Chapter 1
Gaby’s hands shook as she pushed the doors to the conference room open. She’d faced armed traffickers, gone undercover in a den of predators, stared down men who would have sold her without blinking. But nothing tightened her chest like the uncertainty of what Callan had uncovered in the encrypted files.
Worst case, she learned her sister was dead. There was no softening that kind of truth.
Almost as bad, the files might contain nothing at all. No names, no locations, no trail. She’d be right back where she started, hunting for a nineteen-year-old girl who’d vanished two months ago without a single solid lead.
She knew what it felt like to hit a wall. She’d been a detective once, two hard-earned years on the force before she walked away from the career she’d planned her whole life. Not because she wanted to quit. Because the higher-ups had kicked Natalie’s case to an already buried FBI field office. That was the moment Gaby understood, with harsh clarity, that if her sister was going to be found, she would have to be the one to do it.
Then Nick Devlin had made her an offer she never saw coming.
He hadn’t sugar-coated it. He needed a female investigator, and he wanted to keep an eye on her. Maybe both were true. Either way, she’d taken the job without blinking.
The paycheck mattered. Hunting a ghost didn’t come cheap. But the access mattered more. Devlin didn’t hire paper-pushers. He hired big, unflinching, been-there-done-that investigators. Former FBI. Ex-CIA. Men who’d spent decades learning how monsters thought, moved, hid.
She wasn’t big. She wasn’t fearless. And she for sure wasn’t tough in the way they were. But she was relentless. For the first time since Natalie vanished, her tentative hope had turned into something real.
She clung to that as she stepped into the glass-and-steel war room. The doors whispered shut behind her. The meeting was set for ten, but the room was empty except for Dev’s IT savant, Callan Ritchie.
He sat at the far end of the long table, fingers flying over his laptop, multiple screens glowing around him like a cockpit. Code streamed down one monitor. Grids of linked locations filled another. He didn’t look up when she entered.
“You’re early,” he said. “Dev and Rhys will be here at ten on the dot, not sooner.”
Gaby checked her watch. 9:52.
“It figures,” she muttered. She set her legal pad down. “I’ll grab some caffeine.”
“You’ll need it,” Callan murmured. “This stuff is a lot.”
She didn’t ask what that meant. Not yet.
“You’ll also need to make a fresh pot. That one’s been here since I got in.”
She kept her second “it figures” to herself.
At the coffee station, she added a splash of hazelnut creamer. The rich, nutty aroma curled upward, the same subtle notes she’d caught on Rhys’s skin that night under the falls. Her breath hitched as the memory surfaced—warm, vivid, impossible to fully shut out.
She forced herself to look away, pressing her palm to the glass as she stared down at the city. Traffic crawled. Pedestrians hurried. The world kept moving, unaware that hers had stalled in one suspended moment.
Her sister’s face rose in her mind.Soon, Natalie, when I tell you what I had to do to find you. Going undercover in a BDSM club, letting a man who keeps me off-balance strip away my armor. You’re going to lose your mind.
And still, the memory of their one scene rose again. Moonlight splintering through the mist of the waterfall, the spray cool against her overheated skin, his big body firm against hers. He surrounded her with heat and the kind of restrained power that made her ache in places she hadn’t known existed.
“Look at me, Gabriella.”
God. Even in memory, her name in his soft British accent slid over her like a caress.
She remembered his thumb beneath her chin, the gentle pressure tipping it upward. The way his eyes searched hers, as a dom demanding obedience, but also as a man reaching for the same brief escape she was sent sensation rushing through her. The tension between them crackled then flared so suddenly it left her dizzy.
A thick rope-and-wood swing hung from a heavy tree branch arching over the pool and cascading falls. He lifted her and set her on the seat. Something slick glided inside her with startling fullness.
They called the backyard the playground, but there was nothing innocent about it.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“Indeed, it is,” he replied, amusement curving his mouth. “I want to make sure you enjoy your ride.”
He tied her wrists above her head with quick, confident movements. She was at least ten years his junior, a novice inhis world, no matter how hard she’d tried not to look like one. Even after weeks at the Pointe, she still gasped and blushed—especially around him.
