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Ryker’s jaw tightened as he heard it, Atlas’s eyes narrowing to slits. Department 77. My father’s ghost loomed again, his secrets a noose tightening around us all.
I crushed the phone in my fist, plastic splintering, and turned to my brothers. “They want a war? They’ve got one.”
Ryker met my gaze, dark and unyielding. “Then let’s burn them down.”
The night swallowed us as we moved—Dominion rising, a fortress waking up. Claire was out there, and I’d find her. I’d bury anyone who stood in my way.
33
CLAIRE
The world was darkness. Thick, suffocating, absolute.
A hood covered my head, its rough fabric damp with sweat and my own breath, muffling the outside world. The air inside it was stale, hot, tainted with the sharp tang of chemicals—whatever they had used to knock me out. My stomach churned, nausea rolling over me in waves, but I forced it down. I couldn’t afford to be weak.
I was sitting. My wrists were bound behind me—zip ties, biting into the skin, cutting off circulation. My ankles, too. A rough wooden chair was beneath me, solid but old, the kind that creaked with the slightest shift of my weight. The air was damp, thick with mildew and something else. Gasoline? Blood? My head was pounding, the echo of whatever they had injected into me still rattling through my skull.
I swallowed against the dryness in my throat,forcing myself to focus.
Where am I?
Darkness pressed against the edges of my mind, blurring reality, pulling me under. And then—light. Soft, golden. The familiar glow of my apartment in New York, the city outside my window humming with life.
I blinked, disoriented. My sofa was there, covered in a mess of blankets from the last time Diego had crashed after a late editing session. My laptop sat open on the coffee table, audio waves frozen on the screen, half of anUnseenepisode waiting to be finished.
And then—footsteps.
“Claire, please tell me you ordered food.”
I turned, and there he was.
Diego.
Laughing, exasperated, shaking his head as he kicked the door shut behind him. He dropped his bag on the floor, unzipping his hoodie as he walked toward me, his dark hair an absolute mess, his warm brown eyes gleaming with mischief.
“Let me guess,” he said, flopping onto my sofa and throwing a pillow at me. “You got distracted by some murder mystery again instead of eating like a normal human?”
I laughed.Laughed.The sound bubbled up so easily, so naturally, it almost convinced me this was real.
Because this was us.
Me and Diego.
The late nights, the endless debates over edits, the inside jokes that had built over years of working side by side. The ridiculous conversations that spiraled into absurdity when we were both running on too much caffeine and too little sleep.
“That transition was sloppy, Dixon.”
“Sloppy? Diego, I spent two hours making that transition seamless.”
“Okay, okay. But what if we added a little reverb? Just to be dramatic.”
“This isn’t a horror podcast.”
“Says you.”
I had spent more hours with him than I had with anyone else. In recording studios, in coffee shops, in my tiny New York apartment where we camped out when deadlines loomed too close. I knew exactly how he took his coffee—black, two sugars—how he hummed under his breath when he edited, how he’d make the same exasperated sigh every single time I veered off-script in a voiceover.
I had never doubted that he had my back. Not once.