’t authorized for external transport without my primary clearance officer present. That would’ve been you. But he said you approved.”
Her voice doesn’t waver, but my heartbeat does. For her.
“He used to tell me that if I wanted to actually get recruited past ghost work, if I wanted to matter, if I wanted to be valuable — his word, not mine — then I had to learn how to ‘handle myself in the room.’”
Her eyes never leave Damien.
Damien’s face is flattening out now. The bureaucrat mask. Calm. Measured. Like he’s taking notes to weaponize later. “You’re mischaracterizing—”
“He used to put his hands on me,” Ember says, still calm, still soft. “In the car. On my leg. Higher and higher until I asked him to stop. He used to tell me I had a pretty mouth for an orphan.”
Something in my chest goes cold and black.
Wraith’s snarl rips through the room. It’s not loud.
It’s not even fully voiced. It’s low, animal, vibrating under his breath.
I feel it in the floor. Saint takes one step forward, splinted wrist cradled to his chest, his other hand loose at his side.
His eyes have gone ice-pale. No priest left in them.
Just executioner. Vale is grinning now. It’s not his teasing grin.
Not the one he uses when he wants to push and prod and pull someone apart for fun.
This one is feral.
He looks like he might walk over and take Damien’s tongue just to see what sound comes out when he tries to talk without it.
Ash hasn’t moved. Which is honestly more fucking terrifying than if he had. He’s standing with his hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, expression almost blank. But I can see his jaw ticking. Once. Twice. He’s reciting names in his head and putting them in the ground.
Ember goes on.
“I told him to stop,” she says. “The first time. I told him to stop again the second time. The third time I grabbed his wrist and I told him if he touched me like that again I would break his fingers one by one and make him swallow them.”
Despite everything boiling in my veins, I almost laugh. Of course she did. I would expect nothing less.
Damien exhales, a harsh sound. “You were dramatic. You were always dramatic. I remember you at seventeen, crying in my office about some imagined slight—”
Wraith moves. I don’t have to tell him to. He just does. One second he’s behind Ember, the next he’s in front of her, and his hand is on Damien’s throat.
Not choking. Not yet. Holding. His face is carved out of pure fury.
“You don’t say that word about her ever again,” he grinds out.
“You don’t take her mouth in yours like that ever again.
You don’t get to say ‘crying.’ You don’t get to call anything she felt ‘imagined.’ You don’t get to reduce a seventeen-year-old girl telling you she was being touched to ‘dramatic.’ You don’t get to live in that lie, Damien. You hear me?”
Damien tries to laugh. It curdles. “Christ,” he coughs. “You’ve lost your—”
Wraith squeezes. Just enough to cut sound. My wolf knows every pressure point.
“Move your hand,” I say, quiet and lethal.
Wraith goes still. He doesn’t like it, but he does it. He pulls his hand back and steps to the side, not behind her this time — beside her, body brushing hers, like he’s physically declaring what side he’s on.
Ember doesn’t thank him. She doesn’t have to. She never looks away from Damien. “I went to you,” she says to him.
Damien’s eyes flick back to her.
She smiles again, but all the warmth is completely gone. “I went to you, Damien,” she says. “Remember?”
I taste blood, and don’t even realize I’m biting the inside of my cheek until iron hits my tongue. She keeps going.
“I walked into your office,” she says. “I sat in the shitty plastic chair while you finished ‘taking a call.’ I stared at your stupid framed commendations on the wall — Imperial College, MoD liaisons, Royal Honors, all those little lapel pins you were so proud of — and I told you Marcus was putting his hands on me.”
“You were a child,” he snaps, voice breaking. “You were emotional, you were doing anything you could to keep your brother close, you were making up drama to keep yourself in the game—”
Ash moves. He doesn’t lunge, or grab. He just steps forward, slow, eyes gone flat, and says in a voice I’ve only heard when he’s standing over someone who doesn’t know they’re already dead, “Do not call her a liar again.”
Damien laughs like he thinks this is still salvageable. “Oh, is that the game? You’re all going to take turns pretending you’re outraged? You think I haven’t broken—”
“You told me,” Ember says, louder now, voice cutting over his, “that he was valuable.”
The room stills.