Hands bound or not, they’d have to go through him.
The door swung outward, and light poured in—harsh, fluorescent, the kind that bleached everything to bone-white and left no shadows to hide in. Dom squinted against it, blinking rapidly as his concussed brain scrambled to process the sudden overload.
A silhouette filled the doorframe. Tall, broad, built like a man who’d spent decades turning his body into a weapon. He stepped forward, and the details sharpened as Dom’s eyes adjusted: close-cropped gray hair, hard jaw with a scar running along the line of it, arms folded across a chest that strained the seams of a black tactical jacket.
Dom recognized him from one of Davey’s recent intel briefings.
Malcolm Raines. Praetorian’s senior field commander.
Color him not surprised that Praetorian was behind this.
two
Vivi’s headwas splitting open, and the fluorescent light from the corridor bored through her skull, turning everything behind her eyes to static. She tasted copper and something chemical at the back of her throat, and her wrists burned where the zip ties bit into skin.
And to top off the phenomenally shitty night, Malcolm Raines stood six feet away, smirking at them.
She studied him from behind Dom’s shoulder—because of course Dom had planted himself between her and the threat. His hands were bound behind his back, and he was still trying to play hero. Infuriating. Also very on brand.
But she didn’t need his help.
Think.
Her brain sluggishly obeyed, hauling itself through the chemical fog that still clung to every synapse. She had training for this. Not military like Dom, but the kind of training you picked up in cramped back rooms in Marseille and Bucharest, the kind Sabin had drilled into her before their first real job.
Assess the room.
Assess the threat.
Assess your assets.
Room: concrete, sealed, one exit. Camera in the corner. Two guards in the corridor, armed, blocking the only exit. The door was steel, hinged outward. Even if she could get to it, she couldn’t move fast enough with her hands bound.
Threat: Raines. Six feet. Unarmed, as far as she could see, but that meant nothing. Men like Raines didn’t need weapons. They were weapons.
Assets: herself. Dom.
Raines let the silence stretch. She recognized it as a dominance tactic because she’d used it herself. Fill the room with nothing and wait for the other person to crack, to babble, to give something away.
She wasn’t going to give him anything.
“Ms. Cavalier,” Raines finally said. “Why don’t you come out from behind Mr. Wilde? I’m not here for him.”
Tension radiated off Dom. His shoulder pressed against hers, not quite pushing her back, but close. A wordless warning.Stay behind me.
She ignored it—she’d been ignoring Dominic Wilde for three years and wasn’t about to stop now— and stepped out from behind him. She didn’t need him to be her shield. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Raines?”
“Business.” He tilted his head, studying her the way a collector might study a piece he was considering acquiring. “Specifically, yours.”
Raines reached back into the hallway, and Dom moved in front of her again. She wanted to tell him to back off, to let her handle this, but the words died somewhere between her brain and her mouth when one of Raines’s goons handed him a tablet. He held it out to her, and everything stopped. Her heart. Her lungs. Her brain.
The footage was crystal clear, with a timestamp in the corner showing the current time. It was a live feed of a concrete room, smaller than this one, lit by a single bare bulb. A man sat zip-tied to a metal chair, head hanging forward, golden hair matted with blood.
Sabin.
The concrete floor seemed to lurch beneath her feet, and she locked her knees against it, refusing to let Raines see her stagger. She stared at the screen. Her brother was bruised, badly beaten. He hadn’t gone without a fight. As she watched, he lifted his head to glare up at the camera.
Even beaten half to death, even bloodied and bound, Jean-Sabin Cavalier still looked like he was daring whoever had put him there to try harder.
