And I would tear the world apart to get her back.
Lu stepped forward, his presence cutting through the room like a blade. He didn’t posture like the others. There was something in his stillness, the way his eyes locked onto mine without flinching, that told me he knew what this was.
“I know someone,” he said, voice flat but loaded with implication. “Ex-Sendai. Owes me a favor.”
I tilted my head, the edge of a smirk tugging at my mouth despite the rage boiling in my chest. “What can he do?”
Lu didn’t hesitate. “He can find anyone who’s not dead.”
A beat passed—quiet, heavy, final.
“Do it,” I said, the words leaving my mouth like a shot fired in a war that hadn’t started yet.
But it would.
He nodded and pulled out his phone, already dialing. His fingers moved fast—deliberate. Efficient. I watched him like a hawk, pacing the floor behind him as adrenaline pumped through me, fast and sharp.
Gideon leaned back against the nearest wall, arms crossed, eyes narrowed like he was trying to see straight through me. “We’re really doing this,” he said, low. “You think Callista’s the one who took her?”
My jaw tightened. The truth was written in the wreckage of my foyer. The shattered phone. The broken glass. The blood on my knuckles.
“I don’t care what Callista thinks,” I said, voice low, lethal. “She made her move. Now I make mine.”
Gideon shifted, like he wanted to say more, but Scar’s glare from across the room shut him up.
“Just don’t lose yourself in this,” he muttered anyway.
I turned on him, slow and deliberate. “I’m not losing anything,” I growled. “I’m taking back what’s mine.”
Lu spoke quietly into the phone, words in a dialect I didn’t understand—but I didn’t need to. I could feel it in the air, that something was happening. The hunt had begun.
And still, my mind was full of her.
I would not let that be taken from me.
The moment Lu hung up, I was on him. “Where?”
“He’s running the trace now,” Lu said. “Give it ten.”
“Ten minutes is five too many.”
Lu didn’t flinch. “We’ll get her back.”
I nodded once, barely containing the storm in my chest.
“We better,” I said, eyes burning. “Because if we don’t… I’ll burn the fucking world down.”
Fifteen minutes dragged by like molasses in hell. Each second ticked loud in my skull, stretching and warping until I thought I might crack under the weight of it. My men stayed quiet. Focused. But the tension in the air was suffocating—everyone waiting, watching, the storm circling just beneath the surface.
Then Lu’s phone buzzed.
The sound cut through the silence like a blade. He snatched it up, and the second his expression shifted, I was on him—leaning in, every muscle in my body pulled tight like a bowstring.
“Abandoned government facility,” he said, voice calm but coiled. “Outskirts of town. Used for trafficking a few years back. Shut down—supposedly.”
Something snapped inside me. My blood turned to ice, my vision tunneled. That was where she was?
A fucking graveyard?
