Page 30 of All Ghosts Aren’t Dead (The Forgotten #1)

I leveled him with a look. “If someone tries to stop you from pulling a kid out of a fucking cell, drop them. But we’re not storming in like it’s open slaughter season. No collateral. No chaos. No dead innocents. Our object isn’t destruction. It’s extraction.”

“Can we burn something, though?” Rune palmed his lighter. “Once we get everyone out, I mean. Can I set the place on fire?”

No one answered. Not right away.

Fire was more to Rune than flames and annihilation. It was rage he could shape with his hands, a way to cauterize what couldn’t be saved. Under all the chaos and a sharp-toothed grin, he could spot rot when he saw it.

This place—this Sanctum —fucking reeked of it.

“Light it all on fire,” Blue whispered. “Every last bit of it.”

The room fell silent.

Even Bay shut the hell up.

“They tried to fix us, but they only broke us. They—they beat my big brother even as I begged them not to.”

Baby.

His chin dipped low, hair brushing the creased skin above his brow.

Fists clenched tight in his lap, his fingers twisted the fabric of his pants like he needed something to anchor him.

His knee started to bounce, sharp and rhythmic.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

“They built that place to hurt us. So yeah, burn it. Burn every room, every chair, every fucking sermon note. Make sure there’s nothing left for the next kid they try to ‘save.’”

Fuck.

My throat burned.

I had spent so long trying to make sure Blue never broke again, but this—this wasn’t a crack. This was strength, and it was fucking beautiful.

A ripple of readiness passed through the room.

“Sam.” Bishop jerked his chin at me. “You didn’t assign yourself a team.”

“We’re Team C. Extraction. Blue and I will go through the south tunnel, cut across the Sanctum floor, and get Jonah.”

“You’re leading?” Bishop shifted. “You think that’s wise?”

I held his stare, unmoved.

For the first time in a long goddamn time, I wasn’t interested in being wise. I was interested in making sure Blue never had to look at a locked door again without knowing he could blow it off its fucking hinges.

Bishop dragged a hand over his jaw. “If something goes wrong—if Blue gets hurt, or panics, or if something throws him off—you won’t be able to focus. You’ll choose him. Every time.”

“Damn right I will, and if you think for one second I’m sending him in without me, you’ve lost your mind.”

“You don’t think that’s a liability?”

“I don’t give a fuck if it is. I want eyes on every angle between him and anything that breathes wrong.”

“I wasn’t questioning your judgment,” Bishop said after a beat.

“Wait, wait—this is real?” Bay sat up straighter, eyes wide. “Daddy Death Glare is putting on a vest and going full mission mode? Sam never leaves the house.”

“That’s because when he does, someone usually ends up in pieces.”

The boys stilled.

“He’s not reckless,” Bishop added. “But he doesn’t miss and he’s pretty fucking terrifying when provoked.”

He wasn’t fucking wrong, and nothing provoked me more than a threat to Blue.

Rune gave a low whistle. “Shit. You’re really going?”

“I said I was,” I muttered, adjusting the cuff of my sleeve. “Do you need it in writing?”

“No, Sam, Sir.” Bay’s voice cracked. “I just— damn . Bluebird really lit a fire under your ass. Feral daddy arc unlocked.”

“Remind me never to date anyone who talks like that,” Miller muttered without looking up from his notes. “But also, I’m weirdly into this.”

Bay scoffed. “What the hell are you going to be doing while we’re out here risking our lives, you degenerate?”

“Besides celebrating the odds of you getting stabbed?”

“Oof.” Bay clutched his chest. “Say it with love next time, you cold-hearted academic.”

“Shut the hell up.” My voice cut through the room. “Now is not the time for your bullshit.”

I met each of their eyes.

“Miller’s staying back to run comms and coordinate with Midnight. If anyone’s got a problem with that, too fucking bad.”

No one pushed back.

My boys liked to toe the line, but they knew better than to cross it.

Not with me, and sure as fuck not today.

“Departure is at oh five hundred,” I said. “We’ll meet at the garage entrance at four-thirty. If you’re late, we’re leaving without you.”

“You heard the House Daddy.” Bay slapped his hands together. “Avengers, assemble.”

Blue growled beneath his breath, barely audible, but my body locked onto it like a trigger.

He pushed up from the chair so abruptly it scraped across the floor. The table shook when he slammed both fists against it, the crack loud enough to kill every trace of humor in the room.

“Baby—”

“If you call him daddy one more time,” Blue seethed, “I will crawl across this fucking table and rip your throat out.”

No one breathed.

It wasn’t just the threat. It was the way his voice cracked around it, all venom and heartbreak.

He wasn’t posturing.

He wasn’t bluffing.

He was breaking.

A sob burst from his throat. Tears curved down his cheeks and dripped off the angle of his jaw, hitting the top of the table.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

This wasn’t fury. No. It was ache.

Blue had watched the last piece of his old life come back from the dead, and now he couldn’t bear the thought of someone else laying claim to the one thing that had helped him survive—me.

Fuck.

Seeing it, seeing those tears ?—

I would’ve carved out my own ribs if it meant he’d never have to cry again.

“Bailey,” I murmured.

Strands of hair swept across his forehead when he shook his head, breath catching like his lungs couldn’t hold it all in.

I crossed the room in four strides, arms reaching outward. Blue launched himself at me, arms wrapped around my neck, and legs locking around my waist. Burying his face in my throat, a sound tore out of him—half sob, half gasp.

“Daddy.”

My baby clung to me like he was drowning, cheek pressed to my collarbone as he exhaled, one broken, shuddering breath at a time. Small fingers dug into the muscles of my back, his chest rumbling against my own.

I could feel his heart knocking.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Pivoting once, I carried him straight out of the room. The library doors shut behind us with a muffled click, cutting the others off like they didn’t exist—and they fucking didn’t.

Not right now.

I moved down the hallway without thinking, curving around the narrow edge of the corridor and stepping into a shadowed alcove.

Pressing his back against the wall, my palms on either side of him, I bent low and breathed him in.

Our foreheads met first, and then I kissed him.

Blue breathed me in like he’d been suffocating for days.

Our lips moved like we could stitch each other back together with nothing but breath and skin, and the weight of being wanted.

I will never not want this boy.

“Daddy.” His teeth grazed my lower lip before his mouth drifted along my jaw, breath spilling against my skin. “Show me.”

I shifted him higher in my arms, then turned until my shoulder brushed his chest.

“Is this what you need, baby?”

“Yes, please, Daddy.”

With desperate fingers, he grabbed the hem of my shirt and yanked it upward, whimpering as my skin came into view. When the fabric bunched high enough, his gaze locked on the small, raised mark beneath my shoulder blade.

B.

He dragged his fingertips along the shape he carved, like he didn’t trust the world not to erase it.

“You’re mine,” he said.

I gripped his chin between two fingers. “Say it again, Blue baby.”

“You’re mine, Daddy.”

“Good boy.”

Flattening his palm against the mark, he held it there as though he could shield it from everything that ever wanted to take something from him.

“I—I want to go,” he whispered. “I want to go to that compound, and I want Jonah back, but I—I need you to promise me something.”

I dipped my head. “Anything.”

“When we go,” he paused, thumb brushing over the ridge of the carved B, “I need you not to leave my sight. If I can’t see you, I’m pretty sure I’ll freak out. If I blink and you’re not there, I’ll fucking lose it, Daddy. I’ll think they took you. I know I will.”

Fuck.

I swallowed hard and held him a little tighter, one arm around his waist and the other sliding up his spine to cup the back of his neck.

“I’m not going anywhere, baby,” I murmured. “No one touches me. No one touches you. We go in together, and we come out together.”

“I mean it,” he said. “If I look and you’re gone?—”

“I’ll be there,” I swore. “I’ll chain us together if I have to.”

That earned me the smallest, broken laugh against my throat. “You promise?”

“Baby, I’ll sew us together at the fucking spine if that’s what it takes,” I whispered. “You’ll never lose sight of me, not in this life, not in the next.”

My boy had lost enough.

I dared someone to touch him, dared someone to even glance in his goddamn direction. I’d peel the nerves right off their skin.

I kissed his temple, then his cheek, then the soft spot just under his eye.

“You’re not going to lose anything, Blue,” I vowed. “Not a goddamn thing. Not anymore.”