Unless you knew each of us as well as we do each other, you’d never be able to guess who was attempting to break down my door from the other side of the finished basement. Everyone who looks at Dallas Collins sees the grim-faced enforcer, the lazy almost King, or the playboy who doesn’t play since his heart got broke.
But put him around the rest of our friend group? Yeah… there’s only one of my bros who will threaten to shoot the lock off my door like that.
“Dallas?”
“Thank fucking God. I thought you’d OD’d in there or something. When you didn’t answer… you okay?”
I grab my phone. Ignoring the sixteen missed calls and twenty-nine missed texts on the notification screen, I glance at the time—and then the date. The sedative put me under for nearly fourteen hours.
Am I okay? The same old guilt that I slept for that long while Haven could beanywherewill slam into me in a moment once the last effects of the drug wear out. For now, though, I’m alive, and that’s the best I can hope for.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Just needed a reset. You get it.”
Of the five of us, Dallas is probably the only one who does. Still grieving his Lucy after she left him three years ago, I know he has his moments where he goes a little… off himself. I’d never cut my own life short. Dallas, on the other hand? I was worried about him before Haven vanished, and when I get her back, I’ll probably worry about Dallas again.
For now? I just want to know what the hell he’s doing banging on the door to my panic room.
Lurching myself to my feet, I shake off some of the grogginess. It doesn’t really help, but after forty-two… forty-threedays, I can’t spare another minute.
“Stand back. I’m coming out.”
The panic room has a dual locking system. I’d never have had one built that I couldn’t access at all times. So while I can keep the world out, I can also use the override key to let myself in. No one else has one—not even Dallas or Adrian, Bas or Des—so the only way for me to leave the room is to open the door myself.
I’m doing just that when Dallas’s voice reaches me through the wood.
“Hurry, Connor.”
There’s something in his voice that makes my gut twist. My hazy brain can’t distinguish between hope or fear, but after forty-three days, I’d be insane to go with hope.
Which is exactly why I do.
I shove the door out, searching for Dallas. He’s dressed all in black, from the tight t-shirt stretched over his chest and his black jeans to the black boots on his feet. There’s some mud on the boots, and dark circles under his pale green Collins eyes. His hair—sandy brown curls when they’re grown out—is mussed, and I see a smear of dirt near the black spade tattoo on the side of his throat.
I’m sure I look like hell, too, since I haven’t left my house in days, and I sure as fuck haven’t showered or shaved, but when I meet Dallas’s gaze, I don’t see pity. I don’t see sympathy or remorse, either.
I see vindication.
And then he says the three words I’ve been wanting to hear for six weeks, and I’m only hoping I’m not hallucinating them now as Dallas tells me: “We found her.”
The longest sixweeks of my life come to a close inside of a rundown warehouse in East Hamilton, a small town about two-and-a-half hours north of Harmony Heights.
I swear, if someone asks me what the shithole looked like, I don’t think I could tell them. Like, I know there was a gravel parking lot behind it with only a single nondescript white van in the lot. There were a couple of trees on one side, a couple of bay doors, and a side exit that became our target. That’s all I got because I wasn’t focusing on the outside of the warehouse.
Hell, no. It was all about what I would find inside.
Haven. Haven was supposed to be in there.
All along, I knew she wasn’t dead. Call me crazy, but if she was… I would’ve felt it. That’s the kind of connection I have with that woman. I would’ve known, and a part of me always suspected that while she might be in trouble, she’d be alive when I found her.
That doesn’t mean that I allowed myself to believe it right away. Hell, Dallas had to confirm it for me three separate times while I made him explain himself. Still groggy, I couldn’t understand where Haven was. She was alive, he assured me—or was the last time anyone set eyes on her. Since that was just last night, I had to believe she was okay… even if I wished that, instead of Dallas telling me that ‘we’ found her, he was shoving an alive-and-well Haven at me.
In the end, it was actually Adrian who got the tip. He’d been using every contact that he’s made over the years as the Order’s de facto money man to get a lead on what happened to Haven Smith. Not because he changed his mind and decided to Claimher after all. He would never do that to me, and since he didn’t want to see me suffer, he was determined to bring Haven back.
I don’t know where Haven was kept the past six weeks. Only that, two days ago, she was seen riding in the front seat of a white van, curled up in the passenger seat, staring like a zombie out the side window. That was what caught some good samaritan’s attention. A vacant stare, and a flinch when the other driver rolled down their window, trying to get Haven’s attention, asking if she was okay.
It seemed like Haven jolted, and the guy driving the van cut over two lanes of traffic to get away from the samaritan. Concerned, they tried to follow the van, losing them when the van took a quick exit off the highway. They did get a license plate, though, and enough of a description that it flagged one of the parameters in a search Adrian had set.
It was her eyes. Not many people have stormy grey eyes like my Haven, and when that popped, followed by the license plate belonging to Snowfall, Inc. and its CEO and proprietor, James Winter, Adrian had the first lead in weeks.
