18. Ronan
Ronan
The penthouse is silent.
“Prudence?”
No answer.
I drop my keys on the counter and move through the kitchen.
Her mug sits in the sink—rinsed, not in the drying rack.
She always places it in the rack. I cross to the living room.
There’s a book lying face-down on the couch cushion, spine cracked, pages fanning.
Prudence treats books with the careful reverence of a woman who spent nineteen years without access to simple pleasures. She would never leave it this way.
“Prudence.”
The bedroom door stands open. I cover the hallway in four strides.
The room is empty, so I check the bathroom. That’s empty too.
On the nightstand, a glimmer under the lamplight catches my eye.
It’s her rings—her platinum and diamond wedding set.
She’d never owned a piece of jewelry in her life.
She stared at it for a full minute when I slid it onto her finger, then pressed her hand against her sternum as if she needed to feel the weight of it against her heart.
I pick it up.
My fist closes around the band until it bites into my palm.
Her phone sits propped against the lamp base. I pick it up. The screen is unlocked and when I swipe, it opens to the photos app. Her last entry is a recorded video.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and tap it to begin playing it.
Prudence fills the screen. She’s been crying—her lashes are clumped, her eyes are pink, and she has tear tracks on her cheeks.
“Ronan.” Her voice is fractured but bears the formality she’d been slowly losing—the cadence of the Enclave, each word placed with the careful precision of a girl reciting catechism. She’s regressed. Whatever happened between my departure and this video dragged her two weeks backward.
The woman on this screen has been filled with fire and brimstone scripture.
“I must speak plainly. I owe you that much.” She swallows.
Her hands fold in her lap—left over right.
“I am a dark mark upon your soul. Every pleasure I have taken from your life has stripped a layer of protection from you. Every night I have spent in your bed has blackened your spirit. Every kindness you have shown me has been repaid with the corruption of my presence.”
What the fuck?! My grip on the phone tightens.
“I am returning to my people. I must undergo penance. I must be cleansed so that the stain I have left upon you can be washed away. It is the only way.”
She pauses. Her composure cracks—a fissure running through stone—and for a breath, the woman I’ve been falling in love with surfaces beneath the programming. Her lower lip trembles.
“Please do not come for me. If you love me—” Her voice breaks. She presses her knuckles to her mouth, holds, and forces herself to continue. “If you have any care for me at all, you will let me go. Let me atone. Let me save your soul from what I have done.”
Another pause. She lifts her chin, and tears spill from both eyes.
“I love you, Ronan. Loving you is the gravest sin I have committed, and I would rather burn for eternity than watch you suffer on my account.”
She reaches for the phone. The angle shifts as her arm extends—
And the video ends.
My blood runs cold. Then it ignites.
I dial Cillian. He picks up on the first ring.
“She’s gone.” My voice doesn’t sound right. What comes through is raw and serrated. “Buford got to her somehow. She’s gone back to that fucking cult.”
A beat of silence. Then Cillian, ice-cold and operational, responds, “I’m calling the others. Don’t move until we get there.”
I don’t wait. I call Finn and relay the same information in fewer words. Finn doesn’t ask questions. He says, “Pulling building security footage now. I’ll have it in twenty.”
I pace. The penthouse feels cavernous and wrong. Her absence is a vacuum that sucks the life from me.
My brothers arrive within thirty minutes. Cillian comes through the elevator first, coat still on, Finn a step behind him. Declan strides in next, having driven from the brownstone in what must have been record time. Lorcan is last, breathless from taking the stairs two at a time.
I play the video.
Four men watch my wife’s tear-streaked face tell me she’s poison. Four men listen to her beg me not to follow.
Cillian rubs his jaw, his eyes narrowing. “Buford threatened her. Or coached her.”
“He didn’t have to coach her. He built the script nineteen years ago. All he had to do was activate it.”
Declan hasn’t spoken. His jaw is granite, his scarred knuckles white where they grip the back of a chair. When he does speak, it’s a single word, “How?”
Finn answers, phone pressed to his ear, a tablet balanced on the kitchen counter scrolling footage.
“Service entrance. Camera three shows a blind spot in the loading dock corridor—ninety-second gap between guard rotations. Two individuals entered in maintenance uniforms at fourteen-twelve. Exited at fourteen-forty-one.” He looks up.
“Someone must have snuck in, spewed their religious mumbo-jumbo and swayed her. Twenty-nine minutes is all it took.”
“Someone?” Lorcan scoffs. “My money’s on Buford himself.”
Buford was in my home with my wife for twenty-nine minutes, and my security didn’t flag it?
I put my fist through the wall.
The drywall craters. Plaster dust showers the hardwood. Pain splinters across my knuckles, but I don’t register anything except the fury pouring through me.
“We go now,” I say. “The Enclave.”
We take two vehicles and drive fast. Declan rides with me, his silence a wall of cold, controlled violence. Cillian and Lorcan follow in the second car with Finn.
The dirt road hasn’t changed. The potholes haven’t changed. The fence posts haven’t changed.
But the gate is open. Not open the way it was on my quarterly visits, with a Flock member letting me in. Wide open and unmanned.
I kill the engine and step out.
No smoke rises from the cookhouse chimney. No figures cross the yard between buildings. The animal pens are empty. The compound is a skeleton—structures are standing, but life has evacuated.
We fan out. Cillian and Finn take the administrative building. Declan clears the dormitories. Lorcan checks the outbuildings, the barns, the cookhouse.
Every structure is stripped. Furniture remains—too heavy to move quickly—but ledgers, personal effects, tools, food stores, and livestock are gone.
Buford didn’t abandon the Enclave. He relocated it.
A military-grade withdrawal, planned and executed with the cold precision of a man who anticipated he might need to disappear.
“He moved nearly two hundred people.” My voice is flat. “That takes vehicles, coordination, and a destination. He didn’t improvise this. He had a contingency.”
Cillian steps beside me. “We’ll find her. Buford can run, but he can’t hide two hundred people forever. Not from us.”
“Viper’s contacts are already working it,” Lorcan adds, his voice stripped of its usual levity. “The Iron Guardians have tracked relocated operations before. If Buford bought or leased new land, there’s a paper trail.”
“My contacts are pulling satellite imagery now,” Finn adds. “And checking every rural property sale and lease within a two-hundred-mile radius in the past six months. We’ll cross-reference with known associates and shell companies.”
I hear them. I absorb the tactical details. I know my brothers will deploy every resource, every connection, every advantage this family possesses.
But I’m staring at the whipping post. This is where I married her. This is where I lifted her ruined dress from the ground, put myself between her body and unwarranted punishment, and made a decision I will never regret no matter how much it costs me.
My brothers are gathered behind me. No one speaks. Cillian moves beside me, surveying the abandoned compound with the quiet attention of a general reading a battlefield.
“He planned this,” I say.
“The trafficking investigation spooked him,” Cillian says. “He was already preparing to relocate. Taking Prudence back gave him leverage against us.”
“I don’t care about the trafficking investigation right now, Cillian.”
“I know.”
My hands are fists at my sides—one swollen and hastily bandaged, the other white-knuckled around my phone. “I need to find her.”
“And we will.” Cillian’s voice carries the weight of an oath.
Lorcan jogs over from the access road, phone pressed to his ear.
He drops the call and faces us. “The Iron Guardians have been tracking Buford’s trafficking pipeline since we gave them the heads-up.
They tracked a property purchase in central Wisconsin.
Rural. Two hundred acres. Paid for through a shell company connected to one of Buford’s known aliases.
” He holds up his phone. “Viper’s people confirmed satellite imagery of construction activity on the property as recently as yesterday.
New structures going up. Fencing. A cleared road. ”
Wisconsin. Three hours north. Maybe four.
“He’s rebuilding the compound,” I say.
“Viper’s team is staging in Wausau,” Lorcan continues. “They can have eyes on the property within hours.”
I’m already striding toward the car. “Tell Viper I’m on my way.”
“Ronan.” Declan’s voice stops me mid-stride. I turn. He’s silhouetted against the dark mass of the empty chapel, arms at his sides, every line of him radiating the particular bearing of a man ready to go to war. “I’m with you.”
“We all are,” Lorcan adds.
I look at my brothers—Cillian, Declan, Lorcan—these men are not asking permission. They’re reporting for duty.
I nod once. “Let’s go get my wife.”