I don’t wait. I call Finn and relay the same information in fewer words. Finn doesn’t ask questions. He says, “Pulling building security footage now. I’ll have it in twenty.”
I pace. The penthouse feels cavernous and wrong. Her absence is a vacuum that sucks the life from me.
My brothers arrive within thirty minutes. Cillian comes through the elevator first, coat still on, Finn a step behind him. Declan strides in next, having driven from the brownstone in what must have been record time. Lorcan is last, breathless from taking the stairs two at a time.
I play the video.
Four men watch my wife’s tear-streaked face tell me she’s poison. Four men listen to her beg me not to follow.
Cillian rubs his jaw, his eyes narrowing. “Buford threatened her. Or coached her.”
“He didn’t have to coach her. He built the script nineteen years ago. All he had to do was activate it.”
Declan hasn’t spoken. His jaw is granite, his scarred knuckles white where they grip the back of a chair. When he does speak, it’s a single word, “How?”
Finn answers, phone pressed to his ear, a tablet balanced on the kitchen counter scrolling footage. “Service entrance. Camera three shows a blind spot in the loading dock corridor—ninety-second gap between guard rotations. Two individuals entered in maintenance uniforms at fourteen-twelve. Exited at fourteen-forty-one.” He looks up. “Someone must have snuck in, spewed their religious mumbo-jumbo and swayed her. Twenty-nine minutes is all it took.”
“Someone?” Lorcan scoffs. “My money’s on Buford himself.”
Buford was in my home with my wife for twenty-nine minutes, and my security didn’t flag it?
I put my fist through the wall.
The drywall craters. Plaster dust showers the hardwood. Pain splinters across my knuckles, but I don’t register anything except the fury pouring through me.
“We go now,” I say. “The Enclave.”
We take two vehicles and drive fast. Declan rides with me, his silence a wall of cold, controlled violence. Cillian and Lorcan follow in the second car with Finn.
The dirt road hasn’t changed. The potholes haven’t changed. The fence posts haven’t changed.
But the gate is open. Not open the way it was on my quarterly visits, with a Flock member letting me in. Wide open and unmanned.
I kill the engine and step out.
No smoke rises from the cookhouse chimney. No figures cross the yard between buildings. The animal pens are empty.The compound is a skeleton—structures are standing, but life has evacuated.
We fan out. Cillian and Finn take the administrative building. Declan clears the dormitories. Lorcan checks the outbuildings, the barns, the cookhouse.
Every structure is stripped. Furniture remains—too heavy to move quickly—but ledgers, personal effects, tools, food stores, and livestock are gone. Buford didn’t abandon the Enclave. He relocated it. A military-grade withdrawal, planned and executed with the cold precision of a man who anticipated he might need to disappear.
“He moved nearly two hundred people.” My voice is flat. “That takes vehicles, coordination, and a destination. He didn’t improvise this. He had a contingency.”
Cillian steps beside me. “We’ll find her. Buford can run, but he can’t hide two hundred people forever. Not from us.”
“Viper’s contacts are already working it,” Lorcan adds, his voice stripped of its usual levity. “The Iron Guardians have tracked relocated operations before. If Buford bought or leased new land, there’s a paper trail.”
“My contacts are pulling satellite imagery now,” Finn adds. “And checking every rural property sale and lease within a two-hundred-mile radius in the past six months. We’ll cross-reference with known associates and shell companies.”
I hear them. I absorb the tactical details. I know my brothers will deploy every resource, every connection, every advantage this family possesses.
But I’m staring at the whipping post. This is where I married her. This is where I lifted her ruined dress from the ground, put myself between her body and unwarranted punishment, and made a decision I will never regret no matter how much it costs me.
My brothers are gathered behind me. No one speaks. Cillian moves beside me, surveying the abandoned compound with the quiet attention of a general reading a battlefield.
“He planned this,” I say.
“The trafficking investigation spooked him,” Cillian says. “He was already preparing to relocate. Taking Prudence back gave him leverage against us.”
