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I didn’t fight it. Didn’t even try. I hung there, arms slack at my sides, blinking through the shock. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Then why,” he spat, his face inches from mine, breath hot with fury, “did he say he was doing stuff for you and, then, start crying so hard he couldn’t breathe? Why did he lock himself in the filing room? He hasn’t needed to do that in forever.” His voice cracked on the last word.

That hurt more than the hand at my throat.

Because I knew what that room meant to Robbie and what it meant that he’d chosen to crawl back into it.

Enzo’s grip trembled enough to tell me this wasn’t rage for the sake of rage—this was panic. This was fear dressed up in fury because Robbie was hurting again, and Enzo didn’t know why.

And I was the closest target because Robbie had mentioned my name. I raised my hands. Not to defend myself, but to show I wasn’t going to run.

“He asked to help with the research I was doing,” I said. “I gave him the safe files. Not the encrypted crap. Just boring data. Lassiter stuff. Nothing that should’ve?—”

Enzo’s jaw clenched.

“—nothing that should’ve triggered him,” I finished, quieter.

The silence that followed was heavier than the grip on my neck.

“Let him go, Enzo,” Robbie said next to us, voice calm but firm.

Enzo tightened his grip; the muscles in his arm locked like steel. I pinched at his wrist, not fighting—just reminding him I needed air. Maybe reminding him that he wasn’t that guy.

“I found some old files,” Robbie continued. “Ledgers. Numbers that are linked to people. It just… shocked me, that’s all. I handled it and took my ten minutes. I’m okay.” He reached out, fingers brushing Enzo’s bicep. “Listen to me, my love; let him go, babe. It’s okay.”

That single word— babe —cut through the fury. Enzo’s entire frame jerked as if he’d come out of a daze. His eyes widened for a breath, then narrowed in pain. And at last, his grip loosened.

I slid down the wall as though my legs had stopped remembering how to hold me up, hitting the ground hard and clutching my neck with both hands.

Enzo stood there, breathing ragged, guilt bleeding through every line of his body. But he didn’t look at me.

He looked at Robbie, as if he’d almost lost something he couldn’t name. And then, they were moving toward each other, pulled by gravity or desperation—I couldn’t tell which. Enzo crushed him into his chest, arms wrapped tight as if he was anchoring them both.

Robbie clung back just as fiercely, legs wrapping around Enzo’s waist as he jumped into the embrace. “It’s okay,” he kept repeating, breath hitching between words. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Enzo buried his face in Robbie’s shoulder, still shaking, and I could tell—this wasn’t only relief.

This was the kind of fear that lingered, that gnawed at you long after the danger was gone.

And Robbie… he was holding them both together.

So fucking strong. I scrambled to stand, then made it back and away from the two men who needed their privacy.

I hunted down Ro bbie’s laptop and found the lists he’d discovered.

They didn’t mean much to me, but somehow Robbie had connected numbers to names and saved them in a separate file.

I saved everything, but uploading it from here wasn’t working, so I saved the files in a secure place, left a note on the laptop screen to indicate where I’d gone, and left work an hour early.

I needed to see the team in the Cave and check on progress.

See Killian.

I arrived at the elevator door a little after five, as people were leaving their offices and swirling around me.

I stared up at the spot where I knew the tiny camera was located and waited.

The doors opened, and I stepped inside before they could shut on me and fell straight into Killian, who was leaning in the far corner.

The doors closed, and it was just the two of us left, and he wasn’t pressing his hand to the pad for us to go to the office.

Instead, he stumbled into my space and, for the second time today, I was pinned to the wall, only this time it wasn’t with a hand around my neck.

Although I wouldn’t have said no.

Killian kissed me as if he couldn’t get the taste of me fast enough. He kissed like a man possessed. Frantic, all teeth and breath and crushed lips, his hands gripping at my waist, my neck, my face .

“I missed you,” his words spilled out between kisses. “I hated you not being with me. Hated the silence. The space. It makes me fucking wild.”

He kissed me again, urgent and messy, hands pushing up under my shirt, sliding over my skin as if he was trying to memorize me all over again. “You get in my blood,” he breathed. “Fire and passion and lust and obsession, Jamie—I can’t think when you’re not around.”

I was so hard it hurt, every nerve alight with need. He pressed against me, our hips grinding, my head thunking back to the wall. I barely managed a gasp when he dropped to his knees in one smooth motion, yanking my jeans down with a desperation that made my knees buckle.

“Fuck,” he whispered, voice reverent and raw.

Then, his mouth was on me—hot, wet, and perfect—and I was gone.

One hand braced on the wall behind me, the other threading through his hair, holding on because if I didn’t, I might collapse.

He took me deep, greedily, and when I moaned his name, he hummed as if he’d been waiting to hear it for days.

One of his hands stayed tight on my thigh, anchoring me, but the other disappeared between his legs.

I caught the movement from above—his wrist flicking, the slow drag of his palm—and something in me short-circuited.

He was getting himself off. While blowing me.

I’d never seen anything so fucking sexy in my life.

My breath hitched hard, my back arching off the wall as heat spiked through me, wild and uncontrollable.

He didn’t stop—didn’t slow—just let the rhythm build between us until I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.

My name on his tongue, the wet sound of slick skin, the tension in his jaw as he fought to take me deeper while chasing his own edge.

It was obscene and perfect and sent me over the edge fast—no chance of holding back after three days of wanting, aching, and spiraling toward this exact moment.

When I came, it was with a stuttered breath and his name on my lips, like a prayer and a curse in one, and he followed up a few seconds later.

Killian stood, eyes dark and wild. “Hi,” he said, voice hoarse.

I glanced down between us, to the floor of the elevator. “Clean up on aisle one?” I deadpanned.

He chuckled as we kissed again, cradling my face as if I were something precious. He tidied me up, tucked me away, kissed me so sweetly it almost made up for the fact that I hadn’t dropped to my knees for him, too.

And somehow, the buzzing in my head—sharp and relentless for days—had stopped.

There hadn’t been pain. I hadn’t had to give anything up.

There’d been no power play, no guilt, only the gentle, grounding weight of his hands on me and the raw, unfiltered need in his eyes.

I’d existed in the moment, let him take care of me, let myself feel how turned-on he’d been by me, by what he was doing to me, by needing me so much he couldn’t stop himself.

It was dizzying and steadying all at once.

And for the first time in days, I felt quiet.

“I love you,” I whispered, the words barely audible between our breaths.

They hung there for a moment, fragile and fierce, and I marveled that I’d said them at all. I don’t think I’d ever said those words like this before—where it meant something, where it cost something, where it left me bare and open.

“I love you right back,” he murmured, and I got my first honest look at him—he was exhausted.

His eyes were bruised from lack of sleep; dark circles etched deep beneath them.

He wasn’t in his usual sharp suit, but in sweatpants and a faded band T-shirt that clung to his chest. His hair was a mess, not just from my fingers yanking at it, but as if he hadn’t tried to fix it in days.

“You look like shit,” I murmured.

He smiled crookedly. “Thanks for that.”

“In a sexy way,” I amended, and he chuckled.

He gave me one last lingering kiss, then turned and pressed his hand to the keypad. The elevator jolted into motion and opened into the Cave, as if nothing had happened, even though everything had.

“Can you wait until I turn the internal cameras off next time?” Caleb deadpanned.

“Oops, my bad,” Killian shot back, not missing a beat.

Caleb raised an eyebrow. “You owe me for the trauma. That elevator needs holy water.”

“Add it to the expense report,” Killian replied with a smirk.

“Asshole,” Caleb said, then turned his attention to me. “Hey, Jamie.”

“Caleb,” I acknowledged. There was no sign of Sonya here, but another man sat at the far desk, suited and booted. He extended a hand for me to shake, which I did.

“Levi,” he said.

“Our cop on the team,” Killian explained.

“You have a cop on the team? ”

“Of course we do,” he said as if that was a thing every Bat Cave had. “Look, let me show you what we have.”

“Me first,” I said, “Robbie went through some files and found things, check this.” I pressed the go button on the file upload, and Caleb whistled as files began to download to his secure area.

“That’s a lot of files.”

“Names and numbers,” I explained. “Robbie said it was important.”

“On it.”

Then, I turned to Killian, who stood at the board beside Levi the cop, calm and sharp-eyed, taking everything in with quiet intensity.

Cops made me feel weird, and I wasn’t getting over that any time soon.

Sonya came in with a handful of files, greeted me with a smile, and slid into her chair.

The entire Cave group was here. And maybe that included me?

Killian tapped the top row of photos. “Lassiter and Kessler sit at the top. Everything starts and ends with them.”

Next to Lassiter was Kessler, the household name. Tech giant. Billionaire. A man so high up the food chain it was hard to imagine him in the same league as these others.

I saw Mitchell right under Lassiter, with a yellow Post-it stuck to the bottom of his image—I assumed that color indicated he was dead. “Mitchell’s dead, so why is he still on the board?” I asked.

“He was involved right up until the end. He doesn’t get to be erased from this,” Killian said, catching my eye.

“Kessler’s a problem,” Levi tapped Kessler’s photo.

Caleb sighed. “Yeah, he’s got no lines leading to anyone beneath him.

Not because he isn’t connected, and we won’t stop looking, but because he’s almost impossible to trace, his money shields him.

Everything he does is run through ten firewalls, five shell companies, and a rotating cast of proxies.

You try to follow the trail, and it vanishes like smoke. ”

Killian gestured to the next row beneath, where Mitchell sat among a cluster of faces.

“This is the next tier down—thirteen people, including Mitchell. Twelve remain—eleven men, one woman. The purple Post-its indicate we have enough evidence to take them down—testimony, payment trails, and intercepted communications. That’s eight out of twelve.

The remaining four have been harder to pin down. ”

“Maybe not anymore,” Caleb cut in, stepping forward.

He slapped three purple Post-its onto the board—over the FBI regional director, his brother, and Senator Huxley at the far end.

“Robbie found exactly what we needed. Cross-referenced ledger entries and location data. That’s three more off the question list.”

“Who’s this?” I asked and pointed to a space where a photo would be, and the name Lyric Thornwood was written on a green Post-it. Yellow meant dead, purple meant fucked, and green meant…?

“Green is for ghost,” Caleb said. “The only Lyric Thornwood I can find has links to Kessler’s college years.

The name barely leaves a digital footprint.

There are no photos of them, and honestly, they may as well be dead for all I can find, but they’re still named on various transactions, so they stay there as a bad guy until we find out more. ”

“That’s why there’s no string connecting him to anyone?”

“Yeah,” Caleb said and sighed. I hated loose ends. “But the fact that his name, Lyric, is attached to those Lyric-Night investments that Lassiter wanted to bring Killian in on? That’s just another weird thing in a list of weird things.”

“Okay, so we’re missing Kessler and Lyric Thornwood, but we hit the rest,” Levi said, looking around the room, his voice steady.

“We take down who we can and isolate the ones we can’t.

We press the button on what we have now before anyone else is hurt or taken, and start a separate operation on Kessler and find this Lyric guy? Are we agreed?”

Killian nodded. “Agreed.”

Caleb tapped his desk. “I’m almost ready. I need twenty-four hours to get the information packets for these last three secured and ready, plus fixing where the information lands because shit, this is the biggest thing we’ve done.” He nodded then. “But after that, yeah, agreed.”

“I’ll help you with that, C,” Sonya offered. “And once all the ducks are groomed with little tuxedoes and ready to be put in a row, then agreed,” she said.

All of them turned to me.

Why are they looking at me? This part wasn’t mine. I wasn’t one of them, not really—I was just waiting for the go-ahead to burn Lassiter to the fucking ground. That was my job. Not strategy, not evidence chains, not takedown plans.

“Jamie?” Killian asked, his voice gentle but sure.

I looked at him, at the board, at the weight in their eyes. Thought about Robbie, and Enzo, and the way this mess had wormed its way into all of us.

I could say nothing because they didn’t need me to agree. I could walk out now while they were doing their bit, light the match, and vanish until I could take down Kessler after that.

But Killian was looking at me, wanting me to be part of this, so instead, I nodded. “Agreed.”

And weirdly… I felt good.

Also, I hadn’t even mentioned killing Lassiter once.