I flinched, my fingernails scraping against the shallow grooves of the table.
“What are you going to do to me?” My voice was small, raw.
Vince finally stopped pacing, his shoulders stiff as he turned to face me. His eyes were a storm—dark, furious, grieving in a way I couldn’t quite name. “You murdered my father, Acelynn. The only living elder who was left of the Knights. You killed him in your house, and now you need to prove that you aren’t against us, prove that you are not a Spade playing both sides, because from where I’m standing, a whole lot of shit has gotten fucked up since you waltzed in here. Prove you are who you say you are, Acelynn. That’s all we are asking of you.”
The sound of my name—or rather, thewrongname—on his tongue made my stomach turn.Emersyn Spade.Daughter of the Death Dealers’ leader. The girl who’d died in the familymassacre. Or should have. My chest tightened. “What do you want me to do?”
Kaius’s gaze sharpened, carving right through the trembling mess of me. “Tomorrow night, a shipment comes through the border. Muze.”
The word itself was poison, the drug whispered about in every back alley, the one that had ruined more lives than fire and steel combined. “We’ve already paid, but the delivery requires a face-to-face drop. A lump sum, no mistakes.”
Nolan leaned in, smirking faintly, but his eyes were all steel. “That face is going to be yours. You’ll drive down, hand off the money, and bring the shipment back to the club. Clean. Simple. No questions.”
My blood went cold. Delivering Muze wasn’t just some errand. It was a test. One misstep, one second of hesitation, and they’d decide I wasn’t proving loyalty. That I was proving guilt.
“And if I don’t?” My voice cracked before I could swallow the weakness down.
“Then we’ll know,” Kaius said flatly, “that you’re not with us. And if you’re not with us, Acelynn…” His eyes burned into mine, cold enough to freeze bone. “You’re against us.”
The room pulsed with silence, the air too thick to breathe. I nodded. Slowly, then faster, like if I agreed enough times, it would drown out the sound of my heartbeat slamming against my ribs.
“Fine,” I whispered. “I’ll do it.”
None of them smiled. None of them eased. Because this wasn’t a victory. It was a leash.
By the time I left the roundtable, I could still feel the weight of their eyes clawing down my spine. The nausea in my gut was so sharp, I nearly doubled over in the hallway. As soon as I shut the door of my car, I dug into my pocket for my phone. My hands shook, fumbling over the screen until it rang through.
“Watson,” I breathed when he picked up, my voice hushed but hard with urgency. “I need you to do something for me.”
A pause on the other end. Then his voice responded, low and cautious, “What is it?”
I pressed a hand against the steering wheel, grounding myself, because if I didn’t, I might spiral into the panic waiting just under my skin. “Tomorrow night, I need Parsons distracted, out of the way. Do whatever it takes. I can’t explain why. You are just going to have to trust me. Can you do that?”
Another beat of silence, then Watson exhaled slowly. “Yes, I can handle that.”
The call ended, but the dread didn’t. Because this wasn’t survival anymore.
It was war.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
acelynn
The housestill smelled faintly of bleach. Even after the Knights’ cleanup crew had scoured it top to bottom, I could smell it—the chemical sharpness clinging to the air like invisible ghosts, trying too hard to erase the violence that had stained these walls. No matter how many times I blinked, I still saw Alaric’s body on the floor, his blood dark and tacky under the weak light of my kitchen. My throat clenched with the memory of his eyes in that final moment, shocked that I had been the one to end him.
But the Knights hadn’t let me sit with that. They had dragged me into the roundtable room, made me stand beneath the unyielding weight of Kaius’s stare, Nolan’s suspicion, and Vince’s hollow silence. And then Kaius’s words had cut me open like a blade.
You have Knight blood on your hands. Now you have to pay that debt.
I couldn’t shake it. Not in the way Nolan’s hand had lingered near his gun the whole time I spoke, not in the way Vince hadn’t looked at me once. But most of all, not in the way Kaius had said it. Like a sentence, not a warning. So now here I was, wearing bruises I hadn’t earned honestly, wearing a mask I couldn’t take off. I slid into the driver’s seat of an unmarked sedan with a trunk full of cash Nolan had dropped off earlier. They hadn’t trusted me with this job. They had dared me to survive it.
The desert landscape bled out in every direction, endless and hollow. Driving at night felt like steering through the underworld, headlights carving out fragile tunnels of light in a sea of black. The road stretched on and on, cracked and narrow, as if it might collapse beneath me and swallow me whole. My hands gripped the wheel so tightly, the leather began to cut into my palms. The engine’s low hum was steady, but underneath it I could hear my own pulse hammering.
Every so often, I checked the rearview mirror, half-hoping, half-dreading to see headlights cresting over the hills. If Nolan and Vince had decided to tail me, maybe this would feel less like a suicide mission. But the mirror stared back empty, the desert swallowing me whole. My mind wandered to Logan. Logan, with his wolf-smile, his endless cruelty hidden behind charm. The ghost of the man who had once called himself mine. If anyone could light a spade into the sand, it would be him. Now that he knows I’m alive, it’s only a matter of time before he buries me himself. And if he knew I was alive, then I might as well just bury myself in my own grave. My knuckles tightened further as I shoved the thought down, trying to refocus my thoughts.
Kaius hadn’t given me a choice. If I wanted to prove I wasn’t an enemy, I would drive this money down to the border and bring back the Muze shipment without flinching. No excuses. No stumbles. And so here I was, the perfect little pawn, drivingstraight into hell. The first sign of the border meeting point was the smell.
Smoke drifted on the wind, acrid and greasy, the kind of smoke that clung to your clothes and followed you home. Then came the faint glow, pulsing weakly in the distance—an oil-drum fire eating away at the night. My stomach twisted as I approached, headlights spilling across rusting fences and half-collapsed gates. This was natural land that wasn’t technically owned by any governing official. The chain-link fence sagged under barbed wire, and the leaning concrete walls looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. A no-man’s-land. The kind of place where you could bury a body and no one would ever find it.
