Page 123 of Dual

Somewhere in this building, Pavel is conducting his business, thinking he’s won. Thinking he’s outsmarted the dangerous little bee who’s been buzzing around his operation.

He’s about to learn why my name is Red.

And why smart predators never, ever corner an animal with nothing left to lose.

THIRTY-EIGHT

DOMHNALL

The warehouse stinks of rust,stale water, and something else—something metallic that makes my stomach clench. Blood. Not much, but enough to set every nerve on fire as I sweep my flashlight across the concrete floor, searching for any trace of her.

“Sir, over here,” one of Isaak’s men calls from the far corner. Carlos, I think his name is. He’s ex-military, with the kind of steady professionalism that doesn’t flinch at blood or chaos. “Fresh zip ties.”

I stride over, crouching beside the scattered plastic fragments. My chest tightens as I imagine Mads bound here, helpless, while some bastard held her captive. The rage that’sbeen building since Moira told me what happened threatens to explode, but I force it down. Focus. Find her first. Kill everything else after.

“This has to have been where Moira and Anna were being kept,” Isaak notes, his own flashlight illuminating more cut ties a few feet away.

“Timeline?” I ask, though part of me doesn’t want to know. Every hour that passes makes this worse.

“Hard to say. Could be yesterday, could be this morning.” Marcus straightens, scanning the room with the methodical precision of someone who’s done this before. “Whoever was here cleared out fast, but they weren’t sloppy about it.”

Professional. Which means this isn’t some random kidnapping gone wrong. This is organized, planned, and deliberate. And that makes it a thousand times more dangerous.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, the sound sharp and jarring in the empty space. Unknown number. My heart lurches. I swipe to accept.

The screen flickers to life, and my world tilts sideways.

A video call. It’s her face—unmistakably hers—but something’s wrong. So fucking wrong.

Blood. There’s blood everywhere. It’s streaked across her cheek like war paint, dried under her fingernails, and splattered across her clothes. Her hair is matted with it, dark strands sticking to her forehead.

But it’s her eyes that stop my heart. They’re empty. Notvacant—empty. Like looking into a house where all the lights have been turned off and no one’s home.

“Mads!” The name tears from my throat, raw and desperate. “Anna!”

She tilts her head at me, and a smile spreads across her blood-stained face. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen—too wide, too knowing, like she’s in on a joke I’ll never understand.

“Hello, Domhnall,” she says, and even her voice is wrong. The cadence is off, the tone too measured, too clinical. Like she’s reading from a script written in a language she doesn’t quite speak.

I force myself to breathe, to think, to function despite the ice flooding my veins. “Who am I talking to?”

The smile widens impossibly further. “Red.” The name rolls off her tongue like she’s tasting it, savoring it.

My hands tighten around the phone until my knuckles go white. This is the alter Mads mentioned. The one who... killed someone. The one Anna was terrified of.

And she’s covered in fresh blood.

“We saidnoton video!” she snaps suddenly, her head jerking to the left like someone just shouted at her. Her expression shifts, features hardening with annoyance. “Well, I don’t care what you said.Iwanted to see his face.”

She turns back to the camera, and that unsettling smile returns as her gaze locks onto mine through the screen. “Pretty,” she murmurs, reaching out with one blood-stained finger toward the camera. The digit hovers inches from the lens,leaving a crimson smudge on the screen when she finally makes contact.

I swallow hard, fighting the urge to be sick. “Can I talk to Mads? Or Anna?” My voice sounds foreign to my own ears, strained and hollow.

Her head twitches to the side again, like she’s listening to voices I can’t hear. The movement is sharp, bird-like. Predatory. “They’re here,” she says conversationally, as if we’re discussing the weather.

Relief floods through me so fast it’s dizzying. “Good. That’s good. Can I talk to them?”

Red laughs, and the sound raises every hair on the back of my neck. It’s not Mads’s laugh, sharp and challenging, or Anna’s, warm and musical. This laugh is knives and broken glass.