“I have to,” he says, standing up and towering over her. His face is back to that mask of ice, but his eyes are wet. “I told you. I can’t lose you. And this is the only way I know you’ll be here when I get back.”
“No!” she screams, tears falling fresh and fast, staining the concrete. “Don’t leave me like this! You promised! James, I can’t… I can’t be in the dark! I’ll die! I’ll fucking die!”
“I will come back,” he says, his voice cracking on the last word. “I promise. But you’re staying where it’s safe.”
He turns his back on her screams, his boots heavy as he walks back towards me. I see the way his hand is shaking as he picks up his rifle. He looks like he’s already dead inside.
“Let’s go, Peter,” he says, his voice flat. “Before Ichange my mind and burn this whole city down just to stay in this room with her.”
The heavy iron door of the warehouse groans as it swings shut, sealing Tahlia’s screams inside. The sound of her fist hitting the metal is muffled, a dull, rhythmic thud that syncs with the frantic pounding of my own heart.
The rain hits us instantly. It’s a cold, vertical sheet of grey that turns the alleyway into a river of oil and grit. I pull the collar of my tactical jacket up, but the water is already soaking through, chilling the skin around my fresh staples.
Hook is ten feet ahead of me, his pace relentless. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t even seem to feel the rain. He walks with a jagged, lethal posture, his rifle gripped in his good hand while the surgical steel of his hook glints under the flickering streetlamp like a shark’s fin cutting through dark water.
He looks like a man who has already accepted he’s going to hell and is just waiting for the gates to open.
“James,” I call out, my voice barely carrying over the roar of the downpour.
He stops. He doesn’t turn around, but his shoulders bunch. “Don’t,” he says, the word a flat, vibrating warning.
I catch up to him, my boots splashing in the deep puddles. My mind is a jagged mess of “what ifs.” I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if Viktor has her in a basement, if he’s moved her across state lines, or if she’s already been sold to someone I’ll never be able to reach.
The lack of information is a slow-acting poison. I keep picturing her face—not crying, but that terrifyingly blank look she gets when she’s given up.
“We hit the docks first?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. “If Viktor is moving ‘high-value’ stock, that’s where the transport hubs are.”
Hook finally turns. His face is a ruin of wet hair and arctic-blue eyes that look completely hollowed out. The water drips off the end of his hook.
“We hit the club first,” he says. The silk is gone from his voice; there’s only the venom left. “Viktor’s second-in-command, Silas, keeps his books at The Gilded Cage. He’s the one who handles the logistics. He’s the one who knows which names are on the manifests.”
“And if he won’t talk?”
Hook steps closer, the smell of wet wool and gun oil rolling off him. He raises his left arm, the polished steel of the hook coming up to rest just beneath my jaw. It’s cold—colder than the rain.
“Then I’ll use this to unzip him until I find the page with her name on it,” he murmurs.
He drops his arm and heads for the blacked-out SUV idling at the end of the alley. The engine’s low rumble vibrates in the pavement, a growl that matches the tension coiling in my gut. I look back at the warehouse one last time. It looks like a tomb. I can’t hear Tahliaanymore, and I don’t know which is worse—her screaming or the silence.
I climb into the passenger seat, the leather cold against my damp clothes. Hook guns the engine, the tires screaming against the wet asphalt as we pull out into the night.
I stare out the window at the blurred lights of the city. Somewhere in that maze of concrete and shadow, Wendy is waiting. She has to be waiting. I grip the handle of my door so hard the plastic creaks. I don’t have a hook, and I don’t have James’s cold-blooded certainty, but I have a desperation that feels like it’s going to light me on fire.
“Drive faster,” I mutter.
Hook doesn’t respond. He just floors it, the speedometer climbing as we race toward a ghost.
The silence in the SUV is a living thing, bloated and heavy with the sound of the rain lashing against the windshield. The wipers rhythmic thwack-thwack feels like a countdown I can’t stop.
I’m vibrating. It’s not the cold and it’s not the shock from the staples—it’s the poison of the unknown. My mind is a fever dream of images I can’t scrub away. I see Wendy’s throat, pale and vulnerable, and I imagine a hand that isn’t mine wrapping around it.
I imagine her blue eyes turning glassy, looking for me in a room I can’t find.
Where is she? The question is a jagged loop in my skull. Is she breathing the same air I am right now, or is she trapped in some soundproof box beneath the city? I want to rip the dashboard out with my bare hands.
I want to swallow the sun so the whole world has to feel as dark as I do. I’m becoming something I don’trecognise—a frantic, starving dog pacing a cage made of “what ifs.” If I find out someone looked at her too long, I’ll gouge their eyes out. If they touched her, I’ll peel the skin from their fingers inch by agonising inch.
She’s mine. She’s the only thing that makes the blood in my veins feel like something other than battery acid.
