Page 32 of Lock

Kellan woke once while I was still in the room, blurry-eyed, stubborn mouth, trying to sit up like he could muscle through it. I pushed him back gently, told him to sleep.

And he did.

Like my word meant something.

That made the next part feel worse.

I didn’t go far.

Just down the hall, far enough that I wasn’t breathing Kellan’s scent anymore, but close enough that if he so much as shifted wrong, I could get back in three strides.

But I didn’t look too closely at that either.

Wraith sent Ember back to their rooms and fell in behind me without a word. Grim, who’d been waiting outside his suite, pushed off the wall and joined us, steady as usual. Fuse came last, his tablet in hand.

This was my circle.

And it was usually five of us.

And Saint should’ve been standing here too.

Five of us meant balance. Four felt wrong, like the floor had tilted and nobody wanted to say it out loud.

Saint should’ve been here. Instead he was in a hospital bed, skull split by a Reaper patch we still couldn’t name.

I stopped at the corner where the hallway bent toward the private suites, my suite included. Doors lined both sides, every one of them belonging to a senior patched member. It was late enough that the whole floor was quiet.

Or maybe they’d all made themselves scarce…

I leaned against the wall and pulled out my phone, and let the silence settle. My hand was steady. My temper wasn’t. Fury sat there, tight under my ribs, waiting for Rowan to give it a place to go.

I tipped my head once toward my door and something hit low and sharp, dragging my attention toward what I was about to do before I forced it back to the call I had to make.

Kellan was only twenty feet behind me, down the hall in my room, and that made every instinct I had sit too close to the surface.

Leaving an omega in my bed while I made war calls went against every rule I’d ever written for myself.

Wraith folded his arms beside me, expression carved from stone.

“You sure you want to do this right now?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m doing it.”

Grim took the opposite wall, silent and massive, the way he always was when things were about to get violent. His presence made the air feel heavier.

Fuse looked up, deadpan.

“Well… Rowan definitely knows something. Their whole network just tripped like someone kicked a hornet’s nest.”

“Good,” I muttered. “Let’s make it worse.”

I scrolled to Rowan Roe’s private number and hit call with the speaker on.

The line rang once.

“What.” Rowan snapped, like he’d already been tearing into the nearest idiot and was looking for another throat.

“Rowan.”