There is no remorse, no brotherly grief. There is only a cold, hollow satisfaction at the debt collected.
I step over Mateus’s body without a second glance. The rage is gone, replaced by an icy, singular purpose. Grace. Get Grace back.
The air in the warehouse is thick with the smell of rust, stale water and something else, something metallic and coppery that makes the back of my throat tighten. Dust motes dance in the slivers of pale, sickly light cutting through the grime-caked windows high above. My footsteps echo on the concrete, a solitary drumbeat in the vast, hollow space.
They’d taken my phone, my wallet, my gun. Patted me down with rough, impersonal hands at the door. I’d come alone, as instructed. A lamb to the slaughter, but a lamb with a singular, burning purpose: get Grace out.
Three men stand in a loose circle under a single, dangling bulb that does more to carve out pockets of darkness than to illuminate. My eyes scan them, assessing threats, calculating angles, and then my blood runs cold.
The man in the centre turns. He’s older, his face a roadmap of hard living and cruelty, but I’d know that predatory smirk anywhere. The cold, intelligent eyes that have haunted the periphery of my world for years.
Lucas Fucking Asher.
The name is a silent curse in my mind. He’s a predator, a paedophile, a man we excommunicated from the Brethren years ago. The only reason he wasn’t eliminated entirely is the virtue of his blood, him being a Founder.
“Antonio Macrae,” Lucas says, his voice a low, gravelly thing that seems to absorb the light. “Punctual. I appreciate that in a man who’s about to lose everything.”
I don’t grace him with a response. My silence is my weapon, for now. I just stare, letting him see the ice in my gaze, the promise of what will happen when I get my hands on him.
He smiles, a thin, bloodless line. “You’re not in charge here, but you already knew that. Come. Your wife is eager to see you.”
He leads the way toward a heavy metal door set into the far wall. One of his brutes pulls it open, revealing a set of stairs descending into utter blackness. The coppery smell intensifies, mixed with damp and decay.
We go down. The stairs are narrow, iron, clanging with every step. The basement is worse than the warehouse. It’s a dungeon. The air is cold and wet, clinging to my skin. The only light comes from a string of bare, low-wattage bulbs that run along the ceiling, casting a jaundiced glow.
And then I see her.
My breath catches, seizing in my chest. The world narrows to a single, horrifying point.
Grace.
She’s in a cell. A cage of floor-to-ceiling iron bars, like something from a medieval nightmare, and she’s naked. Curled into herself on a thin, filthy mattress in the corner, her arms wrapped around her shins, her face buried in her knees. Her skin is goose-fleshed and smudged with dirt. Her beautiful hair is a matted, and bloodstained mess.
A low, animal sound builds in my throat. I take an instinctive step forward, my hand reaching out as if I could tear the bars apart with my will alone.
Lucas’s hand slams against my chest, stopping me dead. “Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast, Macrae. Like I said, you’re not in charge right now. You look. You listen.”
My eyes are glued to Grace. She must have heard us. She flinches, uncurling slightly, and lifts her head.
And the entire world stops.
Her face is a mask of tears and grime, her eyes wide with a terror, and then I see it. The blood. Dark, rust-brown smears down the sides of her neck, tracing cruel paths over her collarbones. The wounds themselves are hidden by her hair, but the evidence of their butchery is painted on her skin.
A whimper escapes her, a broken, shattered sound that doesn’t sound like her at all. It’s the sound of a soul being systematically dismantled.
“An, Antonio…”
Her voice is a rasp, a ghost of the melody I love. It breaks the paralysis holding me. Rage, white-hot and absolute, floods my system. I turn on Lucas, my body vibrating with the need to kill.
“What do you want?” The words are a snarl, ripped from a place deep within me I rarely let surface. “If you want me dead, then kill me. Get it over with, but she hasnothingto do with this. Let her go. Now.”
My demand is met with a chorus of low, mocking laughter from the men flanking Lucas. It echoes in the damp chamber, a sound of pure evil.
Lucas just looks amused. “Nothing to do with this? Antonio, you’re not thinking. She haseverythingto do with this.” He takes a step closer to the bars, and Grace shrinks back, a fresh wave of tears spilling down her cheeks. “You married her. And, as we recently discovered, you knocked her up.”
The words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer, and all the air leaves my lungs. The roaring in my ears drowns out everything else. Pregnant?
My eyes snap back to Grace. I stare, desperate, searching her face for a sign, for the truth. She’s still plump enough that it’d be hard to tell, and she has been gaining weight these last few months, weight I wanted her to put on…
