Boots thundered outside. Flashlights swept through the slats in the barn walls. Two officers filled the doorway, pistols up.
Breakneck raised his hands slowly, palms out, breath fogging the cold air.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t twitch.
He just stood there in the half-light, blood drying on his skin, bruises blooming across his ribs, Ryker’s body at his feet.
“Turn around,” one of the officers shouted. “You’re under arrest.”
Blair was halfway down the corridor, a case file tucked under her arm, when the station doors slammed open and Bessel and Jaffe hauled a man between them, wrists cuffed behind his back.
She stopped dead.
The breath left her chest in a quiet, startled hitch because she had never seen anything like him.
He was bare-chested, bruised, and streaked with blood that had dried in harsh lines across his ribs, his skin a canvas of violence and survival. Dense muscle flexed across a broad chest, powerful shoulders tapering into arms thick with strength, every line of him cut and hard and unyielding. His torso was sculpted like someone had carved it from raw determination and field op conditioning. Tight jeans clung low to his hips, worn cowboy boots scuffed from work, and he moved with the grounded weight of a man who knew exactly how to use every inch of his body if he needed to.
His face was a whole different kind of dangerous. Black hair shaved close at the sides, wild on top. A bruise darkening along his jaw. A split at his temple. Dried blood under one cheekbone. Rough, ravaged, devastating. The kind of face that didn’t lose beauty even when bruised and battered.
But his eyes…God.
Gray. Sharp. Predatory. Intelligent.
A storm locked behind irises that flicked over every detail of the hallway like he was mapping exits, threats, weaknesses. Then those eyes landed on her.
Heat shot straight through her body, low and fast, catching her off guard. A visceral punch she felt in the base of her spine. He just looked, steady and assessing, and something tight and electric pulled through her abdomen like a string drawn too fast.
No criminal had ever done that to her. No man, period, and she’d danced with some fine male forms.
He radiated control even in cuffs, violence contained in the set of his shoulders, lethal training in every line of his posture. A man forged in places most people wouldn’t survive a minute.
Blair had built her life on reading danger at a glance.
This man wasn’t just danger.
He was gravity.
Standing there in the middle of her own station, spine straight, pulse stuttering in a way she hated, Blair Brown felt something she hadn’t in a long time. An awareness that wasn’t fear, wasn’t adrenaline, wasn’t professional caution.
It was heat.
Low. Slow. Unwanted. Unavoidable.
She forced her lungs to work again, forced her feet to root to the floor instead of stepping back or, God help her, closer. The constables escorting him couldn’t contain him. No one here could.
He lifted his chin just a fraction.
Her pulse tripped. Once. Hard.
She swallowed.
This man was trouble.
This man was trained.
This man was beautiful in the most dangerous way imaginable, a dark, ruined Gabriel come down to earth, minus nothing but the wings.
For the first time in a long time, Blair didn’t know if she should brace herself
