They’re finally safe, and they need to stay that way.
Four walls, no windows, and a single door bolted from the inside.This is my confession booth.A concrete tool shed behind an abandoned house on a dead-end road that no one visits.
Just a couple of blocks from the tattoo shop, dead freight piles up outside.Busted pallets lean against the weathered blue exterior.
Blue princess.
Nobody looks twice.
Inside, though?Inside is mine.Stacks of towers.Rows of monitors.Thirty eyes, all open and unblinking.
Here lies the equipment Wolf asked to see.
My hunting ground.
I lean back in the chair, fingers spidering over the keyboard, pulling up feeds.
Thanks to Frankie Strakh, I can type with both hands again, only slightly limited by the splint on my wrist.
The screen on my left streams in real time, showing footage from the street outside this room.The one above it loops through the morning hours, time stamp after time stamp.
All the rest, dozens of displays, monitor Dove’s walking paths to the mechanic shop, inside the garage bays, the deli where she grabs lunch, the private slips where she comes and goes by yacht.Every angle of her little Alaskan life recorded in grainy black-and-white.
Except the island.The Strakh fortress is impenetrable.
For everyone but me.
I take grim satisfaction in knowing which island is theirs and how to breach the security.
But I’m backed into a corner.If I drag her out now, I’ll lose the bodyguards who are protecting her.If I leave her there, I’ll lose her to Wolf.
Either way, one of us gets hurt.
Better me than her.
She’s safe with the Strakhs.Safer than she ever was with Gavin.
Safer than she is with me.
I hate that.
Since the night I butchered our parents’ murderer, I’ve been on the run, using fake names everywhere, from Colombia to Bangkok, across borders and burner phones.But Sitka Tattoo carries my real name.A signal flare in the night.Not because I want to be found, but because I want to see who’s brave enough to come looking.
Last year, the feds found me in California.But the tail on Dove yesterday and today?That wasn’t government-issued.
A far deadlier threat has arrived in Sitka, and I’m not ready.I don’t have the money or manpower to win this war.
It’s time to call in a favor.
I reach for a burner phone and hesitate, the splint on my wrist transporting me back to this morning.
The shape of Wolf’s mouth against mine, the taste of his defiance, the punishing hand job, the way he didn’t pull away, and the moment I realized he isn’t just another mark.
There’s no denying it.He was into it, into me, and goddammit, I didn’t want him to leave.
My fever took hours to break, but I wanted another round with that complicated dark angel and his vicious hands.More conversation, more heat, more of that razor-wire tension that makes me feel alive.But he bolted.Like I knew he would.
Did he run straight to Dove?Put his cruel mouth all over her?Shove his virgin cock up between her legs?Slack all that wild hunger I stirred in him?
