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4
ELIAS
The dock’s wooden planks groaned under my boots as I stood rooted, fists clenched, watching Vivi’s kayak vanish into the black shimmer of Charleston Harbor. Her taunt—you better keep up—hung in the humid air, sharp and reckless, slicing into me like a switchblade. My pulse thundered, not from exertion but from something darker, something that clawed at the edges of my control. She was fire, that redheaded hellion, and I was a damn fool for standing so close to the blaze.
Laughter shattered the moment, low and mocking, from my brothers behind me. Marcus, always the loudest, leaned against the boathouse railing, his beer bottle dangling from his fingers. His dark eyes glinted with that smug amusement that made me want to knock his teeth out just to shut him up.
“Who’s the mermaid, Elias?” he called, his Charleston drawl thick with salt. “Got yourself a new project, or is she just another glitch?”
I didn’t turn, didn’t give him the satisfaction. My jaw tightened, and I forced my fists to unclench, shoving them intomy jeans’ pockets. “None of your business,” I said, voice low, clipped. The demon inside me snarled, not at Marcus but at the thought of Vivi reduced to their bullshit banter.
“Oh, come on,” Marcus pressed, stepping closer. “Red hair, smart mouth, paddling out in the harbor like she’s auditioning for a fucking action movie? Who’s the hotty in your totty? Spill, brother.”
The others joined in, their voices a chorus of razzing I had no patience for. Dominion Hall’s brotherhood, once my fortress, felt like a cage tonight, their settled lives pressing in like a vice. Almost every one of them had found their woman, their anchor, and now they looked at me like I was next in line for domestication. Fuck that.
“She’s nobody,” I snapped, turning just enough to meet Marcus’s gaze. “Drop it.”
He grinned, undeterred, because Marcus was a bulldog when he smelled weakness. “Nobody, huh? Didn’t look like nobody when you were about to dive in after her. What’s her name? Bet it’s something spicy, like her.”
“Vivienne,” I said before I could stop myself, the name slipping out like a curse. I regretted it instantly. Marcus’s grin widened, and the others exchanged glances, the kind that promised weeks of relentless shit-giving.
“Vivienne,” Marcus repeated, rolling the word like a cigar. “Sounds like trouble. You always did have a thing for the wild ones.”
I turned away, my boots thudding against the dock as I headed for the path back to Dominion Hall. “You don’t know shit,” I muttered, but the words lacked heat. He wasn’t wrong, and that was the problem. Vivienne Laveau was trouble, the kind that didn’t just burn—it consumed. And I was already too close to the flames.
The laughter faded behind me, swallowed by the hum of cicadas and the distant lap of waves. Dominion Hall loomed nearby, its pale stone glowing under the moonlight, all sharp angles and our mountains of money.
Once, this place had been my sanctuary, a fortress where I could lose myself in code and control, where the world made sense. Now it felt stifling, crowded with my brothers’ growing families, their women, their futures. The new compound on Isle of Palms couldn’t be finished soon enough. I needed space, distance, a place to breathe without their eyes waiting for me to fall like they had.
I climbed the stairs to my wing, my footsteps echoing in the cavernous halls. My suite was at the far end, a minimalist cave of glass and steel, all clean lines and cold surfaces. My computers hummed softly, screens glowing with the results of my spiders’ work. I’d almost forgotten about them, distracted by Vivi’s reckless stunt in the harbor. That pissed me off more than anything—how easily she’d derailed me, how she’d made me forget the hunt.
I dropped into my chair, the leather creaking under my weight, and pulled up the data. My spiders had done their job, burrowing through the hackers’ system, mapping their digital footprints. The results blinked on the screen, precise and undeniable. Not far. Just inland, a half hour’s drive. A small operation, sloppy but ambitious, holed up in a shithole apartment in North Charleston, if the IP addresses were accurate. And they were. I didn’t make mistakes.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, itching to dig deeper, to tear their system apart. I could send the data to the feds, let them handle it. It was the smart move, the clean move. I’d done it before—dropped a file in the right inbox, watched from a distance as the arrests rolled in.
But the thought felt hollow tonight, unsatisfying. My blood ran hot, my pulse a steady drum in my ears. I didn’t want clean. I wanted to feel it—their panic, their fear—when they realized they’d fucked with the wrong man.
No, not my world.Herworld. Vivienne. Vivi. The thought of her name in their database, her address in their hands, made my vision tunnel. She was out there right now, paddling through shark-infested waters, laughing like the danger was a game.
Reckless. Fucking reckless.
I believed in code, in systems, in puzzles that fit together with perfect precision. Risk was fine—calculated, measured, controlled. But her? She leapt without looking, spun through life like she was daring the universe to break her. It was stupid. Dangerous. And it made me want to pin her down, shake her, make her see how close she was to the edge.
I leaned back, scrubbing a hand over my face. My cologne lingered on my skin, woodsy and sharp, but it couldn’t mask the memory of her scent—sweat and jasmine, raw and alive. It clung to me, a ghost I couldn’t shake. I should’ve gone to bed, let the data sit until morning, wiped her from my mind. Should’ve done a lot of things. But the demon inside me was awake, pacing its cage, and it wasn’t interested in should over should not.
I wanted my hands on them. The hackers. I wanted to look them in the eyes, see the moment they realized they’d crossed a line they couldn’t uncross. Not because they’d breached the ballet company’s network—that was just a job. Because they’d reached intoherworld, threatenedhersafety. The thought was irrational, possessive, and it felt like truth.
Without a word to my brothers, I grabbed a duffel from the closet and threw in the essentials: laptop, burner phone, lockpicks, a USB drive loaded with my nastiest scripts. My pistol went in last, a cold weight at the bottom of the bag. I didn’t know if I’d use it, but I wasn’t taking chances. Not with these assholes.
I slipped out of Dominion Hall, the night air thick with salt and heat. My black SUV waited in the garage, its engine purring to life as I slid behind the wheel. The drive inland was a blur, the highway stretching out like a dark ribbon under the moon. My mind should’ve been on the job, on the hackers, on the plan forming in my head. But it kept circling back to her. Vivi, grinning like a devil as she paddled away, her curls catching the moonlight. Vivi, who didn’t know what was out there, who didn’t care. Who made me want to break every rule I’d ever set for myself.
Her devil and my demon.
I gripped the wheel tighter, my knuckles whitening. Charleston’s waters were a graveyard for fools—every month, some idiot drowned or vanished, thinking a moonlit swim or a night float was a cute idea.
She wasn’t invincible, no matter how much she acted like it. The harbor didn’t care about her fire, her defiance. It would swallow her whole, and the thought of her gone—her laugh, her spark, her reckless, infuriating light—made my chest ache in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
I forced my focus back to the road. The GPS pinged softly, guiding me off the highway and into a rundown neighborhood in North Charleston. Cracked pavement, sagging porches, the kind of place where nobody asked questions. The address matched a squat apartment building, its windows dark except for a faint glow on the second floor. That’s where they were, no doubt scratching their heads, wondering why their connection to the ballet’s network had gone dead. They’d be planning their next move, oblivious to the storm coming for them.