The Shadow in the Ranks

POV: Jarrah

My knuckles throbbed, a dull, heavy ache that radiated straight up my forearm, but I didn’t stop. The skin over my right hand was split and bleeding, the warm slickness of it coating my fingers, but the physical pain felt miles away. The only thing I registered was the wet, ragged breathing of the man tied to the heavy metal chair in front of me.

The basement smelled of rust, old water, and the metallic tang of fresh blood.

The sniper’s forged IDs called him Cole. Three hours ago, this piece of garbage had been lying prone on a shipping crate at the docks, his finger resting on the trigger of a silenced .308 rifle. If the glint of the setting sun hadn’t caught his scope for a fraction of a second, if I hadn’t thrown my entire body weight into Malia to drag her down behind a rusted forklift, I wouldn’t be standing in this damp basement demanding answers. I would be digging a grave.

The very thought of it of Malia’s lifeless body on that concrete sent a fresh, blinding wave of rage through my chest. I grabbed Cole by the collar of his blood-soaked shirt and hauled him forward. The heavy nylon ropes groaned against the chair.

"I'm going to ask you one last time," I said, my voice dropping to a low, deadly calm that echoed off the concrete walls. "How did Alastair know we would be at Pier 47?"

Cole coughed, spitting a glob of blood onto the floor. Despite his swollen eye and the fact that he was completely at my mercy, a smug, sickening grin stretched across his face. "You think you’re untouchable, Jarrah. You think you're the king of this city. But your walls are made of paper."

I drew my combat knife from my thigh sheath and pressed the flat of the cold steel against his jawline. "Who gave you the timing?"

Cole didn't flinch. He just stared up at me with the manic devotion of a man who knew he was already dead. "Alastair told me you’d be a tough bastard to crack. He also told me to pass along a message when you finally caught me." He leaned forward, ignoring the blade pressing into his skin. "He said the Blackwood Protocol was a clever backup plan... but he prefers the original."

The floor seemed to drop out from beneath my boots.

I froze, the air freezing in my lungs. I lowered the knife, taking a slow step back as a cold, suffocating dread washed over me.

Blackwood Protocol.

It wasn't just a random phrase. It wasn't a location. It was a verbal contingency plan I had laid out at three in the morning, standing in the soundproof war room upstairs. There were no cell phones allowed in that room. No listening devices. It was just me and the three men I trusted more than my own life.

Silas, who had taken a bullet in the shoulder for me during the Denver cartel shootout. Vance, who I had pulled from the violent gutters of the South Side when we were teenagers, sharing scraps of food to survive. And Gideon, my late father's oldest, most loyal confidant.

Those three men were my blood. My brothers.

And one of them was a rat.

I turned my back on Cole, my mind racing through a hundred different memories, searching for a slipped word, a hesitation, a misplaced glance. Nothing. The betrayal felt like a jagged piece of glass twisting directly in my gut. Someone in my inner circle was feeding Alastair our every move, and they had just handed him Malia on a silver platter.

I walked out of the basement without another word, leaving Cole to the guards. I stopped at the industrial sink in the corridor and scrubbed the blood off my hands. The harsh soap burned the open cuts on my knuckles, but it was nothing compared to the white-hot paranoia setting in.

As I walked down the main hallway of the compound, the shadows felt different. Every man I passed my soldiers, my guards I looked at them with new eyes. Who else was bought? Who else was listening?

I had to get to Malia. Right now.

I didn't bother knocking when I reached her guest room. I shoved the door open and locked it behind me.

Malia was pacing at the foot of the bed, wearing my oversized gray sweater. She looked small, but the defiant fire in her dark eyes was burning as bright as ever. She hadn't slept. She was still shaken from the gunfire at the docks, but she refused to show it. That was Malia. Stubborn to a fault, fiercely independent, and the only person in the world who made my dead heart beat.

"Pack whatever you need," I said, my voice rougher than I intended. "You're moving."

She stopped pacing, crossing her arms over her chest. "Excuse me? I'm not going anywhere, Jarrah. You can't just barge in here and bark orders at me after leaving me locked in the dark for three hours. What happened in the basement?"

"I don't have the patience for an argument today, Malia. Grab your bag."

She stood her ground, her chin lifting. "I am not a piece of luggage you can just drag around when you feel like it. Tell me what is going on."

My control snapped. I crossed the room in three long strides, backing her up until her shoulders hit the wall. I didn't want to scare her, but the sheer desperation of keeping her alive overrode everything else. I planted my hands flat against the drywall on either side of her head, completely caging her in.

She gasped, her eyes going wide as she stared up at me.

We were inches apart. The proximity hit me like a physical blow. I could smell her a dizzying mix of sweet vanilla, the faint, acrid scent of gunpowder from the docks, and the warm, intoxicating heat of her skin. It took every ounce of my shattered willpower not to bury my face in the crook of her neck, to just hold her and prove to myself that she was still breathing.

"Someone in my inner circle is working for Alastair," I whispered, the confession tearing out of my throat.

Her defiance instantly melted into pure shock. Her lips parted. "What?"

"The sniper knew things only three of my closest men know. Someone is feeding him our every move." I leaned down, lowering my head until my forehead rested heavily against hers. I closed my eyes, feeling the faint trembling of her body against mine. "I can't trust the guards outside your door. I can't trust the men patrolling this hallway. I can only trust myself. So you are moving into my room, and you are not leaving my sight. Do you understand me?"

The tension between us shifted, the argument evaporating into something thick, heavy, and desperately intimate. Malia slowly lifted her hands, her small, warm fingers wrapping gently around my bruised wrists. Her touch was a jolt of electricity straight to my chest.

"Okay," she breathed softly, her thumb brushing over a cut on my skin. "Okay, Jarrah. Let's go."

I didn't let go of her hand as I guided her down the east corridor toward my private wing. No one came down this hallway without my explicit permission.

We reached the heavy steel door of my suite. I pressed my thumb to the biometric scanner. It chimed green. I leaned into the retinal scanner. A second later, the heavy deadbolts slid back with a series of deep, metallic thuds.

I pushed the door open and pulled her inside.

My suite was a fortress disguised as a luxury bedroom. Soundproof walls, reinforced steel plating in the doors, and bulletproof glass on the single window. It smelled of cedar and my cologne. It was the only place in the city I ever truly let my guard down.

The door swung shut behind us. The magnetic locks engaged automatically with a heavy, finalized clack. The keypad on the wall glowed a steady green, then clicked to a solid red. Lockdown mode. No one could get in. No one could get out without my biometrics.

For the first time in three hours, the iron grip around my lungs loosened. We were finally safe.

Malia dropped her small duffel bag onto the hardwood floor. She looked around the dimly lit room, rubbing her arms. The massive king-sized bed sat in the center of the space, a glaring reminder that we were entirely alone, completely isolated from the rest of the world.

"You look exhausted," she said softly, taking a hesitant step toward me. The raw tenderness in her eyes made my chest ache.

"I'll sleep when Alastair is dead," I replied, rolling my shoulders to ease the tension.

She offered a sad, understanding smile, then reached into the deep pocket of the gray sweater. "I forgot to give this to you earlier. When the shooting started at the docks, Vance shoved me behind the shipping containers. He pressed this into my hand and told me to keep it completely hidden until we got back here."

She held out her hand. Resting in the center of her pale palm was a cheap, standard burner phone. Black plastic. Unremarkable.

I stared at it, a cold prickle of dread washing over the back of my neck. "Vance gave you a burner?"

"He said it was a clean line. Just in case we got separated and the main comms were jammed."

I slowly took the phone from her hand. It felt impossibly heavy. It felt wrong. Vance didn't handle communications. And Vance knew I had a strict, unforgiving protocol against bringing unvetted electronics into the main compound, let alone my private quarters.

"Jarrah?" Malia whispered, her voice tight with sudden worry as she saw the color drain from my face. "What is it?"

Before I could answer, the cheap plastic phone violently vibrated in my palm.

The screen lit up, casting a harsh, pale glow against the dim lighting of my bedroom. A single text message bypassed the lock screen, flashing across the display. I stared at the words, the blood in my veins turning to absolute ice.

Sender: Unknown. Message: Is she in your room now, Jarrah? Tell her I said hello.

My heart stopped beating.

And then, directly behind me, the heavy steel door of my impenetrable, biometrically sealed suite... slowly clicked open.