Chapter 2
two
Vivi’s head was splitting open, and the fluorescent light from the corridor bored through her skull, turning everything behind her eyes to static. She tasted copper and something chemical at the back of her throat, and her wrists burned where the zip ties bit into skin.
And to top off the phenomenally shitty night, Malcolm Raines stood six feet away, smirking at them.
She studied him from behind Dom’s shoulder—because of course Dom had planted himself between her and the threat. His hands were bound behind his back, and he was still trying to play hero. Infuriating. Also very on brand.
But she didn’t need his help.
Think.
Her brain sluggishly obeyed, hauling itself through the chemical fog that still clung to every synapse.
She had training for this. Not military like Dom, but the kind of training you picked up in cramped back rooms in Marseille and Bucharest, the kind Sabin had drilled into her before their first real job.
Assess the room.
Assess the threat.
Assess your assets.
Room: concrete, sealed, one exit. Camera in the corner. Two guards in the corridor, armed, blocking the only exit. The door was steel, hinged outward. Even if she could get to it, she couldn’t move fast enough with her hands bound.
Threat: Raines. Six feet. Unarmed, as far as she could see, but that meant nothing. Men like Raines didn’t need weapons. They were weapons.
Assets: herself. Dom.
Raines let the silence stretch. She recognized it as a dominance tactic because she’d used it herself. Fill the room with nothing and wait for the other person to crack, to babble, to give something away.
She wasn’t going to give him anything.
“Ms. Cavalier,” Raines finally said. “Why don’t you come out from behind Mr. Wilde? I’m not here for him.”
Tension radiated off Dom. His shoulder pressed against hers, not quite pushing her back, but close. A wordless warning. Stay behind me.
She ignored it—she’d been ignoring Dominic Wilde for three years and wasn’t about to stop now— and stepped out from behind him. She didn’t need him to be her shield. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Raines?”
“Business.” He tilted his head, studying her the way a collector might study a piece he was considering acquiring. “Specifically, yours.”
Raines reached back into the hallway, and Dom moved in front of her again.
She wanted to tell him to back off, to let her handle this, but the words died somewhere between her brain and her mouth when one of Raines’s goons handed him a tablet.
He held it out to her, and everything stopped. Her heart. Her lungs. Her brain.
The footage was crystal clear, with a timestamp in the corner showing the current time. It was a live feed of a concrete room, smaller than this one, lit by a single bare bulb. A man sat zip-tied to a metal chair, head hanging forward, golden hair matted with blood.
Sabin.
The concrete floor seemed to lurch beneath her feet, and she locked her knees against it, refusing to let Raines see her stagger. She stared at the screen. Her brother was bruised, badly beaten. He hadn’t gone without a fight. As she watched, he lifted his head to glare up at the camera.
Even beaten half to death, even bloodied and bound, Jean-Sabin Cavalier still looked like he was daring whoever had put him there to try harder.
God, she loved him.
The knot in her throat was a fist, squeezing. She swallowed against it once, hard, and said nothing. She would not give Raines her grief. She would not give him anything he could use.
“Proof of life,” Raines said, pulling the tablet back.
“Where is he?” She was proud her voice came out level.
“Comfortable, for now. Whether he stays that way is entirely up to you.”
Dom swore and went rigid beside her. He was about two seconds from doing something catastrophically stupid.
“Dom,” she said under her breath.
It took him a second, but he relaxed. Marginally.
“Your brother has been our guest for two days,” Raines said.
“I’ll spare you the details of how he came to be in our care.
What matters is that you and your brother have a vault at Villa Pandora in Greece.
Number 237. You’ve been clients for—” he paused, as though consulting a mental file “—eleven years.”
Had Sabin told them that? She couldn’t imagine any scenario where he’d talk like that, but how else did they know about the vault?
“There’s nothing in there of any value to Praetorian.”
“You’re right. We’re not interested in whatever trinkets you and your brother have stashed away.
But,” Raines continued after a weighty beat, “there is another vault. 485. It belonged to a Dr. Heinrich Strauss, who is no longer alive to object to what I’m about to ask you to do.
” He paused again, and she got the sense he enjoyed dragging this out.
“Before his death, Dr. Strauss completed what is arguably the most significant piece of neurological and biological research of the past century. He called it the Lazarus Protocol.”
Vivi had never heard of it, but she was a jewel thief-turned-fashion designer, not a scientist. Even at the height of her and her brother’s thieving, they hadn’t trafficked in scientific research. They had preferred shiny things.
She slid a glance at Dom, but his expression gave nothing away. If he’d heard of it, he wasn’t going to let Raines know.
“The Protocol provides the foundational science for something Praetorian has been developing for some time,” Raines said. His smirk spread as he stared at Dom. There was an unspoken message there. One she could only decipher as checkmate.
Sabin had told her that Praetorian and Wilde Security were in a sort of cold war that had escalated in recent months, and Raines obviously thought this research was the key to winning.
“So you want me to break into Stauss’s vault and steal his research.” Vivi scoffed and raised her bound hands. “You didn’t have to do all of this. You could’ve just asked.”
Raines tilted his head. “Would you have agreed?”
Fuck no. “Guess you’ll never know.”
Raines studied her for a moment with something that might have been appreciation, if men like him were capable of it.
“You have legitimate access to the facility. You can walk through the front door, present your credentials, and visit your own vault without raising a single flag. And we’re aware that you have the skills to access Vault 485 undetected while you’re there. ”
“And if I say no?”
Raines held up the tablet.
Sabin.
Someone had moved to stand behind him, a gloved hand pulling his chin up, a knife pressed against his throat.
The air left her lungs.
Sabin didn’t flinch. He stared straight into the camera like he knew she was watching, like he was trying to tell her something across the distance between them.
Don’t. Don’t do it, Viv. Don’t let them win.
He’d gone to prison for her. Had walked into a courtroom and taken everything that should have been split between them and carried it alone so she could walk out the other side clean.
She’d spent every day since trying to claw back some equilibrium on that debt, and she was still nowhere close to even.
“One week,” Raines said, tucking the tablet away again.
“That’s not enough time,” she said.
“Then I suggest you start immediately.”
She pulled in a slow breath through her nose and let it out. “And after? After I hand you Strauss’s research, and you have what you want. What happens to Sabin?”
“He goes free,” Raines said without hesitation, which meant absolutely nothing.
She studied his face. She’d gotten good at reading the tells, finding the gap between what a person said and what they meant.
Raines had no tells. His face was a closed door with no handle.
Which was its own kind of answer.
“One more question.” She let her gaze slide sideways to Dom, then back. “Why him? You needed me for the vault access. Why bring him into this at all?”
Raines nearly smiled. “Because we’re not amateurs, Ms. Cavalier. We know that Dominic Wilde spent years working jobs with you and your brother in between his deployments.”
How the hell did they know that? Only three people knew that Dom pulled jobs with them, and two of them were in the room now. Dom wouldn’t have bragged about it. He couldn’t risk his father, uncles, or brothers finding out.
The blood turned to ice in her veins. There was only one way Praetorian could have known about Dom’s involvement in their past jobs. Sabin had told them.
Her brother, who never broke. Her brother, who had once endured three days of questioning by Interpol without giving up a single name. Her brother, who protected her secrets like they were his own.
What had they done to him?
She had to lock her knees again to keep from swaying. If Sabin had given up that information—something only the three of them knew—what else had they forced out of him? How badly had they hurt him to make him talk?
“You bastards,” she whispered.
Raines didn’t even blink. “Your brother has held out longer than most. But everyone breaks.” He nodded toward Dom. “You want your brother back? He’s your best option.”
She turned to look at Dom fully for the first time since Raines had walked through the door. He stared back, jaw tight. Those bright Caribbean blue eyes she had once loved so much were now flat, unreadable.
Damn him.
“I’ll work with someone else,” she said, turning back to Raines. “Anyone else.”
Raines shook his head. “We’re not in the business of compromise. Mr. Wilde stays with you, where we can monitor him.” He paused, and something like amusement flickered across his features. “And where he can’t run straight to Wilde Security and bring them down on our heads.”
“So what happens to him after?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“It absolutely is my concern.”
“Your concern is your brother. Focus on that.” Raines motioned his goons forward, and the two men stepped into the room.
One moved to Dom, the other to her. The guard in front of her cut her ties without a word.
She winced as blood rushed back to her fingers, sending pins and needles shooting through her hands.
They throbbed painfully as she rubbed them, trying to work feeling back into the numb tips.
“Let me show you where you’ll be working,” Raines said and nodded toward the hallway. “After you.”
As the guards led them out, she noticed they left Dom bound. So they were afraid of him and underestimated her.
That was the first good news she’d had all night.