Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
But if they know—
They have to know.
This is a major breach. Hell, this is more than a fucking breach. This is a declaration of war.
Luca LaRiccia doesn't send subtle messages. He sends bodies or invoices, depending on whether you're worth collecting from or just worth erasing. If he suspected I killed his son, I'd already be in a warehouse with a blowtorch aimed at my kneecaps while he waited for me to confess.
Unless he's not after me.
Unless he's after her.
The witness.
The girl who saw me put a bullet in Rico's skull and lived to tell about it because I couldn't pull the trigger a second time.
Instantly, I'm spiraling. Thoughts turn in to theories, turn into nightmares…
Then I remember the trail cam.
The cheap motion-activated wildlife camera I installed in the woods after Emmaleen's first day here—the day I handed her my Aventador and watched her panic through the dash cameras. The day she pissed in my woods and I had no footage of it because I hadn't anticipated needing coverage that far off the perimeter.
The day that started this whole game between us.
I pause, staring at the dark screen in front of me.
Is it still a game?
Was it ever?
She signed the Doctrine. She kneels. She calls me King. She lets Jino train her body, and me break her mind, and she comes back every single time asking for more, writing seventy-three-page poems in terza rima about how much she wants my darkness.
That's not a game. That's—
I shove the thought away.
Not now. Not when someone was in my house, and she's missing, and every system I built to protect her is offline.
Later.
If there is a later.
The trail cam runs on AA batteries, records to a local SD card, connects to nothing. No network. No Wi-Fi. No cloud backup. Just motion, timestamp, save. Analog redundancy in a digital world, which makes it exactly the kind of thing a professional hacker would miss.
I grab my phone and head outside.
The woods are silent except for wind moving through bare branches. I navigate by memory and phone light, cutting through underbrush until I reach the oak tree where I mounted the camera at chest height, angled toward the driveway in front of the house.
Still there.
I yank it free from the strap, check the indicator light. Green. Active.
Back inside, I pull the SD card from the camera's side slot and load it into the laptop's reader. The file directory populates—dozens of clips labeled by date and time.
I scroll to tonight.
7:57 PM.
8:01 PM.
I click the first one.
The video loads. Grainy infrared footage, trees rendered in ghostly white-green. A car enters the frame from the driveway.
The vehicle that pulls up to my gates looks like something a high schooler would abandon in a Target parking lot after the transmission died.
What is that? Some kind of piece of shit beater car?
I scoff. Of course it is. Whoever did this probably stole it.
The driver's door opens.
A man gets out.
Big guy. Six feet, maybe more. Broad shoulders, lean build—moves like someone who knows how to handle himself in a fight. Wearing all black. Jeans, long-sleeve shirt, boots, and a ski mask pulled down over his face.
He doesn't hesitate. Doesn't scope the perimeter or check for cameras. Just walks straight toward my front door like he's been here before and knows exactly where he's going.
He punches in the code to my house.
The specific, exact, private-as-fuck code that only four people on the planet know.
Me.
Dom.
Ricky.
And Jino.
He, or someone on his team, blacked out my defenses. All of them except one piece of shit analog trail cam.
Which is exhibiting it's lack of well-thought-out function and purpose, because the footage cuts off after thirty seconds of no movement.
I click to the next timestamp.
8:01 PM.
The video loads. Same grainy green-white infrared. The front door opens and the man exits—no shirt now, ski mask still in place, one arm wrapped around Emmaleen.
His hand covers her mouth.
Four minutes.
He was inside my house for four fucking minutes.
Professional hacker, military-grade breach, systematic shutdown of every failsafe I've built—and he gets in and out in the time it takes to order coffee.
He knew the layout. Knew where to find her. Got her out of the dungeon—
No.
Wait.
She wasn't in the dungeon.
The book on the floor. The key by the baseboard. The library.
She broke my rules. Used the key, wandered into restricted territory, grabbed The Little Prince like she was browsing a fucking Barnes & Noble instead of staying where I told her to stay, where she'd be safe—
Why, Emmaleen? Why did you break the rules today of all days?
On screen, the man drags her toward the Buick. She's not fighting. Not screaming. Just… compliant.
Like she's been trained to be.
Headlights sweep across the hallway outside the control room.
A car door slams.
Footsteps on gravel.
I'm up and moving, laptop forgotten, phone in hand, every nerve firing as I grab a gun from the foyer table, cross the space, and yank open the front door.