We arrive at 2:58. I kill the engine half a block away. No obvious surveillance, no unmarked vehicles. Too clean.
The studio door is locked. I break the glass with my elbow while Cyrus covers me.
Blood. A splatter pattern across the polished wood floor. Not a large volume, but a significant spray. My legendary control—the hallmark of my existence—shatters like glass. I’m no longer the calculated half of the Dexter twins. I’m raw nerve endings and fear.
“Keira!” I scream her name, knowing she can’t answer but unable to stop myself. I overturn the nearest bench, sending it crashing across the floor.
I tear through the room in methodical chaos, ripping open cabinets, flipping furniture, searching for anything—a phone, a note, a fucking breadcrumb leading to her. I punch the wall when I find nothing, leaving a dent in the drywall and blood on my knuckles.
“Where did they take her?” The words tear from my throat, half question, half animal howl.
Only silence answers me.
I turn to Cyrus, needing his fire, his recklessness—needing him to balance me as he always has.
But my brother stands motionless by the door, his face perfectly blank. I know that look. It’s the expression he wore when Handler Seventeen would come for him, the careful nothing that meant he’d retreated so deeply inside himself that bringing him back required careful navigation.
His eyes stare at the blood on the floor, unseeing. His gun hangs limply at his side. The switch has flipped, and Cyrus hasgone to that place where nothing exists except emptiness, his protection against unbearable pain.
“Cyrus,” I say, my voice cracking, “I need you, brother. Keira needs you.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. The most volatile man I’ve ever known has gone utterly still, and that terrifies me more than my own rage.
My phone rings. Unknown number.
I answer without speaking, putting it on speaker for Cyrus.
“Dexter.” The voice is accented, casual, as if he’s ordering coffee instead of destroying my world. “Dmitri Volkov. We have your dancer.”
My knees nearly buckle. The room tilts and blurs at the edges while my vision tunnels to a pinpoint focused on the phone in my trembling hand.
“If you’ve touched her—” My voice breaks, ragged and unfamiliar.
“She is unharmed. For now.” His tone remains conversational, almost bored. “Forty-eight hours to turn yourselves over to Viktor Kozlov, or we start cutting pieces off her.”
The phone shakes violently in my hand. I can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t process anything beyond the image of Keira bleeding, screaming, pieces of her?—
I’ve planned hundreds of operations. Executed countless kills. Remained ice-cold while men begged for their lives. But now? I’m unmade. Everything I am dissolves into blind panic.
“Proof of life,” I demand, surprised I can form words at all.
A pause. Rustling. Then her voice—weak, slurred from whatever they drugged her with—cuts through the static.
“Ace? Cy—” Her words end in a whimper.
My legs give out. I slide down the mirror-covered wall. I’m supposed to be the calm one. The strategist. The one who never loses control.
But I’m nothing now. Nothing but raw terror wrapped in human skin.
Cyrus remains frozen in that terrible blankness.
“The assassins of Ravenwood, scrambling over a woman.” Volkov’s laughter grates through the speaker. “Forty-eight hours. I’ll text an address for your surrender.”
The line goes dead.
I stare at the phone, my lifeline to Keira now severed. My throat constricts with the scream building inside, desperate to tear free.
Two days to save her. Two days before they start cutting pieces from the woman I love.
