Lahat ng Kabanata ng Caged By His Love: Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

JETHRO’S POV“The shipment’s gone,” Brandon said, standing in my study the next morning with the particular grim set to his shoulders that told me he already knew I wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “Not gone as in destroyed. Gone as in moved before we ever had eyes on the warehouse.”“How is that possible? You said you had someone watching the location within hours of finding the flag.”“We did. But the shipment cleared customs two weeks before we found it, Jethro. It had two weeks to disappear into the city before we even knew to look.” He dropped a folder onto my desk, photographs spilling slightly out of the edge. “Empty crates. A padlock that looked untouched but wasn’t. Whoever moved it knew exactly how to make it look like nothing had happened at all.”I picked up one of the photographs — a warehouse interior, dust undisturbed on the floor except for a single set of tire tracks leading to a bay door. “Professional.”“Very. This isn’t some street crew Rodrigo hired off a

JETHRO’S POVLycan called at nine that evening, exactly as Melanie had promised he would. I put him on speaker, and she sat beside me on the study sofa, close enough that our shoulders touched, her hand finding mine before her father had even said hello.“Jethro.” His voice sounded older than it had any right to over a phone line. “Melanie said she told you about the debt.”“She told me there was one. Not what it was for.” I kept my voice level, though every instinct in me wanted to demand the answer immediately rather than let him circle toward it in his own time. “I need the details, Lycan. All of them, tonight.”There was a long pause on the line, long enough that I wondered if he’d hung up.“When I was twenty-four,” he said finally, “before Wright Industries existed as anything more than a name on a business plan, I was desperate for capital. My own father had cut me off years before — he thought the whole venture was foolishness, a young man’s fantasy. I went looking for investor

MELANIE'S POVI noticed the car on the drive back from Melissa's, though it took me almost a mile to admit to myself what I was seeing.Dark sedan, two cars back, matching every turn I made a beat too precisely to be coincidence. I gripped the wheel tighter and forced myself to breathe, to think, instead of letting panic take over the way it wanted to.I called Jethro without looking away from the road."Melanie?" His voice was instantly alert, some instinct in him always listening for the particular tightness that meant something was wrong."There's a car behind me. Dark sedan. It's been with me since I left Melissa's street.""Don't speed up. Don't do anything that tells them you've noticed." His voice had gone flat and calm in the way that always meant he was already moving, already giving orders to someone else even as he spoke to me. "What's your location?""Turning onto Fifth now.""Stay on Fifth. Don't take any shortcuts, don't turn onto a side street. I want you somewhere with

JETHRO'S POVThe breach came from inside, which was somehow worse than anything Diego had done from the outside.Brandon brought it to me himself, refusing to explain over the phone, showing up at the house with his laptop already open and his expression carefully blank in the way I'd learned meant he was bracing for my reaction."Show me," I said, once we were alone in the study.He turned the screen toward me. "Outgoing calls from one of our own numbers. Three calls in the last two weeks, all to the same unregistered number. I cross-referenced it against everything we have on Rodrigo's known associates.""And?""It matches a number we flagged months ago. Connected to Salvador's network."I felt something cold settle into my chest, the particular stillness that came right before real fury. "Whose phone."Brandon hesitated, which told me everything before he said the name."Elena. Night shift, gate security. Four years with us.""Six Months." I stood, needing to move, needing somewher

MELANIE'S POVThe box arrived on a Thursday, sitting innocuously on the front step like any ordinary delivery, except that none of us had ordered anything, and the return address listed a company that didn't exist.One of the new guards found it first during the morning sweep and immediately called it in rather than touching it, exactly the way Jethro had trained everyone to respond to anything unexpected. By the time I came downstairs, Jethro was already standing over it in the entryway, arms crossed, studying it like it might detonate simply from being looked at too long."What is it?""We don't know yet. Security's scanning it before anyone opens it." His jaw was tight. "It's addressed to you. By name."My stomach dropped. "To me specifically?""Melanie Blackstone," he confirmed. "Handwritten. No other information."We waited together in tense silence while one of Brandon's men ran the box through a portable scanner, checking for anything that might explain the particular dread alr