Chapter One
Xavier
The comms crackled in my ear as I pressed my back against the exterior wall of the warehouse, the weight of my tactical vest a familiar comfort against my chest. Eight weeks. Eight goddamn weeks since Molly Gilbertson vanished from Kingdom, and every single one of those nights I'd lain awake replaying the surveillance footage in my head. We hadn’t found it at first. The main cameras had just shown Molly going to the bathroom, looking drunk, then Ruby escorting her to a supposed friend that was collecting her. Except one of our new hires—not actually working at the time—was there with her friends,and they’d been taking snaps and short videos of them dancing. In the background it had shown Molly arguing with Ruby just before she’d gone to the bathroom. The way she'd marched right up toward Ruby O'Keefe's table like a five-foot-three avenging angel, ready to throw herself between danger and an innocent woman she didn't even know.
Brave. Stupid.Mine, whispered something primal in the back of my skull that I'd been trying to silence since the first time I'd seen her at Salvation, all fire and defiance and those wide hazel eyes that couldn't quite hide how badly she wanted someone to catch her.
"Alpha team in position," Gideon's voice came through low and steady. "Bravo?"
"Bravo in position, south entrance," I confirmed, checking the magazine on my sidearm one final time. Dion was to my left, Kai to my right, both of them moving with the fluid ease of men who'd done this a hundred times in places far worse than an industrial complex on the outskirts of the city.
"Charlie team, rooftop access?"
"Charlie's set. Stairwell is clear," came Maddox's reply.
"On my mark." A pause. The kind of pause that used to precede breaching doors in Kandahar, in Mosul, in a dozen places that still lived behind my eyelids when I closed them. "Three. Two. One. Execute."
The south door buckled inward under the breaching charge, and we flowed through the gap like water finding cracks in stone. The interior was exactly what the thermal imaging had suggested—a converted warehouse sectioned off into smaller rooms with hastily constructed drywall, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped insects. It smelled like industrial cleaner and something underneath it, something human and desperate that made my jaw clench so hard my teeth ached.
The first guard went down before he could reach for his weapon. Dion had him pinned and zip-tied in under four seconds, a knee between the man's shoulder blades and a look on his face that said he was exercising considerable restraint in not breaking something. The second guard came around a corner and walked straight into Kai's fist, crumpling like wet cardboard.
"Clear left," I called, sweeping my barrel across an empty hallway.
"Contact right—two tangos down," Gideon reported from the north side. "We've got rooms. Multiple rooms with locks on the outside."
My stomach turned. Locks on the outside.
We moved through systematically, room by room. The first door I kicked open revealed a small space with a cot, a toilet, and a young woman who screamed and pressed herself into the far corner, her arms wrapped protectively around a belly that looked to be about seven months along. She was shaking so violently I could see it from the doorway.
I holstered my weapon immediately and held up both hands, palms out. "Ma'am, my name is Xavier. We're here to get you out. You're safe now."
She didn't understand English. The rapid stream of Portuguese that poured out of her told me that much. I keyed my comms. "Mari, I need you in room three. Portuguese speaker, pregnant, terrified."
"Copy, en route."
Four more rooms. Four more women. All pregnant, all ranging from barely showing to ready to deliver any day. All of them locked in spaces barely fit for animals, with minimal bedding and the kind of fluorescent lighting that could drive a person insane over weeks. My blood ran so hot I could feel my pulse in my fingertips.
But none of them were Molly.
"Gideon." I couldn't keep the edge out of my voice as I cleared the last room on my corridor and found it empty. "She's not here. Molly's not in the south wing."
"Not in the north wing either. We've swept every room."
Something cold and terrible settled in my chest—the same feeling I'd had the morning I'd woken up in the field hospital at Bagram and been told half my entire team was gone. That sickening freefall oftoo late, too late, you were too late again—
"Wait." Maddox’s voice cut through the static. "Charlie team, rooftop. I've got an open vent cover up here. Someone's been through the ductwork recently—there are scratches on the metal, fresh ones."
I was already moving. I hit the stairwell at a dead sprint, taking the steps three at a time, my boots ringing against the metal treads like gunshots. Four flights. My thighs burned and I didn't care. My lungs screamed and I didn't care. Because if she'd heard the breach, if she'd heard the chaos and thought it was something else. Thought they were moving her, thought new buyers had come, thought any one of a hundred terrible things that eight weeks in captivity would teach a person to think—
I slammed through the rooftop access door, and the night air hit me like a wall, cool and tasting of rain. The roof was flat, industrial, studded with HVAC units and exhaust vents. Maddox stood about twenty feet away, near an open vent grate, and he was pointing toward the far edge of the building.
And there she was.
Molly Gilbertson stood at the very edge of the roof, five stories above the concrete below, her bare feet on the narrow lip of the parapet wall. She was wearing what looked like hospital scrubs two sizes too big for her, hanging off a frame that had lost weight it couldn't afford to lose. Her hair—that wild curly auburn hair I remembered catching the light at Salvation—was tangled andmatted, whipping around her face in the wind. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and even from thirty feet away I could see the whites of her eyes, wide and feral and seeing everything as a threat.
She looked like a cornered animal deciding whether the fall was better than the cage.
"Stay back!" she screamed, and her voice cracked on the second word, raw and hoarse, like she'd been screaming for weeks and no one had listened. "I won't go back in those rooms! I'll jump, I swear to God, I'll jump before I let you put another needle in me!"
