Page 5

FIVE

Jamie

I folded my arms tight across my chest. Not because I needed to look tough—though fuck if that wasn’t part of it—but because it was the only thing holding me together. Killian’s eyes were on me again, calm and cold, as if he were reading me and making notes. I hated it. Hated him.

Liar.

I hated that spark when he stepped too close and tilted my chin as if he owned me.

I hated that my body reacted as badly as when I craved the burn.

I was weak enough to imagine dropping to my knees for him after the fire was gone, still high on adrenaline and ash.

And that scared the ever-loving shit out of me.

He stepped closer again, and I held my ground. Not flinching. Not giving him the satisfaction. But the air between us was electric and sharp, like the moment before a fire took hold. I hated that I wanted to lean into him. Just for a second. Just to see if his touch burned hotter than fire.

“Okay, so no killing yet? But, what do we do instead? How do they pay?” Rio’s voice cut through the noise.

“Simple. We want the entire network,” Killian said, and I wanted to punch that calm out of his voice. “You want Robbie to be truly safe? Then, we need to take down as much as we can. Dismantle the whole thing.”

“And we do that how?” Rio asked, glancing pointedly at me and Enzo. “There are just three of us.”

“Four,” Robbie said and straightened up.

He still looked fragile, but there was a sharpness to him now, a core of something forged in fire instead of broken by it.

He stood taller, straighter—not much, but enough that it made me pause.

The shadows in his eyes hadn’t gone; they hovered like ghosts behind glass, but there was something new there, something solid.

He wasn’t just surviving anymore—he was stepping forward.

Enzo held him close; arms wrapped around him like a shield.

I didn’t hate it, not really. I couldn’t understand it.

That kind of gentleness—offering me safety like it was second nature—felt impossible.

Foreign. A code I’d never learned to crack.

I watched Enzo steady Robbie, and for the briefest moment, I wondered what it would be like to be that for someone.

But even as the thought formed, I knew the truth: I wouldn’t know where to begin.

“Four,” Killian agreed without dismissing Robbie, then checked behind him. “No, Logan?”

“In San Diego with Gray,” Rio said. “He stays out of this.”

“Agreed,” Enzo said.

“This isn’t a quick job,” Killian said. “If Mitchell gave up two names, what did he say they did? Did he work for them? Did they work for him? Someone talk to me.”

Everyone was quiet—no one wanted to explain what Lassiter and Kessler had done.

Robbie cleared his throat. “When business meetings were at the house, I was the party favor for two men and was expected to perform and learn what secrets they had so Mitchell could add to his intel on them. He was stealing millions from them, and I knew it, and I was expected to smile and play the part of a toy they could hurt. Mitchell watched. Every time. Sometimes… he picked who went first. They would talk about business like I wasn’t there, movements of drugs, guns, percentages…

people… kids. I had to remember it all.”

He lifted a hand and brushed his fingers behind his ear, revealing a thin scar I hadn’t noticed before.

“Lassiter held me while…” His voice broke, and he couldn’t finish.

Enzo tightened his arms around him, pulling him close as if he could absorb the pain.

Robbie leaned into it, but his hands shook.

“I need to do something,” I blurted, itching to kill both of them, and Rio’s eyes widened. He knew what I meant—I needed action rather than words.

Killian held up a hand. He was pale, but his eyes were emotionless, and his voice was steady as if nothing Robbie had said affected him. Was he made of stone?

He cleared his throat. “Networks like this have layers and redundancies. These two names, Kessler and Lassiter, will be just the surface. I need to take this to my team and work out a game plan before you go anywhere near them.”

“No!” The word left me before I could stop it.

I slammed my fist on the bench, tools jumping in protest. “While we’re sitting around talking, Kessler and Lassiter are doing God knows what to other people.

” A spike of heat flared in my chest before I locked it down.

My temper, buried under layers of cold strategy and practiced calm, reared its head with teeth bared—an old companion I kept caged, because the moment I let it out, I stopped being useful and all I wanted to do was burn.

He clenched his jaw—just a flicker—but I saw it.

“You think I don’t know that?” Killian stepped in again, bringing that smell of expensive cologne, overlaid with the memory of ash. “But if we move too fast, we’ll take down two men and leave a hundred more to carry on. Is that what you want?”

Oh, that was an easy question. “What I want? I want to watch them both burn. Slow. Loud. Screaming. Knowing this was about what they’d done to.

..” I couldn’t drag Robbie’s name into this—not when the rage boiling in me was mine alone.

This fury wasn’t his burden to bear. My thirst to erase anyone who hurt the vulnerable, to scorch the earth beneath their feet—that was all me. “Innocents,” I finished.

And I fucking meant it. Every twisted, gut-deep word. I wanted their world to catch fire with them inside it. I wanted to hear them beg, to see the terror in their eyes as they realized there was no escape. For Robbie, I wanted more than justice—I wanted vengeance, visceral and scorching and final.

“They will,” he murmured, his voice lowering to something intimate and dangerous. As if he was promising me damnation and deliverance in the same breath. “But like Mitchell, when you strike, you do it clean. Surgical. No mess. Nothing leading back to my team.”

I should’ve walked away right then. Should’ve shoved aside the weird weight of his voice, the way it burrowed under my skin like a hook.

But I didn’t. I stood there, watching him—the ice in his eyes, the chill in every word—and wondered how deep the frost went.

I didn’t trust Killian, not even a little.

But God help me, some reckless part of me wanted to see that control shatter.

Wanted to be the one to make it break, to light a fire under all that cold until he burned, until he was unraveling and screaming.

And worse—twisted and wrong—I could feel my body reacting in ways it shouldn’t.

That control, that power in his voice, was lighting something up inside me, and I hated that I wanted more.

My thoughts were chaos. Anger, fire, violence, grief, confusion—and now desire?

My gut clenched, a flicker of heat crawling under my skin that had nothing to do with fury and everything to do with how he stood so calm and sure, as if nothing could touch him.

How could I want him when I hated him? Why did I want to know what he tasted like?

Would he be cold, or would fire be hidden beneath all that ice?

Would he fight me in bed or let me pin him?

Or better—take control and ruin me from the inside out?

I flinched away from it, disgusted with myself.

This wasn’t the time, the place—he wasn’t the person.

I hated that those thoughts had even found room in my head.

But once they were there, they were hard to shake.

What the hell was wrong with me?

“Killian’s right, J. We need to be smart,” Rio said, calm but insistent—the tone he used when he was trying to stop me from doing something reckless. I bristled anyway. He wasn’t wrong, but I hated being told what to do. “Tell him about the other files.”

My spine went rigid. Killian turned that analytical stare on me, slicing through my barriers as if they were nothing. “What other files?”

Damn it. I wanted to comb through the files first, map out my own plan for how to take those two down. That intel was power, and I hadn’t been ready to hand it over—not yet. Of course, eventually, I’d give Killian and his cryptic team a copy. Just not before I took what I needed .

“He pulled data from Mitchell’s computer,” Rio added. “Tell him, J.”

Killian’s eyes narrowed slightly. I clamped my mouth shut. I wasn’t about to tell him the full truth—not about the scripts I’d used, or how easily I’d slipped back into a skillset I’d buried years ago. That part of me wasn’t for public display. Definitely not for someone like him.

“Files.”

“Yep.”

“Send them to me.”

No .

Then I forced a nod. “Sure,” I said instead.

Killian grabbed a card from his case. “Encrypted upload,” he said and passed it to me. “Do you know how to use that?”

I flicked a glance at the card. “Yep.”

“Upload it all, and my team will dissect every byte.” Killian said, as if he owned the room. As if he could dictate how this went. I wanted to argue—God, I needed to—but Rio stepped in again, a steady hand to calm the rising firestorm in me.

“If there’s anything on there about Robbie, I want it gone,” Enzo said.

“That’s our priority.” The slick lawyer veneer cracked for a split second, revealing something that might’ve been compassion.

Then it was gone, replaced by steel. “But on the rest of it, we move with precision,” he said.

“These people aren’t just criminals. They’re connected, protected, and insulated by power and money. We rush in, and they vanish.”

“So what’s the plan?” Rio asked.

“My team maps the network,” Killian replied and his eyes found mine again, and fuck, it was like being pinned under a spotlight.

“I understand you want to ignite a war, Pretty, but we can’t go in guns blazing.

So leave it to us to find their weak points, and stay out of it until we give you permission to get in there. ”