Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
She’s nowhere.
This town spans nearly three-thousand square miles. She could be anywhere.
And Jag…
Satan save me from my own stupidity. Jag said he was leaving Sitka today. He couldn’t have been clearer about it.
He also said he wanted Dove to stay with me. He said it like a promise. Looked me in the eye when he said it.
What changed?
Did he read my journal? Did seeing the worst parts of me make him question my ability to protect Dove? I’m not that broken kid anymore. I survived. I learned. If he read all of it, he would know that, godsdammit.
I ride harder, faster, reckless enough that the bike shudders beneath me. Warm air knifes my lungs. My hands ache from gripping the bars too tightly. Leo stays with me, a constant pressure in my mirrors.
Did Jag kill the guards, peel out of there, and snatch Dove while I was on the pier? Did he plan the decoy before or after he sucked my thumb like a blow job? Was that always the move? Bait me, split my focus, take what matters, and disappear?
Dove told me he was manipulating me. She warned me, and I didn’t listen.
I wanted to believe Jag would read my story and stay long enough to tell me his. I wanted to believe the best version of him was real.
Now I don’t know what I believe.
I only know the streets keep coming up empty, and my chest is tearing itself apart from the inside. Every second stretches too long. Every minute without her ratchets my panic.
I circle back toward the harbor, engine screaming, eyes burning, brain stuck in a loop, replaying her smile, her kiss, and the way she told me to go.
My gut told me to stay. Why didn’t I listen to it?
That thought doesn’t leave. It claws.
I ride until my hands shake, my vision blurs, and the city pushes in from all sides, daring me to break.
Leo speeds up alongside me and points in the direction of the tattoo parlor.
Has there been news? Did they find something?
I crank a one-eighty and gun it back toward the shop with Leo glued to my flank.
The barricades come into view, a mayhem of metal, lights, and uniforms. No way to get close. I ditch the bike and take off on foot, knowing Leo will deal with it.
Monty waits for me at the door. That alone is wrong.
He steps closer, his expression ice-quiet. “There’s another body.”
My brain refuses it. I left before they finished cataloging the scene, but another body? How the hell did I miss that?
“Who?”
“Declan.”
I stagger, and Monty reaches for me, pulling me against his chest.
Declan. Loud, coffee-drinking, conspiracy-weaving, always-talking, always-there Declan, who taught me how to use a tattoo machine and showed up every day.
Except today was his day off. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“How?” I grip the lapels of Monty’s suit jacket, wrinkling the expensive fabric. “Where?”
“Stabbed before he entered the shop.” Monty embraces me, cupping the back of my head. “He didn’t make it inside. They found his body in the side alley.”
The world goes red at the edges. I hear myself breathe like it’s someone else. Too fast. Too hard. My hands curl and uncurl, and something inside me tears loose.
Jag Rath.
Did he do this? Did he kill four guards and Declan? And rip Dove from my life?
It’s always him, Wolf. It’s what he does.
Her words drill into me, and my grief turns feral. It shreds into howling ribbons of fury, ripping from my throat.
I shove past Monty, my thoughts scattering as I race into the city, toward the night, toward whoever did this.
Jag? His enemies? His associates? I want names. I want faces. I want the sound of someone realizing they chose the wrong place and the wrong people.
“Wolf!” Leo bellows from somewhere behind me.
I run faster.
Declan is dead.
Dove is missing.
I don’t care how long this takes or what it costs me. I will find her.
The docks, the alleys, the dead-end streets… I comb every inch of Sitka for hours.
Cigarette after cigarette burns down to my fingers as I replay every word Jag said. Every look Dove gave me. Every instinct I overruled because I wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings.
Rage boils up my spine, bending my frame under the pressurized coil and drawing me so tight my teeth ache from clenching.
I kick a trashcan into the side of a building and roar at the top of my lungs.
My fingers crack one by one as I flex them, testing how much force I can put behind a strike before bone answers bone. I punch a piling. The air. The brick. The violence needs somewhere to go until I can wrap my hands around a throat, paint the pavement with blood, and drink vodka from the skull of whoever did this.
I pace. I stop. I pace again. My boots grind glass into the concrete.