I sat in the backseat until the last second, muscles wound tight, jaw clenched. My bear stirred restlessly beneath my skin, pacing the cage of my bones.
It didn’t like this place. The scent alone was enough to raise my hackles. Too many things clung to the air. Fear, stale blood, old stress, newer sweat.
This wasn’t a place for negotiation. This was where people got cornered. Threatened. Broken. Exactly the kind of place a leech like Avery would feel comfortable in.
Callum stepped out first. He didn’t say a word, didn’t need to. He moved with the precise stillness of a predator that had chosen not to strike yet.
But his aura was pure alpha. Calm on the outside, pressure-cooker inside. Aggression rolled off him in quiet waves.
Rowan and Cyrus flanked him, moving like wraiths. No smiles. No jokes. Just silence and sharp-eyed focus. Good. We weren’t here for show.
Beau slammed his door closed harder than necessary. His bear was close to the surface. I could feel it in the way his shoulders rolled and locked.
“You sure James doesn’t know we’re doing this?” he asked under his breath, voice pitched low for my ears only.
I nodded. “He’d want to be here. But if this gets ugly?—”
Callum cut in, flat and certain. “It’s better he’s not.”
We all knew Avery’s type. He thrived on weaknesses, sniffed them out like rot. If he saw even a hint that James mattered to us, to me, he’d use that like a knife.
James… James was mine, even if I hadn’t said the words. Even if he didn’t fully realize it yet. And Avery didn’t get to touch what was mine.
Beau adjusted his jacket and cracked his neck. “Let’s knock.”
There was no doorbell. Just a steel slab that had probably seen a thousand fists. Beau pounded his against it with enough force to rattle the hinges.
We waited.
The silence stretched, punctuated by the distant sound of some machine humming inside, and a dog barking a few warehouses away.
Then came the screech. The door creaked open, rust grinding against rust.
A low-level enforcer peered out. A wiry guy with twitchy eyes and a scar across his upper lip that looked half-healed and badly set.
His nose wrinkled when he saw us.
His eyes landed on Callum first. Then Beau. Then me. And his whole body tensed like a squirrel realizing it had wandered into a den of wolves.
“Boss—” he started.
“Call him,” Callum said, voice calm but sharp as a blade.
The guy didn’t even argue. He bolted back into the shadows like a rat running for cover. I stepped inside last, resisting the urge to snarl.
The warehouse reeked. Someone had clearly tried to mask the rot with cheap air fresheners, those hanging tree-shaped ones you find in gas stations.
The scent was cloying, chemical-sweet, and it only made everything worse.
Stacks of crates lined one wall. A poker table sat abandoned in a corner, chips scattered like they’d been dropped mid-game. Half-eaten takeout containers sat on folding chairs.
This was no clean operation. It was a nest.
Avery descended from a rusted catwalk above the warehouse floor, boots clanking against the metal steps with deliberate slowness, like a showman soaking in applause that never came.
He moved like he owned the place, swagger in his shoulders and confidence radiating as he smoothed down his tailored black shirt and adjusted the gaudy gold watch swallowing his wrist.
That smug little smile of his made my fists itch.
