LOGINSableBy the second night without Jarek, Marcus and I had reached the point where exhaustion should have knocked us out and somehow couldn’t. We had spent the day downstairs while Nixx and Benny tore Mateo’s video apart and everyone else chased properties, freight lines, and anything that might tell us where Jarek was. Hannah finally ordered us upstairs because neither of us was useful if we collapsed.The bedroom was worse than the clubhouse. Jarek’s side of the bed was still a mess from the last night he had slept there, and every time I looked at it, I saw the video instead. Jarek chained to that chair. Blood at his mouth. Mateo’s hand on him. Jarek looking into the camera and telling me to look at him.Marcus closed the door and leaned against it. “We should sleep.”“Can you?”“No.”“Me neither.”He crossed the room and stopped in front of me. “Baby Doll.”“I know he’s alive. I just can’t shut my fucking head off.”Marcus crouched between my knees and rested his hands on my thighs
SableBy the time we had Mateo Serrano’s face pinned to the wall beside a map of every property Nixx and Benny could connect to him, I had stared at him long enough to hate the shape of his fucking mouth.It was ridiculous, and I knew it. His mouth had not taken Jarek. His money and his people had. Still, every time I looked at the photograph, I heard that calm voice telling me I had walked away from the freight yard with the person I loved while he had not.I was still standing in front of the map when Benny’s laptop chimed. He glanced down, then went completely still. Nixx noticed before anyone else and moved beside him without saying a word.“What?” I asked.Neither of them answered immediately, which made something cold curl beneath my ribs. I crossed the room. “Benny.”He looked at Nixx before turning the screen slightly away from the rest of us. “Anonymous email.
MarcusThe second the call ended, the clubhouse got louder.Not chaotic. Nobody had enough energy left for chaos. But every conversation started at once, keyboards clicked faster, chairs scraped across the floor, and Nixx swore under his breath while Benny pulled the call data apart from another screen.Sable stood beside me with both hands braced against the bar.She had stopped shaking.I almost preferred when she was.“Say it again,” Nixx said without looking up.
JarekThe older man came back before I had managed to decide whether the light through the window was getting brighter or dimmer.That annoyed me more than it should have. I still had no sense of time beyond daylight, no way to tell how long I had been sitting there or how much of whatever they had pumped into me was still circulating through my system. My head was clearer than when I woke, but my limbs still felt too heavy, and every deep breath pulled at my ribs.The lock turned, and I lifted my head.He entered alone this time. No water. No guard hovering near the door. No chair dragged into place so he could sit comfortably and pretend this was a conversation between equals. He stopped several feet in front of me and studied my face.“You look better.”“You look disappointing.”His mouth barely moved. “Still trying to be funny.”“I’m chained to a chair. I have to entertain myself somehow.”He glanced at my wrists. The skin beneath the metal had started to redden where I had been t
SableBy morning, the clubhouse no longer looked like a clubhouse. It looked like a command center that happened to have a bar.Maps covered two tables while Nixx and Benny worked across three laptops, camera feeds and traffic records filling the screens. Stone was going through every business along Ortega that might have caught a vehicle leaving the area, and Bryce had a legal pad full of names and phone numbers. Marcus had been moving between all of them for hours, assigning routes, checking updates, and making sure nobody doubled back over ground somebody else had already covered. Nobody had gone home, and neither had I.I had changed out of the clothes I wore when we found Jarek’s bike, but his grocery bag still sat on the counter near me. I didn’t know why I brought it back. The sherbet had melted hours ago, the ice cream sandwiches were useless, and the chips were probably the only thing in the bag that hadn’t been ruined. I still couldn’t make myself throw any of it away.“Head
JarekDaylight was the first thing I understood when I opened my eyes.Pale gray light leaked through a narrow window high on the wall across from me, too weak to tell me whether it was early morning or late afternoon. The last thing I remembered clearly was Ortega after dark, men dragging me into the back of a van while enough drugs to knock down a fucking horse finally shut my body off. Now the sun was up, but whether I had been unconscious six hours, twelve, or longer was anybody’s guess.I tried to lift my head and immediately regretted it. Pain rolled through my skull, followed by nausea strong enough that I closed my eyes until the room stopped shifting. My ribs hurt when I breathed too deeply, my right shoulder throbbed, and my left thigh burned where one of those assholes had shoved a syringe into me after the darts hadn’t worked fast enough. There was still something in my system too, enough that my arms felt heavy and my bo







