Chapter 18
Kane
I ’d just stepped out of the shower and pulled on my jeans when my phone buzzed on the nightstand. Tate’s name flashed across the screen. Below it, a string of missed calls—four, five, six of them—all from while I’d been in the garage, then under the spray of hot water, completely oblivious.
My stomach dropped before I even answered.
“Hey, what’s up—”
“Where the fuck have you been?” Tate’s voice was sharp, urgent in a way I’d never heard from him. “Someone’s in the house. They killed the alarm system—didn’t even try to hack it, just generated some kind of EMP pulse that scrambled everything and shut it all down.”
The words stole the breath from my lungs.
Someone’s in the house.
“Charlotte.” Her name came out raw, torn from deep in my chest. I was already moving—barefoot, shirtless, phone pressed to my ear as I bolted out of the bedroom and down the hall.
“I’m checking to see if they tracked you through tech,” Tate was saying, his voice distant now, background noise to the roar of blood in my ears. “Could be a leak, could be—”
“Charlotte!” I yelled.
The living room was empty. The kitchen, empty. I tore through every room, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
No body. No blood. No sign of a struggle.
“Charlotte!” My voice cracked on her name, desperation bleeding through.
Nothing . Just silence, and the faint whisper of the desert wind through—
The front door. Unlocked. Slightly ajar.
I stared at it, a cold and terrible dread settling into my bones. A premonition. A certainty. They hadn’t killed her here. They’d taken her.
I lifted the phone back to my ear, my hand shaking in a way it hadn’t since I’d witnessed my first murder my first year on the force. “Tate. The security cameras. Can you pull the footage?”
“Already on it.” His voice was grim, and then he swore. “Got about thirty seconds of a hooded figure before the pulse fried everything.”
“They took her.” The words felt foreign in my mouth, impossible to accept even as I said them. “They didn’t kill her—they fucking took her .” Even as panic seized everything inside me, I tried to think logically. “It doesn’t make sense. If they wanted her dead, she’d be dead. Why take her?”
“I don’t know.” Tate’s pause was heavy with everything he wasn’t saying. “The smart play would’ve been to kill her and destroy her research. Quick, clean, done. The fact that they didn’t...”
Tate didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
My mind raced, trying to piece together a puzzle with missing edges.
Charlotte didn’t trust easily—she wouldn’t have opened that door for anyone and she wouldn’t have gone willingly.
Which meant they’d forced her. Drugged her, maybe.
Overpowered her while I was twenty feet away, water running, completely fucking useless.
I was supposed to protect her.
The thought sliced through me, sharp and accusatory.
I was supposed to keep her safe, and I was in the goddamn shower while they—
“ Kane .” Tate’s sharp tone cut through my emotional spiral. “I need to loop in Sutton. This is a red alert.”
“She doesn’t have time for bureaucracy.” I was already moving again, grabbing a shirt from the bedroom, shoving my feet into boots and grabbing my Glock from where I’d stuffed it into my duffle bag. “Every second we waste—”
“I know. But if she’s not dead, it’s because Calloway has plans for her.”
I sucked in a harsh breath, because I knew what that meant.
I’d worked trafficking cases. I’d seen what men like Calloway did to women who defied them—the punishment that came before the mercy of death.
The thought of Charlotte in his hands, of what he might do to break her, to hurt her, to use her—
Rage flooded through me, so hot and violent my vision tunneled. “I’m getting her back.” The words came out low and dangerous, barely recognizable as my own voice.
“Kane—”
“I’ll tear this goddamn city apart if I have to.” I tucked my gun into the waistband of my jeans and grabbed my keys, moving on autopilot toward the garage. “I’ll put a bullet in Calloway’s fucking skull myself. I don’t care about evidence or trials or any of that bullshit anymore—”
“And then what?” Tate’s voice was steady, maddeningly calm. “You go in half-cocked, get yourself killed, and Charlotte has no one left who gives a damn about finding her. Is that the fucking plan?”
I stopped and forced myself to breathe.
He was right. I hated him for it, but he was right.
“Come to headquarters,” Tate said. “We’ll coordinate with Sutton.
I’m already tracing the signal disruption and pulling nearby traffic and security cams so I can map every vehicle that entered or left the area around the safehouse during the window Charlotte was taken.
If they used a regular cellphone, or burner phones or scrambled comms, I can still look for digital footprints—cell tower pings, cloned plates, unusual routing patterns.
Whoever took her had to move through the city somehow, and people always leave traces if you know where to look and I do because I operate beyond the usual restrictions. ”
My grip tightened on the phone. Most of what Tate said went over my head,
but I knew enough not to ask how he gained access to the government level systems he talked about.
I had no doubt the methods he used to pull critical information out of networks that were supposed to be secure and inaccessible to anyone without high level clearance existed in a very gray legal area.
And right now, I was grateful for his ability to move faster than official channels ever could.
“I swear to you, I’ll figure out who grabbed her,” Tate continued grimly. “And once I identify the vehicle or the route they took and what communication device they used, I can start narrowing down where they would’ve taken her. But I need you here, Kane. I need you thinking clearly.”
“She doesn’t have time.” My voice broke on the words. “Every minute she’s with him—”
“I know. And we’ll move fast. I’m already scraping surveillance networks and cross-referencing every vehicle and signal that moved through that area the past thirty minutes, but we have to be smart and move with a plan in place, or you’ll end up reacting emotionally instead of strategically.”
Too late for that.
Three days ago, Charlotte Massey had been a complication.
An assignment. The woman I’d blamed for destroying my career and detonating my life.
Now, she was woven into every part of me, and the idea of losing her made panic claw up my throat hard enough to choke on because of how much I cared about her, beyond her being an assignment.
When the hell had that happened? When did she become the person who felt essential to my future? When did she become… everything to me?
And I hadn’t even told her.
“Fine,” I gritted out, the word scraped raw from my throat. “I’m on my way.”
I slid into the car and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white as I waited for the garage door to roll up. The engine roared to life, and as soon as it was clear I peeled out of the driveway, my mind already racing through possibilities.
Calloway’s office. His apartment. The clubs. The warehouses Ruth had mentioned in her testimony. There had to be something—some thread I could pull, some lead I could chase to find Charlotte.
Because I couldn’t lose her. Not now. Not when she’d become far too important to me.
I was going to get her back, even if that meant burning down the whole goddamn city to find her.