The engines settle into a soothing thrum as the city drops away beneath us.Los Angeles shrinks.The Pacific stretches, and the air inside Monty’s private jet smells like recycled oxygen and mobsters.
Fucking Russians.I don’t trust them.
I don’t trust Monty’s island.I don’t trust the plane, the sky, or the silence between the turbulence.
But I trust Wolf.
I still can’t wrap my head around it.
Twenty years of tracking Adrian Crowe.Twenty years of building traps and watching him slip free every time.I mapped his money, his routes, his business deals, and those of his evil business partners.I stalked him through data, every second of every day, for two fucking decades.
And Wolf walked in and ended him in a single night.A bomb on his chest, a razor blade behind his inked smile, and no fucks to give.
I’d throttle him for it if I didn’t want to grab his hair, shove a hand under his skirt, and assault his mouth until he comes in his hot sequined shorts.
He’s beautiful in a way that makes my chest ache.Reckless in a way that begs for punishment.And he’s mine, if the world would give us five uninterrupted minutes to say the things we’re not saying.
I owe him my life.
I owe him Dove.
Sitting near the rear of the plane, I rest my hands on my lap because if I don’t, they’ll start searching for things to break.
The Restrepo cartel has my little bird.
They fucking took her.
That truth jolts in my head.Not relief.Not terror.But the extremes of both, braided into a live wire.
I need my computer equipment.
Wolf said they moved everything to the island before Crowe’s people could destroy it.Servers, drives, redundancies stacked on redundancies.My work, my mind, all laid out in metal and code.
Except for my connection to the Restrepo cartel.Those files are buried so deep I built them to survive excavation, layers upon layers, the kind that would take Mikhail years to peel back, if he ever managed it at all.
But if he somehow corrupted or compromised my servers, I won’t be able to contact the cartel.
I shut that thought down.I’ll know soon enough.
Monty’s in the cockpit, flying us back to Sitka.His co-pilot, Oliver, sits beside him.Kodiak sprawls near the front with Mikhail, pretending not to listen while listening to everything.
I track Wolf by feel, following his restless orbit through the cabin.
He stops in the doorway of the cockpit, a hand braced on the bulkhead, and speaks quietly with Monty.
From the moment we left the nightclub, Monty hasn’t relaxed his jaw or released his breath.He wears the look of a father who knows his son keeps stepping into fires he can’t follow.He’s terrified of losing Wolf again.
Wolf lowers his brow to Monty’s head and murmurs something that makes Monty’s shoulders loosen a fraction.Whatever Wolf says, it’s meant only for Monty, a quiet assurance from a son who knows precisely how much fear he leaves in his wake and is asking to be trusted anyway.
He checks Kody next, a quick scan, a wordless exchange of eye contact I can’t begin to decipher.
Then he’s standing before me.Baptized by Adrian Crowe’s jugular.Blood cakes his inked smile, clings to his jaw, and mats into his hairline.
The eyeliner didn’t survive the night.It smudges his eyes into dark ruin and bleeds down his cheeks in inky trails that cut through drying red.
More gore splatters his ivory lace skirt that hangs obscenely over mean thigh-high boots.The rings and necklace are gone.The vest and bomb long gone.He’s shirtless, his chest bludgeoned with more scars than I have the years, or the right, to count.Old lines.New ones.Wounds that healed clean.Others that didn’t bother.
I’ve seen monsters up close.I hunted one for most of my life.
