5. The Broken Captive

Elena’s POV

Mark’s laptop still had his fingerprints on the screen.

I saw them the moment Gideon led me into Jax’s office and left me alone with it, smudges along the edges where my husband had carried it, a greasy thumbprint in one corner. It made my stomach turn. Even here, in this black windowless room, he was still touching things I had to live with.

I sat down in the leather chair. My feet didn’t reach the floor properly. I felt like a child who had been put in a stranger’s seat.

Midnight, I told myself. You have until midnight.

It took me nine tries to guess the password.

I tried his birthday. His mother’s name. The Porsche. Then, with a hollow feeling in my chest, I typed the date we were married, and the screen opened.

I stared at it. Out of everything he could have chosen to guard his secrets, he had chosen the day he promised to love me. Of course he had. It was the one date he would never think to defend, because he was sure I would never think to use it.

I almost laughed. Then I started to dig.

I was good at this once. I had to keep telling myself that. Before Mark, I could sit down with a pile of mess and find the thread that pulled it all straight. I opened his email and read until the words swam. Messages from his boss. Messages from men whose names I didn’t know, with subject lines like you in? and last chance. I opened his folders and found nothing but dead ends and old receipts. I opened his browser history, and my chest tightened.

Sports betting sites. Hundreds of visits. Dated at two, three, four in the morning, on nights I remembered lying awake beside an empty half of the bed, telling myself he was working late. I had made him breakfast on mornings after those nights. I had ironed his shirts.

I kept going.

By ten o’clock my eyes burned. By eleven I had opened every statement, every account, every scrap of paper Gideon had stacked beside the laptop, spreading them across the desk and then across the floor as the desk filled up. I looked for what Jax wanted. A second account. A hidden transfer. A number in a language I could read. Any place where Mark might have tucked something away.

There was nothing.

Every account was in his name. Every one was empty or overdrawn. The money hadn’t been hidden. It had been spent, thrown at the same lights and tables and promises over and over, for years, while I scrubbed his kitchen and swallowed my questions and thanked him for the groceries.

At eleven-forty, I found the last account, and I understood why I’d been so afraid to look.

It had my name on it. Elena Vance. The grocery card. The little thing he checked every night, with its weekly limit and its receipts on the fridge. The balance was thirty-eight dollars and seventeen cents.

That was all of it. That was everything my husband had ever left to me.

No secret fund. No offshore escape. No hidden door for the two of us to slip through when it all fell apart. If he’d had one, he would have used it for himself and left me behind without a second thought. He had never been hiding from the Ironhead Cartel. He had only been counting on me to be standing between him and them when they came.

The room blurred. I put my hands flat on the desk and tried to breathe, and the breath came out in a sound I had never made before, a thin, cracked, animal sound.

You failed. You failed the only test that matters.

I slid out of the chair. I didn’t decide to. My legs simply stopped holding me, and I ended up on the floor in the middle of the papers, knees pulled to my chest, shaking so hard the pages rattled under me. Five years of holding it in came up like water through cracked stone. I put my fist against my mouth, and then I couldn’t, and I cried the way I had never let myself cry in that house. Out loud. Ugly. Gasping.

I don’t know how long it lasted.

I only knew when the lock turned, because I heard it through the roaring in my ears.

I didn’t look up. I couldn’t. Footsteps crossed the floor and stopped. I could see the toes of his shoes at the edge of my vision, polished black, quiet.

“Midnight,” Jax said.

His voice was perfectly calm.

“There’s nothing.” My voice came out ragged. “I looked everywhere. I opened everything. He didn’t hide anything. He didn’t have anything to hide.” A sob cracked through the middle of the sentence. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I tried. I swear I tried—”

He crouched in front of me.

I flinched, and a wet breath hitched out of me. I waited for what came next. Anger. Contempt. A hand. But he only stayed there, balanced on the balls of his feet, looking at me, at the wreckage of paper around me, at the tracks of tears I couldn’t stop.

And I said it.

I don’t know where it came from. Maybe the part of me that had nothing left to protect. It left my mouth in a whisper, so small I wasn’t sure he’d hear.

“Why me?”

His eyes didn’t move.

“I never touched any of it. I never knew. I was just… I was just there. Why does it have to be me?”

A long pause. When he answered, there was no cruelty in it, and no comfort either. It was just the truth, set down in front of me like a stone.

“Because he put you on the table, Elena.” His voice was low and even. “Your husband had a house, a car, a watch, and one last thing he was willing to trade. You. He chose the order himself. Debt doesn’t care who borrowed it. It cares who’s still standing in the room.”

The words went through me like ice, because he was right, and I had known he was right since the moment Mark said my wife in our living room, and I hadn’t wanted to hear it said aloud.

His hand moved. I braced, but his fingers only closed beneath my jaw and lifted my face, tilting it up until I had nowhere to look but at him. His grip was firm, but it didn’t hurt. His thumb rested against my cheek, over the wet.

“Look at me.”

I looked.

“Mark left you to rot,” he said quietly. “He didn’t hide a single dollar for you. He didn’t leave a note, or a door, or a way out. You were never anything he planned to come back for.” His eyes held mine, dark and unflinching. “Your old life is dead, Elena. That house is gone. That marriage is gone. There is nothing left for you out there.”

Every word landed like a nail. I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t breathe.

“You belong to this compound now,” he said. “To me. Until every last cent is paid.”

He let go of my jaw. For a moment I felt the loss of his hand, absurdly, and hated myself for it. He rose, slowly, to his full height, and walked to the door.

I watched him turn the lock.

The click was small and final. He pocketed the key. The room seemed to shrink around me, the black walls closing in, the lamp’s glow turning every shadow into a threat. I scrambled up onto my knees, papers sliding off my lap, my heart hammering against my ribs.

He crossed back to me with unhurried steps. He lowered himself until we were eye to eye again, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath and see the faint scar along his jaw. Close enough that there was no air between us at all.

His voice dropped into something dark and absolute.

“And starting tonight, we’re going to figure out exactly how you’re going to pay me back.”

I stopped breathing.