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“Trixie, what…” Her words trail off when she sees my face, catching the fear, the determination, the wild look of someone who’s been driven too far. Her gaze lands on the phone, on the cracked screen still glowing with that message. Something sharpens in her eyes. She gets it. In a flash, she sees the danger.

“No.” Her voice is firm, no trace of the softness from earlier. “No, absolutely fucking not.”

I try to sidestep her, already set on the stairs, the truck, the road to Route 7 and the old mill, whatever nightmare waits there. But Tiana moves with me, blocking my way, her small frame somehow filling the space, holding me back.

“Move,” I manage, the word scraping out of my constricted throat. “Tiana, move.”

She reaches out and wrenches the phone from my grip.

The movement is sudden and fierce, her fingers clamping onto my wrist with surprising strength, prying the phone from my bandaged hand. The gauze snags on the cracked screen, pulling painfully at the raw skin beneath, but she doesn’t relent. She rips the phone away, backing up like she’s shielding something precious.

“Give it back.” My voice quivers, breaking, the sound of someone unraveling. “Tiana, give me the phone.”

“No.” She stands firm, her dark eyes blazing, jaw clenched in a way that makes her look eerily like Butcher. She wags a finger in my face, not gently or playfully, but with the sharp authority of someone delivering a final decision. “No. You’re not doing this. You’re not marching into whatever trap that bastard has laid because of a text.”

Panic surges, a wave growing since the screen lit up, now crashing through the careful walls I’ve built. My knees buckle, just a tremor, a moment of weakness, but enough that I have to grip the porch railing to stay upright.

“They have him,” I say, words torn from someplace deep. “They have Carter, Tiana. They’re going to kill him if I don’t⁠—”

“They don’t have Carter.” Her voice is steady, unwavering. The voice of a twenty-two-year-old who’s grown up around men who trade in threats and bluffs, knowing how to make someone believe the worst. “Trixie, listen. Carter’s at the clubhouse with Greyson and Matthew and every armed brother the Devil Souls can gather. There’s no way, no possible way, that some random text from an unknown number means they’ve got him. It’s a lie. A trap.”

The logic is a shock, a slap of cold sanity, and for a suspended moment, I see it, the manipulation, the cruelty of targeting the one thing that would make me abandon every precaution, every rational thought, every instinct. They don’t have Carter. They have my fear, using it to threaten the man I love.

But the moment passes, and the terror floods back in, filling the space, the logic briefly occupied.

“You don’t know that,” I say, and my voice is raw, stripped of everything but desperation. “You don’t know, Tiana. What if they do? What if they grabbed him at the clubhouse, or on the road, or⁠—”

“Then the clubhouse would know.” She hasn’t moved. Still standing between me and the stairs, still holding the phone behind her back like a shield. “Greyson would know. Matthew would know. Kane would know. There would be calls, alarms, something, not a text from a burner phone telling you to walk into an abandoned mill alone.”

My mother’s face is pale, her hands clasped in front of her. She’s heard enough to understand, and I can see the war playing out behind her eyes, the maternal instinct to protect her daughter battling against the cold, rational understanding that Tiana is right.

“Trixie,” my mother says, her voice careful, measured. “Tiana’s right. This is exactly what they want. They know they can’t get to you here, not with Kane’s perimeter, not with the security, so they’re trying to lure you out. To make you come to them.”

The words make sense. I know they make sense. The nurse in me, the woman who’s stood in trauma bays and watched predators manipulate victims with threats against loved ones, recognizes the pattern with cold, clinical clarity. This is textbook. This is what they do.

But Carter’s face is in my head. His hands on my jaw. His forehead pressed against mine. The sound he made in the alley, that broken, barely human sound when he realized I was still there.

“Give me the phone,” I whisper.

“No.” Tiana’s eyes are bright with something fierce and protective, the ferocity of a young woman who’s decided, at this moment, that she will physically stop me from making the worst mistake of my life. “Trixie, you are not being the hero. You are not walking into a trap because some asshole sent you a scary text. Carter would rather die than watch you hand yourself over to the people who tried to kill you.”

The words land with the force of a slap. Not because they’re cruel, but because they’re true, catastrophically true. I can see it, Carter’s face, if I walked into that mill, the expression that would cross his features when he realized I’d sacrificed myself for him. Not gratitude. Not relief. Horror. The particular horror of a man who’s been fighting to keep me alive only to watch me throw it away.

My legs give out.

Not dramatically, not a collapse, just a slow, graceless slide down the porch railing until I’m sitting on the wooden planks, my bandaged hands pressed against my thighs, my breathing coming in ragged, uneven bursts. The panic attack is still happening, I can feel it in my chest, the tightness, the inability to draw a full breath, but something has shifted. The edge of it has dulled, replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion that makes my entire body feel like it’s made of lead.

Tiana sinks down in front of me, her knees pressing into the wood, her face level with mine. She sets the phone on the porch between us, screen down, the message hidden but not forgotten. Her hands find mine, careful of the bandages, gentle despite the steel in her voice, and she holds them with a grip that’s both comforting and firm.

Carter

“Caldwell.” The name is a raw scrape of sound from my throat. I’m standing over the man at the head of the table, my shadow swallowing him whole, the knife still warm in my hand from the three men bleeding out on the floor behind me. Greyson’s on my six, Matthew covering the door, the rest of the room a graveyard of overturned chairs and shattered glass. “You just made the worst fucking mistake of your miserable life.”

Caldwell doesn’t look scared. That’s the thing that pisses me off the most. He should be scared. He should be pissing himself, begging, doing anything other than sitting in that chair with that smug, shit-eating grin stretched across his face like he’s already won.

“I have your woman,” he says again, slower this time, savoring the words like fine whiskey. “The little nurse. The one with the bandaged hands.”

Something detonates in my chest. Not rage—I’m past rage, past the hot, blinding fury that drove me through the front door. This is colder. Sharper. The cold clarity of a man who’s been told the one thing guaranteed to make him forget every plan, every strategy, every promise he made about keeping it clean.