MasukEli’s POV The air in the grand foyer is thick enough to choke on. David Reid stands like a monolith of cold fury, as his announcement vibrates through the floorboards. To anyone else, it is a call to arms. To Eli, it is the sound of a trap door creaking open beneath his feet. He feels the weight of every pair of eyes in the room, but none are as heavy as Zeke’s who is looking at him with a predatory stillness that suggests he has already reached a verdict and is only waiting for the evidence to catch up. Eli keeps his face an impassive mask as he turns to look at Marcus. “Do we have additional external coverage on the north perimeter? Because if tonight was a coordinated approach, the north side has the least camera coverage and they’ll know that.” It is a reasonable professional question. Marcus answers it. The corridor’s attention shifts, briefly, to the security logistics, and Eli uses those twelve seconds to get his breathing fully level and his expression fully settled and h
I am standing in the corridor outside the east wing with my pulse still going at a speed that has nothing to do with the current stillness of the house and everything to do with the last several hours of my life. The cleaners are already moving through the dining room in their white coveralls, scrubbing the spray of red from the baseboards and picking shards of expensive crystal out of the rugs. It is a silent, efficient operation that feels far too practiced for comfort. My skin is crawling with the leftover hum of adrenaline, making my fingers twitch every time a door clicks or a heavy footstep falls in the hallway. My family is accounted for. That is the thing I have been using as an anchor for the last forty minutes, returning to it every time my brain tries to pull me somewhere worse. Lucas is with my mother. Tyler is shaken but unhurt. My father is somewhere in the lower levels doing something I have been deliberately not asking about with the man who was caught. Marcus is o
The windows explode inward with a sound I will never unhear – a concussive roar that eats every other noise in the room. I’m on the floor before I’ve made the decision to move, some buried instinct that Eli has been drilling into me for weeks taking over before my conscious brain can catch up. “Get to the wall!” Eli’s voice comes from somewhere to my right. “Away from the windows, everyone move!” I am pressed against the cold hardwood with my hands over my head, feeling the vibration of every shot in my teeth. Beside me, Chloe is a silent, shaking heap, and Tyler is scrambling toward the underside of the table. I look up, squinting through the haze of plaster dust, and for the first time in my eighteen years, the curtain of my father’s carefully constructed world is ripped wide open. He reaches into the hidden holster beneath the table and pulls out a sleek, matte-black handgun. He stands, his face a mask of cold, lethal efficiency, and returns fire toward the shattered windows.
My bedroom at six in the morning has one purpose, which is to be dark and quiet and entirely undisturbed, and it is performing that purpose beautifully when someone knocks on my door with the energy of a person who has never once in their life needed more than four hours of sleep and considers this a personality trait. I groan, burying my face deeper into the silk pillowcase, trying to reclaim the hazy vision of a warehouse and the feeling of a fierce hungry kiss. “Five more minutes, Holt,” I mumble, my voice thick with exhaustion. “If the house is not currently sliding into the ocean, leave me alone.” The door opens anyway. “Training,” Eli says. “It’s six in the morning,” I say, into my pillow. “Six twelve. We’re already behind.” I lift the corner of the pillow and look at him with one eye. He is standing in my doorway in training clothes looking unreasonably awake. “This is a violation of at least three human rights.” “Get dressed,” he says, tossing a shirt at me. “If you
Elias’s POV Elias stands in the back of a high-end electronics boutique three miles from the Reid estate, waiting for a custom-ordered encryption module for the house’s primary server. A man in a nondescript grey hoodie approaches the counter, setting down a faulty tablet. He slides a small piece of paper toward Elias under the guise of reaching for a brochure. Elias waits until the man leaves, then palms the note while the clerk is in the back room and reads the instructions: 《Meeting at The Yard. Midnight tonight》 The yard in Carver’s network refers to a specific loading area behind a defunct textile warehouse in the lower east quarter, a place Eli has been to twice before, both times in daylight, both times by choice. He returns to the Reid mansion and proceeds with his daily routine until the house is fully asleep. Later that night, he arrives at eleven fifty-eight and the area is dark except for the orange bleed of a streetlight at the far end. He takes three steps into it
Breakfast the next morning is a performance I was not given a script for. Eli sitting at his usual end of the table, eating his usual breakfast, and responding to the things said to him with the pleasant, contained efficiency of a man doing his job and nothing else. He doesn’t look at me any differently than he looks at the orange juice. When I come in and say good morning to the table, his eyes move to me for exactly the time it takes to register my presence and then move on. I sit down and pour my coffee and tell myself I am not bothered by this, then I proceed to spend the next twelve minutes being very bothered by it. “You’re quiet this morning,” my mother observes, to me. “Migraine’s still lingering,” I say, which is the story I went to bed on and am apparently still living in. Eli says nothing, just keeps buttering his toast. Lucas is talking about something, Tyler is eating quantities of food that should concern someone medically, and my father comes downstairs and moves
TW: This is a very intense chapter, both emotionally and physically. Readers discretion is strongly advised. ~ Pain woke me before sound did. It arrived deeply, curling through my abdomen with a certainty that left no room for denial. I inhaled slowly, counting in my head the way the midwife
“You’re pregnant.” The word echoed loudly in my head as I tried to pinch myself awake. It took a while for my brain to fully process what the words actually meant. Finally, it did. “That’s not possible,” I said quietly. She folded he
Vincent’s chair stays pushed back an inch from the table, the faint scrape still in my mind even as the elevator doors close behind me the next morning. His face when David made that condition stays with me too: the quick flash of possession in his eyes, the way his fingers tightened around mine
Tiny hands wrap around my legs and pull me out of the past so violently that I gasp. “Mama.” I look down blinking, my heart still somewhere years ago, still standing in my living room with divorce papers shaking in my hands. My daughter presses her cheek







