A vision struck her like a tidal wave, vivid and overwhelming. She saw Grayson, younger but just as intense, with his arm wrapped protectively around a woman with dark hair and a warm smile. The image shifted, and the warmth was replaced by blood—her blood—spreading across the ground as Grayson knelt beside her, belting out anguished screams.
Cora gasped, and the vision faded as quickly as it had come. Her knees buckled, and she gripped the edge of the table for support. “What… What was that?”
Grayson’s expression was a mask of fury and pain, and his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “You had no right.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” she insisted. “Who was she?”
He didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on a point somewhere past her shoulder, and his eyes glinted with barely contained emotion.
“Grayson,” she pressed, softer this time. “Who was she?”
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, finally, he exhaled, though the sound was more like a growl. “Her name was Emily.”
Her throat tightened, but she managed to ask, “What happened?”
Grayson’s fingers curled into fists at his sides, and for a moment, Cora thought he might refuse to answer. But then he spoke, his voice raw with a pain that seemed to echo through the bond. “She died because of me. Because of a mission I couldn’t walk away from.”
Cora stayed silent, sensing he wasn’t finished.
“I was out of town, tracking a lead on a smuggling ring that had been moving through Bellefleur’s borders,” he continued. “It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out—gather intel, get out, report back. I was gone for three days.”
His shoulders sagged, and his head dipped lower as if the memory was a physical burden pressing down on him. “The bond warned me something was wrong. I… I felt it. That night, in the middle of that goddamned warehouse, I knew she was in danger. I knew it as sure as I knew I was breathing.”
Cora’s chest ached, but she stayed quiet, letting him get it all out.
“I ignored it,” he admitted. “Told myself it was just the stress of the mission. I couldn’t abandon the team or risk blowing the cover we’d spent months building. I thought… I thought I’d get back in time.”
He laughed bitterly. “But I didn’t. When I got back, the house was empty. The bond… It was gone. Ripped away. She was gone.”
“Grayson, I’m so—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “Don’t say you’re sorry. It won’t change anything. It won’t bring her back.”
“I wasn’t going to say it would. But you’re blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have stopped.”
“I could have stopped it,” he insisted. “I could have left. Chosen her over the mission. But I didn’t. And because of that, she died. They found her body in the woods a week later.”
Cora flinched at the bluntness of his words, but she didn’t back down. “You can’t undo what happened, Grayson. But carrying that guilt forever? It’s not going to bring her peace—or you.”
He looked away, and his hands flexed and curled as if he were trying to physically rid himself of the tension. “It’s not about peace. It’s about justice. Voss, his network… They’re the same kind of people who took her. If I can stop them if I can keep you safe…”
Cora’s heart twisted at the raw determination in his voice. She stepped closer, brushing his arm. “You don’t have to carry it all by yourself.”
Grayson looked down at her, then, with a sigh, he nodded—just barely. It wasn’t acceptance, not fully, but it was something.
Cora gave his arm a light squeeze and stepped back. She could feel his pain through the bond, a shadow that lingered and only deepened her resolve. Whatever was between them, whatever the bond meant, she couldn’t let him carry that weight alone.
As she watched him retreat to the couch, she couldn’t shake the image of the woman in his arms or the pain etched into his face as he lost her. For the first time, she saw Grayson not asher captor, protector, or reluctant partner but as a man carrying wounds far deeper than her own.
And that terrified her more than anything else.
Chapter 10 - Grayson
Grayson pressed his back to the crumbling brick wall of the warehouse and steadied his breath. Voices drifted in his direction from inside, and their low timbre and occasional bursts of laughter mixed with the sound of rain dripping from the cracked gutters above. Cedar Hallow was quiet at this hour—too quiet for his liking—but he was exactly where he needed to be.
The lead had come together faster than expected. A passing comment from Ryder, a slip of information gleaned from one of Zach’s patrols, and suddenly Grayson found himself standing in the shadows of a derelict building just outside a sleepy town two hours from Bellefleur.
Inside, he could feel the tension of something big unfolding. This was no petty operation. This was auction business. He could practically smell it.
