Kayne pulled her into him, holding her tight.“You are not the cause of this,” he said fiercely.“You are the reason we’re ending it.”
She clung to him, breathing him in and letting his strength shore up the places in her that felt as if they were collapsing.
Danica had spent months orbiting her, resenting her, needing her, pushing her away, and pulling her back again, and none of that mattered now.
Somewhere deep beneath the fear, beneath the guilt and the panic and the terrible, twisting love she felt for a sister who had never quite loved her back, something hard and determined took shape.
She would not leave Danica in the dark.And she would not walk into it alone.
#
Kayne had been halfasleep, one arm draped protectively over Chloe, when the phone vibrated on the nightstand.The sound was soft, almost polite, but it punched straight through his nervous system like a starter pistol.
Chloe made a small, broken sound, and Kayne took the phone from her before panic could take root.
“Okay,” he said, voice steady by sheer force of will.He was already standing, already thinking.“Breathe.”
The feed jittered as Danica shifted weakly, her mouth moving to form words that never reached them.Anger coiled tight and contained, the way Kayne had learned to keep it when acting on it too soon would cost lives.
Rage could wait.Precision couldn’t.
He moved fast, opening his laptop, fingers flying as Chloe paced behind him.He routed the signal through every tool he had access to, bypassing firewalls, skimming metadata, and tracking packet paths until the world narrowed to code and instinct, to patterns he trusted.
Then the map resolved.
He froze.
“What?”Chloe demanded.
Kayne turned the screen toward her.The blinking marker sat dead center on a familiar block.
“No,” she said immediately.
“Yes,” he said.“It’s the gym.”
Her breath hitched.“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if he wants you close,” Kayne replied.“And if he wants to control the environment.”
She shook her head, disbelief fighting terror.“There’s nowhere like that there.I’ve been everywhere, the offices, storage, locker rooms, and the mechanicals.That looks like a basement, but there isn’t one.”
“I know.”Kayne was already pulling files from his secure server, blueprints scrolling past as he accessed the original architectural plans.“According to these, there isn’t one.”
Chloe stared at the screen.“Then where is she?”
Kayne leaned back slowly, the answer settling in his bones with cold certainty.
“We’d have caught it on our security cameras if he had gone through the club.There has to be an entrance we don’t know about,” he said.“Something concealed and off-book.”
Chloe folded her arms around herself.“That place used to belong to people who hid things.”
“Yes,” Kayne agreed.“And they were very good at it.”
Good enough that even now, years later, the rot was still embedded in the foundation.
She turned to him then, eyes blazing with fear and resolve.“I’m going.”
“No.”The word came out hard, absolute.
