“Look at me,” he whispered. “Stay here. With me.”
I dragged in a shaky breath, the flashback peeling away. My chest hurt. My eyes burned. But I was here with Levi.
“Yeah,” I rasped. “I’m here.”
And suddenly everything was moving again—too fast and not fast enough.
Caleb cleared his throat. “There’s more. Surveillance shows Raven isn’t alone. He’s got two men with him—always close, always scanning. Younger. Fit. Move like they’ve done muscle work before.”
A new set of tiny images flashed across the screen: two men stepping out of a doorway behind Raven, their eyes dead and assessing.
I leaned closer, stomach tight. I didn’t recognize them. And thank God for that—these weren’t other men I thought I’d killed but who’d survived. They were new, not revenants dragged out of the past to haunt me all over again.
“These two look like muscle for hire,” Caleb went on. “Nothing in preliminary databases. I’m running facial recognition now. I’ll get back to you on any matches.”
The screen held on their images a moment longer—two men who didn’t matter to me, not the way the others did. New blood. Not ghosts I’d failed to put in the ground.
I swallowed hard. “Fine. Good. New is better.”
Levi’s hand brushed my back, grounding me again. “Do we have a location on anyone?”
Caleb huffed, the sound irritated, as if Levi had just questioned his competence. I didn’t know the man, but even I could hear the offense in his huff. “Okay… this is interesting,” he muttered.
My spine tightened. “What is it?”
“They’re not hiding,” Caleb said, disbelief bleeding into something colder. “It’s like theywantus to see them. Like they’re leaving breadcrumbs on purpose. And—fuck—you’re not going to like this, Levi.”
Levi stiffened beside me. “What now?”
Caleb exhaled. “The pings? The signal traces? They’re coming from the same warehouse where you watched that man bleed out.”
“The fuck?” Novak snarled. The muscle in his jaw jumped, and his eyes cut to the screen as if daring it to keep proving him right.
Caleb’s tone shifted again, brisk and all business. “I’m sending the coordinates, not that you need them, I guess. Jamie and Enzo will meet you three blocks away—I’m routing them in now.”
I blinked. “Jamie and Enzo? Redcars? Why the hell are they even part of this?” The words came out before I could stop them.
Caleb huffed—louder this time, as if I was personally offending him. “The Cave is ateam, Alejandro. This is what we do. You think Levi’s the only one who gets his hands dirty for the right cause?”
I didn’t know where to start with that. Hackers, fighters, investigators… people who shouldn’t have belonged together, but somehow did. And now they were all moving because Raven was back.
Because of me.
A chill sliced through my ribs when we got close to the warehouse to meet Jamie and Enzo.
This was it.
After all these years, after all the bodies, after all the running and pretending and surviving when I thought he was dead, I’d face the man who’d made me.
And it seemed that I wasn’t doing it alone.
Enzo was an obsessive, possessive bastard who still hadn’t forgiven me for being a dick to Robbie. Not that any of that mattered right now—the man was standing for me, even if he was practically snarling at the idea. He loomed behind Jamielike a wall, arms folded, eyes narrowed, shoulders tight with the barely leashed promise of violence.
Jamie, in contrast, was all energy. Up on his toes, lighter flipping between his fingers. Bright-eyed. Eager. Dangerous in a way most people didn’t clock until it was too late.
“So,” Jamie said, bouncing once on the balls of his feet, “what’s the play?”
I pulled my blade from my pocket, checked the slide on my gun, then drew out the hypodermic I’d carried for years and snapped it to the band on my wrist—a last resort full of something quick, irreversible, a mercy I wasn’t planning to use tonight.
