"He's out there! We find him. Now!"
Tank. Close. Getting closer. Cross's expression didn't change. He straightened his cuffs, adjusted his grip on the pistol, and positioned himself beside me with the relaxed confidence of a man greeting guests at a party.
Tank came through the doorway first, Glock raised, his body filling the frame like a wall. Behind him, Axel and Declan fanned out on either side—three weapons sweeping the room, covering every angle, a geometry of controlled violence converging on the man standing next to me.
Tank's eyes found mine. I watched the impact hit him—the relief, the rage, the love, the horror at what he was seeing. The bruises on my face, the split lip, the dark circles under my eyes that must have looked like bruises of their own. Four days of captivity written on my body in a language he could read.
"Tyler." My name in his mouth was a sound I'd held onto in the dark for four days, replayed in my mind until the syllables wore smooth like river stones. Hearing it now, spoken aloud, in his voice, in this room—my chest cracked open and something poured through that I couldn't name and couldn't stop.
"Step away from him." Tank's weapon trained on Cross, his voice a controlled detonation—flat, steady, every word carrying the promise of violence held incheck by a discipline that was visibly costing him everything he had.
Cross didn't step away. He stood beside me with the pistol resting against his thigh, his silver hair catching the fluorescent light, his posture relaxed in a way that was either supreme confidence or supreme performance. The charcoal sweater, the polished shoes—even in a bunker, even with his operation collapsing around him, Cross looked like a man attending a business meeting.
"You must be Tank." Cross's voice was conversational, warm, the tone of a host greeting a dinner guest. His eyes moved over Tank with open curiosity—cataloging, assessing, the same clinical gaze he'd turned on me a thousand times. "I've seen photographs, of course. But in person, you're... larger than I expected. I can see the appeal. Tyler always did have a type."
Axel and Declan held their positions on either side of the doorway, weapons trained on Cross, their sight lines clear. Three guns on one man. The math was simple. But the variable standing beside Cross—me, barely upright, directly in the line of fire—complicated everything.
"Gun on the floor," Tank ordered. "Now."
"Or what?" Cross tilted his head—a gesture I recognized, the performance of thoughtfulness, the rehearsed curiosity of a man who already knew his next three moves. "You'll shoot me? With Tyler standing right here? You're a better marksman than that, I hope, but the risk seems unnecessary."
His hand came up slowly, and every weapon inthe room tracked the movement. But Cross wasn't raising the pistol—he was gesturing, palm open, the universal sign oflet's all be reasonable.
"I want to tell you something, Tank. May I call you Tank? A nickname, I assume—though given your build, I understand it." Cross's smile was precise, practiced, the kind that made you feel seen and understood even as it calculated the best angle of attack. "I want to tell you about your brother."
The room changed. I felt it before I saw it—a shift in the air, a tightening, as if the temperature had dropped ten degrees in a single heartbeat.
Tank's jaw clenched. "Don't."
"Daniel Morrison." Cross spoke the name like he was reading it from a file, clinical and detached. "Found dead in his motel room, September third, 2019. Needle in his arm. Staged to look like a relapse—which it very nearly was, given his history, so the staging was almost unnecessary. But we're thorough people. We don't leave things to chance."
"Don't you say his name." Tank's voice had changed—lower, rougher, the disciplined monotone cracking at the edges.
"He was getting clean. Did you know that? Of course you did—you watched it happen. Your little brother, fighting his way back. Making plans, talking about the future." Cross's tone was almost admiring. Almost kind. "The problem was, the drugs that destroyed him came from our pipeline. And clean people ask questions. They go to meetings, they talk to counselors, they start connecting dots. Daniel was connecting dots."
Axel's weapon was steady. Declan hadn't shifted an inch. But I could feel the room tilting, the balance of power shifting as Cross did what Cross always did—found the wound and pressed.
"My people flagged him. A low-level concern—a recovering addict in Henderson asking questions about where the pills came from, who was distributing, why so many people in his recovery group were dying from medications they'd been taking for years." Cross paused, letting the words land. "I made the call myself. I don't delegate the important decisions."
Tank's weapon was shaking.
I saw it—the tremor in his hands, the rage flooding through his system like a chemical fire, burning through the discipline, the training, the control that had held him together through five days of hell. His vision was narrowing. His body was coiling. Danny's knife burned on his belt, and I could feel the pull of it, the gravity of six years of grief and rage converging on this moment, on this man, on the revelation that the monster who'd stolen me had also murdered his brother.
Cross wanted this. I saw the calculation behind his eyes—the same calculation I'd watched a thousand times during our three years together. The FBI agent who'd become something worse than any criminal he'd ever investigated, using the same interrogation techniques, the same psychological precision, the same ability to find the fracture line in any human being and apply pressure until they broke. He was pushing Tank toward the edge, towardthe reckless charge, toward the moment of blind fury that would give Cross the opening he needed.
I watched Cross's fingers tighten around the pistol grip. Subtle. Almost invisible. The gun was still at his side, but the safety was off—I could see the indicator from where I stood—and his index finger had migrated from the trigger guard to the trigger itself.
He was going to shoot Tank. The moment Tank charged, the moment discipline broke, Cross would raise the weapon and fire. Clean, efficient, the kind of kill shot that a former federal agent turned shadow operative could make in his sleep.
I'd spent three years studying this man. Every microexpression. Every manipulation. Every tell that his victims never recognized because the charm was too thick, the performance too polished, the mask too perfect. But I'd lived behind the mask. I knew what lived beneath it. And I saw the kill in Cross's eyes two full seconds before he committed to it.
My body acted before my mind finished the thought.
Two steps—all my ruined legs could manage—closing the distance while his attention was locked on Tank, while his weapon was angled toward the bigger threat, while his arrogance whispered what it had always whispered:Tyler is broken. Tyler is compliant. Tyler isn't dangerous.
My hand closed over his gun hand. Not to wrestle for the weapon—I had no strength for that, my muscles spent, my grip weak from dehydration and days of disuse. Instead, I redirected. Shoved his armwide, twisting his wrist outward, using the momentum of his own surprise against him.
The gun fired. The shot went into the concrete wall six feet to Tank's left, the detonation deafening in the enclosed space, and the muzzle flash lit the room in a strobe of white that burned afterimages into my retinas.
