Chapter 30 - The War Room

The old penthouse at the edge of the docks was nothing like Jaxon’s usual haunts. It had no polished marble floors or expensive leather furnishings. It smelled faintly of rust and salt, the walls scarred from a time when it had served as a discreet safehouse for fleeing clients and dying secrets. But now, it would become something else, something colder. Strategic. A war room.

Raven stood in the middle of the living room, which had been gutted to bare essentials: a long table made of steel and glass, power cords snaking along the floor, screens already flickering with surveillance feeds, maps, and names. Her hands trembled as she placed her encrypted flash drive beside a stack of untraceable burner phones.

"It doesn’t look like much," she said.

Jaxon stepped in behind her, silent in his tailored black shirt and dark jeans. The look on his face was no longer that of a possessive lover or a jealous king, it was that of a tactician. Cold. Calculating. Dangerous.

"It doesn’t need to look like much," he replied. "It only needs to work."

Outside, thunder rolled across the harbor. A storm was brewing in the sky, matching the one between them. Since Raven handed him the complete copy of the stolen files, their intimacy had taken a back seat to survival. Trust was fragile. Lust was sharpened into tension. They hadn’t touched in two nights.

He passed her a folder. Inside were photos, account numbers, movement schedules, names. Zane’s known associates. Three had already gone dark.

"He’s moving faster than I expected," Jaxon said, pouring two glasses of whisky but only offering her one. "He must know we’re coming."

Raven took the glass but didn’t drink. She stared at the floor plan pinned to the wall.

"He has other properties," she said. "Unmarked. Shell corporations. I found one in Romania through the shipping manifests. Girls disappear in through port 14, no customs recorded. They’re ghosts."

Jaxon’s hand tightened on the glass. "You’ve been busy."

She turned to him, jaw set. "I’m not your pawn. I’m your partner. If this is going to work, I need full access."

Jaxon stared at her, unreadable. Then, slowly, he pulled out his phone and tossed it onto the table. "You want full access? There’s a hidden server behind the shell company named Kaelen Holdings. Password is Lucerna. It leads to my private network. You’ll find the names of everyone I’ve paid off to keep Club Eden clean. You’ll also find the ones I couldn’t stop."

Raven blinked, then moved to the console. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

But the tension didn’t lift. The weight of what they were building, this conspiracy, this betrayal of blood, settled like smoke in her lungs.

"What happens when we win?" she asked. "If we win."

Jaxon moved closer, his voice low. "Then we dismantle everything Zane touched from the inside and then we disappear."

She looked up sharply. "Disappear?"

His eyes flicked over her. "You don’t think there’s a future for us after this, do you? Not in the world we’ve lived in. We either kill Zane and vanish... or he kills us."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Only the storm outside filled the silence.

Then she said, "You haven’t asked why I’m really doing this."

"I don’t need to," he murmured. "You told me the truth when you gave me those files. That’s enough."

But Raven wasn’t sure it was, because somewhere deep inside, the part of her that still bled for her brother, the overdose, the unmarked grave, the silence in her chest where his voice used to live, was screaming that this wasn’t enough. That taking Zane down wouldn’t bring Gabriel back. That justice would always be laced with guilt.

Still, she nodded. She sat at the war table and opened her laptop. "Then let’s build the plan."

The silence in the safehouse was a different kind of loud. Raven stared at the whiteboard they'd filled, Zane's face circled in red, threads branching out into supply chains, laundering fronts, and drop sites. The place had become their war room, but it still felt like a cage.

Jaxon stood across the room, sleeves rolled to his elbows, tie discarded on the table. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes, busy scanning a dossier from one of his men, but the tension in his shoulders was building like a thunderstorm.

“Say it,” Raven muttered. “You’re grinding your molars so loud I can hear it from here.”

He didn’t look up. “You moved the ledger.”

“It was in the way of the corkboard,” she snapped. “I didn’t alter anything.”

“I know,” he said too calmly. “You don’t lie with your hands.”

The sentence struck her more than it should have. She wanted to snap back, to tell him he didn’t get to look at her like that anymore, like he knew her skin better than she did, but he did and that was the problem.

“You haven’t told me what’s in the dossier,” she said instead, arms crossed.

He finally looked up. “Zane’s trying to move the girls from the backup location. The place you tracked in Belgravia, the warehouse with the charity ties. He’s got a crew rerouting shipments by Sunday.”

“That’s two days.”

“We hit it before then,” he said. “Quietly. No fireworks.”

She stepped closer, fingers brushing the corner of the map. “We?”

His eyes darkened. “Don’t start. You wanted to see this through, this is the cost.”

“And what if I get caught?”

He stepped into her space, taking her wrist gently but firmly. “You won’t.”

“I’m not your soldier,” she whispered. “I’m not one of your men.”

“No,” he murmured, brushing his thumb over her pulse point. “You’re worse. You’re the part of me I can’t control.”

She hated that it made her breath hitch. Hated more that it wasn’t fear, that she needed him.

He leaned in, pressing his forehead to hers. “You’ve been disappearing again,” he murmured.

“I told you...”

“No, you haven’t. Not everything.” His voice stayed low, deadly calm. “You still talk to your contact at the paper.”

Raven’s eyes widened.

“I checked the burner you thought I didn’t know about. I haven’t read the files, yet, but you kept a copy of the exposé.”

She swallowed hard. “It’s for after. In case you...”

“Die?” His smile was brittle. “Or betray you?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she whispered. “Everything’s twisted.”

His fingers tightened on her wrist just enough to anchor her. “Then we untwist it.”

She searched his face. “Why haven’t you read it?”

“Because I want you to show it to me willingly,” he said. “Because I need to believe we still have a line we won’t cross.”

The words caught something inside her chest. She didn’t deserve him, his patience, his restraint, but he didn’t deserve her secrets either.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “When it’s time.”

He nodded. “Soon.”

The air between them thickened. She could feel the tension crackling, strategy had bled into longing, control into something more raw than raw itself.

“Strip,” he said.

Her breath caught. “Jaxon…”

“No roles tonight,” he said. “No commands, no rituals. I just need to touch you.”

She hesitated. He didn’t. He walked backward to the bedroom, slow and deliberate, waiting for her to follow. She did, heart pounding.

Inside, he sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her between his legs. His hands slid under her shirt, up her back, grounding her.

“We might not win this,” he said against her skin. “But I want the memory of you to outlast the war.”

She kissed him hard, teeth and tongue, nails raking his back. The clothes disappeared without ceremony, heat rising fast.

He didn’t bind her or blindfold her, but his hands were as firm as ever, his mouth as punishing. He pushed her into the mattress like he was staking a claim, this wasn’t about ownership, but survival.

She cried out as he drove into her, not just with his body but with everything unsaid. Her fingers tangled in his hair, her legs locked around his hips. It wasn’t about pleasure, though it poured through her like lightning. It was about staying tethered. About not drowning.

When they finally collapsed, sweat-slick and breathless, he didn’t roll away. He held her.

“Say it,” she whispered.

He brushed her hair from her face. “You’re mine.”

Her eyes stung. “Even if we lose everything?”

His voice was steel. “Especially then.”