MasukSableThe message on Mateo’s burner changed the room without anybody moving.KING IS OUT. BURN THE ROUTES.Jarek stared at the laptop while his fingers stayed wrapped around mine. His grip was still weaker than normal, but the tension running through his hand was not. He asked how quickly Mateo could actually burn a network like that, and Nixx gave him the ugly answer: it depended on what routes meant. Phones, drivers, properties, freight accounts, shell companies. If Mateo started shutting everything down the second he knew we had Jarek, some of it might already be gone.
JarekNixx had barely finished saying they had not opened the file box when I asked why, and the fact that he glanced toward Marcus before answering irritated me more than it should have.“Don’t look at him. I asked you.”Nixx adjusted the laptop under his arm and came farther into the room. They had been inventorying everything before they started tearing into it, he explained. Benny was downstairs with the other burner and the paperwork, and Nixx had only come up because Marcus told him I was awake.“Good. Now I’m awake.”
MarcusThe monitor betrayed him before his face did.Jarek watched the open doorway after Sable disappeared, expression controlled enough that anyone else might have missed it. I caught the way his fingers curled into the blanket and the tiny shift in his breathing when footsteps passed in the hallway without stopping.The number on the monitor climbed from eighty-four to ninety-three, then crossed one hundred before I said his name.“Jarek.”“I’m fine.”
JarekI woke up to the sound of a machine beeping beside my head and immediately hated everything about it.My eyes opened before the rest of me caught up. Dark wood ceiling instead of concrete. Warm lamplight instead of a bare bulb. No chain dragging against my waist when I breathed. No cigarette smoke. No footsteps outside a locked door. Pain arrived a second later from nearly every direction at once, settling into my ribs, shoulder, wrists, and the steady pressure behind my eyes.I stayed still while my brain caught up, not because I was scared to move, but because the last two weeks had taught me that waking too fast usually ended with somebody deciding I was alert enough to drug again. The thought landed before I could stop it.Then a warm hand tightened around mine.“Jarek?”I turned my head too quickly and regretted it immediately, but Sable was there in the chair beside the bed with her legs tucked under her, hair a mess, eyes swollen from exhaustion, and one hand wrapped arou
MarcusTwo words were all it took to crack something open in me. For fourteen days, I had imagined finding Jarek a hundred ways, and none prepared me for him looking at me from that chair like I had only been gone ten minutes. I crossed the room before I realized I was moving.Sable shifted off his lap enough to give me space. I caught the back of Jarek’s neck, leaned down, and pressed my forehead against his. He was warm, breathing, and here, and everything I had held together for the club, for Sable, and for myself cracked at once.My hand shook against his neck until Jarek breathed out slowly and asked, “Miss me?”
SableThe door hit the wall hard enough to make both men inside turn. Jarek sat in the center of the room in a metal chair, one wrist cuffed to the armrest and a chain wrapped around his waist. His shirt was filthy and torn, one side of his face swollen badly enough to narrow his eye. Dried blood marked his mouth, collar, and the skin near his hairline. He looked thinner than he had fourteen days ago, exhausted enough that the restraints seemed to be doing part of the work of holding him upright.He was alive, and the second his eyes found mine every other detail in the room tried to disappear.“Kitty.”The word nearly took my knees out, but the man beside him reeked of cigarettes. Keys hung from his right pocket, and he had one hand on Jarek’s shoulder with a syringe in the other. A younger man stood on Jarek’s opposite side with a pistol already coming up, so I fired first. The younger man went backward into the wall. His shot hit the ceiling, showering dust across the room as the





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