Wilde and Reckless (Wilde Security Worldwide #3)

Chapter 1

one

What the fuck did I drink last night?

That was the first real thought Dominic Wilde managed to assemble. His head throbbed with each heartbeat, mouth dry as Death Valley, the coppery taste of blood coating his tongue where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.

He’d had some monster hangovers before, but nothing like this—

His second coherent thought was her name.

Vivi.

Which was ridiculous. Vivianna Cavalier hated him.

He tried to open his eyes and instantly regretted it. Even the faint light sent daggers through his skull. He squeezed them shut, breathed through the nausea, and tried again. Slower this time, letting the world come in pieces rather than all at once.

Dark. Very dark. Not pitch-black, but close. A thin seam of cold fluorescent light leaked from beneath what had to be a door, somewhere to his left.

He tried to move his arms and found them wrenched behind his back, wrists bound tight enough that his fingers had gone numb at the tips.

Zip ties. Thick ones, industrial grade. Not the flimsy things you’d grab at a hardware store.

He twisted experimentally, and the sharp plastic bit into his wrists.

The skin there was already raw. Whoever had tied him hadn’t been gentle about it.

Okay. Inventory time.

Dom closed his eyes again and ran through his body the way Griffin had drilled into all of them during tactical assessment training, back when they’d thought the worst thing they’d ever face was a hostile extraction gone sideways.

Head: pounding. Likely concussed, given the way the room tilted every time he moved. A knot on the back of his skull, tender and swollen—he’d been hit, or dropped, or both.

Ribs: bruised on his left side, deep and hot when he breathed. Nothing grinding, nothing shifting. Bruised, not broken.

Shoulders: wrenched from the position, aching, but functional.

Legs: free. That was something. His ankles weren’t bound, which meant either they were confident in the restraints on his wrists or they were sloppy. He didn’t think they were sloppy.

His phone was gone. His watch. His wallet. Even the leather cord he wore around his wrist—the one Brennan had given him years ago, braided during some boring stakeout in the middle of nowhere. They’d stripped everything.

The air smelled like damp stone and industrial cleaner, with a faint mineral tang underneath that reminded him of a parking garage or a subway tunnel.

Cool but not freezing. Climate-controlled, or at least well-insulated.

The hum of ventilation rattled faintly behind the walls, mechanical and steady, the kind of background noise that told him they were deep inside something built to last.

He pushed himself upright, and as he did, the room simultaneously brightened and lurched sideways. He rode it out with his eyes closed, forehead pressed against his knees, waiting for the vertigo to pass.

Focus, Dom. Come on.

He opened his eyes and took in the newly lit space.

It was small. The floor was bare concrete, the walls the same.

No furniture. No windows. One heavy, metal door hinged on the outside, designed to keep people in.

The red eye of a camera blinked from the corner beside a floodlight, which must be motion sensor.

He cataloged it all, filing the details into the tactical part of his brain that still functioned despite the chemical fog. Davey would have been proud.

Then his eyes finished adjusting, and he saw her.

Vivi.

Memory slammed back with the force of a wrecking ball. The club. The whiskey. The taste of her kiss in the backseat of his car. Then everything went sideways. Someone yanked him from the vehicle, and his limbs turned to lead.

Fuck. They’d been drugged. Taken.

She was slumped against the wall opposite him. Her wrists were zip-tied in front of her body—different from his, which meant they’d considered her a lower physical threat.

Their first mistake.

Her legs were folded beneath her, her head hanging forward so her hair spilled across her face in a curtain of tangled gold.

Blood on her temple. A dark smear of it, almost black in the dim light, tracking down past her eyebrow and into her hairline. Dried. Not fresh. But seeing it there—on her—sent something white-hot and electric ripping through his chest that had nothing to do with training or tactics.

Every protocol he’d ever learned went out the window. The room, the door, the zip ties—none of it mattered. All that mattered was getting to her.

He moved without thinking, scooting across the concrete on his knees because his hands were useless behind his back. The rough floor scraped through the fabric of his jeans, and his bruised ribs screamed with every shift of his weight, but he barely registered it. Six feet had never felt so far.

“Viv.” His voice came out like gravel, barely more than a rasp. He knocked his shoulder against hers. “Vivi, come on.”

No response. But her chest rose and fell, shallow and steady. Breathing. Alive.

Relief made him lightheaded. Or maybe that was the tranq still pumping through his bloodstream.

She’s okay. She’s okay.

Except she wasn’t okay, because they were both zip-tied in an underground bunker and he didn’t know who had them or what they wanted, and the last time he’d been this scared—

No. He’d never been this scared.

He’d been scared in the field. Scared during that mess in Kyrgyzstan when their extraction went sideways. Scared when the call came in about Brennan missing in action. But those fears had training between him and the panic. This didn't.

This was different. This was Vivianna. His Vivi. And the terror wasn’t tactical. It was animal, primal. It bypassed every trained response and went straight for the throat.

His gaze kept returning to the blood on her temple.

This was his fault. He never should have talked to her in that club. Never should have let her buy him that drink. Never should have taken her to his car like some horny teenager who couldn’t keep it in his pants for ten goddamn minutes.

Everything was always his fault when it came to Vivi.

“Viv.” He nudged his shoulder harder against hers. “Wake up. Please.”

A sound. Low, barely audible. A groan that started somewhere deep in her chest and worked its way out through clenched teeth. Her head shifted, her hair sliding across her face, and then her brow furrowed—that particular furrow he knew so well, the one that meant she was fighting something.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on, Viv. Open those beautiful eyes for me.”

She groaned again, louder this time, and her bound hands twitched in her lap. Slowly—agonizingly slowly—she lifted her head and blinked. Her eyes were unfocused and glassy, the green barely visible in the low light. She looked at the ceiling first. Then the walls. Then down at her wrists.

Then at him.

For a moment, she just stared. Her expression moved through confusion to recognition to fear, and then locked down.

“Dom.” Her voice dragged, thick with whatever they’d been dosed with. She blinked again, harder, and shook her head. Winced, tried to touch her temple, and only then realized her hands were bound. “What—”

“We were drugged. Grabbed from the car.” He kept his voice casual, like this was no big deal and he already had a plan to escape.

He didn’t.

Not the first fucking clue.

She stared at him for another beat. Then her eyes flashed. She was done being disoriented and was ready to be furious instead.

There she was.

His Vivi.

No.

Fuck.

Not his.

He’d told himself a thousand times he wouldn’t go there again with her. Which was ironic, considering what they’d been doing in the backseat of his car before they were abducted.

“Did you at least make me come before they took us?”

A laugh tore from him. It hurt his ribs, hurt his head, and he didn’t care. Because of course. Of course that was her first coherent sentence. Drugged, captive, bleeding from a head wound in a concrete box, and Vivianna Cavalier’s opening move was to give him shit.

“Seriously? That’s what you’re going with right now?”

“I’m zip-tied in what appears to be a murder basement, Dominic. Forgive me for wanting to know if the evening was at least partially worthwhile.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“And you’re avoiding the question.”

“No, Vivi. I did not make you come. I was a little preoccupied with losing consciousness.”

“Shame.” She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, and for a second, just a second, the mask slipped.

She was terrified.

And she was never, ever going to admit it.

Something cracked open in his chest, and it wasn’t his ribs.

It was the thing he kept locked down, the thing he’d been drinking to numb at the club—the knowledge that three years hadn’t changed a damn thing.

He’d watched her walk away. Spent months telling himself he was over it, that she was just another beautiful woman in a city full of them, that what they’d had was just chemistry and convenience.

But it wasn’t the curves or the sex or the way she looked in that black dress.

It was this. The steel underneath. The refusal to crack, even now.

The dark humor deployed like armor plating, protecting everything soft and vulnerable that she’d never let him see for more than a few unguarded seconds at a time.

It undid him. Every single time.

“Hey.” He nudged her shoulder with his. “Look at me.”

She opened her eyes.

“We’re getting out of here.”

“Oh, well, if you say so.” But the corner of her mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Close enough.

“Can you reach the zip ties on my wrists?” He shifted, turning to give her access to his hands. “I’ve been working them, but I don’t have leverage.”

She leaned forward, her bound hands reaching toward his. Their fingers tangled awkwardly—his numb, hers shaking—and she felt along the plastic band. “These are military grade. You’re not snapping these.”

“I wasn’t planning to snap them. I need something thin—a pin, a piece of wire, anything to work into the locking mechanism.”

“Fresh out of lock picks, unfortunately. I left them in my other kidnapping outfit.” She pulled back and scanned the room. “What are we working with?”

“Concrete box. One door, steel, hinged outside. No windows. Ventilation system behind the walls. We’re underground—the air, the temperature, the way sound travels. Could be a bunker, could be a basement.”

“Could be a parking structure.”

“Could be.”

“Well.” She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders despite the restraints. “At least they didn’t separate us. That either means they want us together for a reason—”

“Or they’re confident we can’t do anything about it.”

“Right.” Her eyes met his. “Dom, whatever happens—”

“Viv, don’t.” His heart squeezed. She hadn’t called him Dom in years. It was always his full name with that acidic bite in her tone to remind him she was still pissed at him. “Don’t do the goodbye thing. We’re not doing that.”

She held his gaze for a long moment and opened her lipstick-smudged mouth to respond.

A heavy mechanical clunk echoed through the concrete room like a gunshot. Dom shifted his body between Vivi and the door before the sound had finished reverberating. He planted his feet, squared his shoulders.

Hands bound or not, they’d have to go through him.

The door swung outward, and light poured in—harsh, fluorescent, the kind that bleached everything to bone-white and left no shadows to hide in. Dom squinted against it, blinking rapidly as his concussed brain scrambled to process the sudden overload.

A silhouette filled the doorframe. Tall, broad, built like a man who’d spent decades turning his body into a weapon.

He stepped forward, and the details sharpened as Dom’s eyes adjusted: close-cropped gray hair, hard jaw with a scar running along the line of it, arms folded across a chest that strained the seams of a black tactical jacket.

Dom recognized him from one of Davey’s recent intel briefings.

Malcolm Raines. Praetorian’s senior field commander.

Color him not surprised that Praetorian was behind this.