Page 137 of Vows of Ruin

She means the panic attack. She means the fainting. But the way her eyes move over me, quick, soft, professional. It’s subtle but makes me think she is more worried than she is letting on.

Max steps closer again. “She’ll be okay. I’ll make sure.”

Doc lifts an eyebrow. “See that you do.”

She moves off to check Torque's gear, leaving Max and me alone again for a moment. He helps adjust my vest, straps tightening around my ribs. He hesitates. “You ready?” he asks quietly.

I look at him. In a room full of people who would die for us. At the empty space where Liam should be. “No,” I say. “This shouldn’t have to be a mission, but here we go.”

The air outside is cool, sharp, humming with storm-level tension. The mansion lights spill across the gravel driveway where every Serpent, including the ones who don’t normally mobilize, waits in rows beside black SUVs and blacked-out motorcycles. Engines rumble, low and dangerous, like they know where we’re going. Like they know who we’re going to bring home.

I stand between Max and Torque, my hands braced on the hood of the lead SUV as everyone gathers around us. Riot swings a leg over his bike, visor up, eyes locked on me. Wrecker stands at the passenger door, jaw ticking. Elias and Margot load gear into the back of the middle SUV. Doc checks the last of her supplies and slides into the car behind them.

Everyone waits. Everyone listens. My stomach knots, tight and sharp. But my voice comes out steady. Quiet and lethal. “You all know why we’re here,” I say. No one flinches. No one shifts. They just lean in closer, the way soldiers lean in before a war. “Sebastian has Reaper,” I continue. “We don’t know what he’s done. But we know one thing—” I lift my chin, eyes sweeping the entire line of them. “—We’re getting him back.”

Torque nods, Riot slams his visor down. Max stands so close to me I can feel the heat of him. I keep going. “This isn’t a rescue,” I say. “It’s extraction. It’s retaliation. It’s a message.”

A few men murmur in agreement. Weapons click into holsters like punctuation. My voice drops to a razor’s edge. “And listen to me—listen carefully—because this part matters more than anything.”

Silence. Even the engines seem to be quiet. “Everyone comes home.” My chest tightens, but my tone does not. “That’s not negotiable. We go in together. We leave together. No one deviates. No one plays the hero. Not even me.”

Torque huffs a rough laugh at that. Max’s hand finds the small of my back, steadying but not soft. I take one step forward. “If something happens to any of you,” I say. “Reaper will never forgive me. And I refuse to disappoint him. So, I’m telling you now, I will burn that entire district to the ground before I lose another one of you.”

A ripple goes through the group. Fury. Loyalty. Resolve. Riot revs his bike once in answer. Torque taps the SUV, Elias gives a sharp nod from his position. Max looks at me like he did, when Liam slipped the Serpent symbol around my neck, a crown I claimed for myself. Wrecker murmurs something in Italian that sounds like approval.

I lift my voice, not shouting, just commanding. “Load up!”

The war machine moves instantly. SUV doors slam. Bikes roar to life. Weapons are checked, chambered, and clipped. Max heads for the driver’s seat of our SUV, but I grab his jacket and pull him back for a second. “Stay with me,” I say quietly.

“Always,” he replies.

The convoy lines up, three SUVs in front. Two in back. Six bikes splitting formation. Serpent insignias glinting under the lights.

Elias calls out over comms. “GPS locked. Last tracker pinged, East industrial district. Moving out.”

Torque climbs into the front passenger seat of the lead SUV, eyes forward like he’s already seeing the battlefield. I take my spot in the backseat behind Max in the driver's seat, heart pounding in a slow, terrifying rhythm. The gate ahead of us creaks as it opens. Max shifts into drive. I take a breath, slow and sharp, and look ahead at the dark road stretching toward the place where Liam’s signal hit before he came home and cut out his tracker. The place he walked into alone.

“Hold on,” Max murmurs as the engine growls. And then, we move. A fleet of engines roaring into the night. A convoy fueled by fury, fear, and the kind of devotion that will flatten a city if it means bringing my husband home.

The mansion disappears behind us. The hunt begins.

Chapter Fifty

Reaper

Consciousness comes and goes in sharp, jagged flashes. Pain is a hum now, low, steady, threaded through my nerves like a second heartbeat. I can feel the slower parts of it, the bruising, the deep ache in my joints, the sting beneath my ribs.

The sharper parts come next. Sebastian steps back into my field of vision, rolling his sleeves like he’s preparing to cook, not carve. “You know,” he says conversationally. “I didn’t expect you to last this long.”

I lift my head as much as the restraints allow. “Then you don’t know shit about soldiers.”

He smiles. “Oh, I know plenty, and they all break so beautifully.” He presses something against the inside of my arm. A metal rod. The ends are rounded, almost smooth. Almost. Pressure builds first. A slow, twisting push into the muscle. Not piercing, but grinding. A white-hot bolt shoots through the nerves up to my shoulders. The kind of pain meant to break breathing, break resolve.

My breath rips in short, sharp pulls. But I don’t give him the scream he wants. Instead, I laugh. It’s strangled, ugly and wet. But it’s a laugh. Sebastian stops mid-twist.

“There it is,” I rasp, voice slurred from the pain. “The look on your face. Confusion.”

He inhales sharply. Then twists the rod again. My vision explodes in a burst of white heat. My body jerks against the cross. My ribs tremble. Inside, something in me buckles, the place where I store the ghosts from the military. The smells, the sounds, the moments I don’t talk about. My mind slips for a second. Just a second. Enough to see.