I stare at the dark screen long after the call ends. I don’t know how to reach my sister anymore. The only thing she’s willing to talk about is the active threat against her. Anything else—us, the past, our relationship—is cut off clean.
I close my eyes and start mapping out the next few hours. Scar, Hound, Ryder, Spike. Split up. Clear every building, every blind spot. I’m still running through it when Ryder stands abruptly.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters.
The laptop sits open on the coffee table, forgotten. He’s staring at something in his hand. Then he looks at me and my stomach drops.
He looks pale, like the ground just shifted under him.
“Wolf…” His voice trembles.
Every instinct in me goes on high alert. “What is it?”
“He… Savage didn’t sell Charlotte.”
The words don’t land at first. Of course he didn’t, or maybe he couldn’t. But he’d planned to, I know that much.
“What do you mean?” I ask slowly.
Healer looks between us, uneasy. Ryder swallows hard. His jaw works like he’s chewing glass. If my father didn’t sell my sister, then why does Ryder look like he’d rather swallow gasoline than say the next words?
“I mean he didn’t sell her,” he repeats quietly. “He… he saved her.”
What?
He walks toward me and places an old phone in my hand. Almost dead, likely because he just charged it. There’s noservice. Screen cracked at the corner. My heart drops at the sight of this phone. Because it’s familiar.
A message thread is open. I know this thread. I know it without even reading the name on top. And I also know what I’ll see if I turn the phone over.
My hands start shaking violently anyway.
No. It can’t be. Please.
I flip it. There, peeling at the edges, faded from years of disuse, is the handwritten sticker. A sticker I know.
A + L
My breath leaves me in a slow, hollow exhale. I remember the day she stuck that on there. We were seventeen. Nervous, glowing. So sure of something that felt eternal—our naive love that she had ended.
Her eyes were so bright when she pasted this, so full of love.
She had written it herself.Lfor her.Afor me. Her Alexander.
My thumb brushes the worn edges of the sticker.
My father didn’t sell my sister. He saved her. But he didn’t just save her, did he? He traded Charlotte.
For my Leila.
SEVENTEEN
Ruin
I head back to the panic room on the second floor after running another check on the perimeter.
From the outside the cottage must look empty—blinds closed, driveway empty, but I’m not taking any risks. Wolf’s words still cling to my skin. If he needs to search the compound before lifting the lockdown, then so be it.
As much as I’m itching to go back to the clubhouse and stand beside my brothers, this is more important. Every cell in my body is screaming to protect her until this passes.
