Declan.Loud, coffee-drinking, conspiracy-weaving, always-talking, always-there Declan, who taught me how to use a tattoo machine and showed up every day.
Except today was his day off.He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“How?”I grip the lapels of Monty’s suit jacket, wrinkling the expensive fabric.“Where?”
“Stabbed before he entered the shop.”Monty embraces me, cupping the back of my head.“He didn’t make it inside.They found his body in the side alley.”
The world goes red at the edges.I hear myself breathe like it’s someone else.Too fast.Too hard.My hands curl and uncurl, and something inside me tears loose.
Jag Rath.
Did he do this?Did he kill four guards and Declan?And rip Dove from my life?
It’s always him, Wolf.It’s what he does.
Her words drill into me, and my grief turns feral.It shreds into howling ribbons of fury, ripping from my throat.
I shove past Monty, my thoughts scattering as I race into the city, toward the night, toward whoever did this.
Jag?His enemies?His associates?I want names.I want faces.I want the sound of someone realizing they chose the wrong place and the wrong people.
“Wolf!”Leo bellows from somewhere behind me.
I run faster.
Declan is dead.
Dove is missing.
I don’t care how long this takes or what it costs me.Iwillfind her.
The docks, the alleys, the dead-end streets… I comb every inch of Sitka for hours.
Cigarette after cigarette burns down to my fingers as I replay every word Jag said.Every look Dove gave me.Every instinct I overruled because I wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings.
Rage boils up my spine, bending my frame under the pressurized coil and drawing me so tight my teeth ache from clenching.
I kick a trashcan into the side of a building and roar at the top of my lungs.
My fingers crack one by one as I flex them, testing how much force I can put behind a strike before bone answers bone.I punch a piling.The air.The brick.The violence needs somewhere to go until I can wrap my hands around a throat, paint the pavement with blood, and drink vodka from the skull of whoever did this.
I pace.I stop.I pace again.My boots grind glass into the concrete.
Where is she?Is she scared?Hurting?Fighting like hell to get back to me?
I shake out my hands, hard.Again.Again.My shoulders burn from holding myself back.My breath comes too fast.Smoke swamps my lungs as I light another cigarette and let it burn down too close, too consumed by a dark place where all I see is death.
I’m back on that cliff.The place where I stop being strategic and start being terminal.
Haven’t I learned anything?
Rage like this won’t find Dove.It just makes more bodies.
I crush the cigarette under my heel and stand there until the red haze thins, the city comes back into focus, and my hands stop shaking.
My legs give out, and I sink to the ground, my back against an alley wall.
I’m not alone.Haven’t been all night.Leo peels away from the shadows and lowers beside me, snaking an arm around my shoulders.
