“Either give my men what they want, when they want it,” he says, “or kill the man who gave you this knife.”
The room is spinning. A rush of heat squeezes my chest, anxiety churning in my gut like stormy water. Kill Magnus… or let them use me, degrade me. Murder theonlyperson in this shithole who gave a damn about me. In cold blood. To save myself. I want to scream, to claw at the smug, masked face staring me down and make him feel the same helplessness that’s eating me alive.
I shake my head, but I’m too terrified to give him my words.
I don’t want to make this choice. I sob, but he doesn’t falter.
“You want answers. You want warmth. And fuck knows you need a shower. All these things come at a cost. Give us something in return, and you can have them.”
eight
Rowan
Nine days, eight hours, and twenty-three minutes. That’s how long she’s been gone.
My body winces with exhaustion, never being able to rest for more than one hour at a time. If she’s not sleeping peacefully in our bed, how could I? I’ve never been a religious man, but this is the first time in my life when I pray to God. I pray that she’s still alive, because as much as I don’t even fucking want toconsiderit, I know she could be gone by the time I find her. They’d kill her just to spite me… just to break me and take control of the entire political plan I’d no longer care about. Without her I’m nothing, and now they know that.
“You know you have to stop doing this, right?” Maddox asks.
We’re parked in my car, in front of Dove’s apartment building, late at night. My combat boots are drenched in mud from when I buried Governor Castillo’s body after murdering him in his hotel room. By the time I finished the job, Maddox tracked me down and got in the passenger seat so we could talk.
“Do what?” I say, though I know exactly what he’s referring to.
“This. Coming here every night. She’s not… You know we can’t involve her in this kind of life.”
I won’t, so there’s no point talking about it, but the pain of knowing I can’t have her is better than feeling nothing at all. I look out toward the apartment block at the lit bedroom window on the fifth floor. She’s in there, and I know she smells like sugared strawberries and summer rain. And that she smiles… a lot. She wears pretty dresses and keeps her wavy hair long, sometimes wrapped with cute little ribbons. She drinks her coffee no earlier than ten so she can let her natural cortisol wake her up.
I know all these things and I shouldn’t because this girl simply can’t be mine.
“She has a big case tomorrow with her boss,” I say absently. “That’s probably why she’s still up.”
He sighs. “Fuck, Rowan, why are you doing this to yourself?”
The corner of my mouth goes up into a bittersweet smile.
“Because Dove is going to change the world someday. And I’ll be damned if I’m not here to watch.”
I open my eyes and tilt my face to the morning sky, the memory of that night fresh in my mind. Guilt presses down on me, and it’s getting harder and harder to push it aside. I’m in front of the Operations Center, a place I haven’t visited since I took over the military and gave up my special ops role. But now that I have the name of the asshole who took Dove, I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere.
My phone buzzes in my hand, and I glance down before answering.
“Fuck,” Maddox mutters, an afterthought of the last text message I sent him earlier.
Fuckis right.
Turns out, finding out who Dove’s kidnapper is wasn’t the hard part. The real problem is that to get to him, I need someone on board who’s hated my guts ever since I pulled him out of his job five years ago.
I grind my teeth as I pace around the special ops garage. Former Secretary of Defense David Foster will never agree to helping me with anything, let alone setting up a meeting on my behalf. Talk about burning bridges…
“Everybody wants something,” I tell Maddox. “Call him. Give him back the job Delaney fired him from.”
“That would mean firingyou.”
I swallow hard, the weight of it settling in my chest. Everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve built in my career, gone with one call. But they can take it all—rip it apart like a carcass tossed to the vultures—as long as Dove is back in my arms.
I grip the phone tighter, my knuckles white, my pacing frantic. My breath comes fast and uneven, and I have to let out a long sigh before I say, “Do it if it comes to that. Ineedto get to her, Maddox.”
Desperation must be pretty clear in my voice, judging by his response.
