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“Trix.” My voice is gravel dragged across rusted steel. I catch her chin, tilt her face up to mine, and run my thumb along her jaw with a gentleness that costs me everything. “I need you to go wait in the main room. With your mom.”

“Carter.”

“I need to do something.” The words are rough, scraped from the depths of me. “And I can’t—I won’t do it with you watching.”

Her hand finds my wrist, fingers pressing into the pulse, grounding me. “What are you going to do?”

I lock eyes with her, no way in hell I’m lying now. “I’m going to tear these motherfuckers apart, make ’em cough up every last goddamn thing. It’s going to be ugly.”

She doesn’t fucking flinch.

“Okay,” she breathes. Just that. No argument, no plea. Just trust wrapped in a single word.

It nearly destroys me.

I press my forehead to hers, breathing her in, her shampoo, blood, and that scent that’s just her, just Trixie, and for three heartbeats I let myself live in the space between what I am and what she makes me want to be.

“Jean.” I don’t look up. Can’t. “Take her.”

Jean appears, her hand finding Trixie’s elbow. I feel Trixie let go of my wrist, the absence a fresh wound, as her mother guides her to the door, arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders.

She looks back once. That look—no fear, no judgment, fierce, steady. The door shuts behind them.

Silence slams down, heavy and absolute. Not empty, charged, electric, the air before a storm. I turn slowly, and the room narrows to a single point: three men, zip-tied to chairs. They are all that stand between me and the information I need to protect what’s mine.

Greyson steps back, deliberate, hands in his pockets, relaxed, a man who knows when to pull back.

“He’s yours,” Greyson says quietly. No instructions. No cautions. Just the faith of a man who knows what I’m capable of and trusts me to know where the line is.

I crack my neck. Left, right. Vertebrae popping in a ritual I know by heart. This isn’t a fight. This is something else.

I grab a chair and drag it across the concrete. The legs shriek on the floor, the sound ricocheting off the walls like a gunshot. I plant it in front of the man from the bookstore, and drop into it, slow and steady, so close our knees almost touch. He can’t run.

His good eye watches me. The other is swollen and purpling at the edges, a trophy from the plunger. Up close, I see the scar on his jaw, a thin, surgical line from someone who knows how to handle a knife.

I lean forward, close enough to smell the blood’s copper tang, the fear-soaked sweat in his shirt.

“Marcus Caldwell,” I say, voice calm, measured. The voice I use when I’m holding it all back, just before the animal inside takes over. “Tell me everything.”

His tongue darts over his split lip. “I told you⁠—”

“You told me nothing.” I grip his jaw, thumb pressing into the hinge, fingers digging into the soft flesh under his ear. He makes a strangled sound, vibrating against my palm. “You gave me a name. That’s just the start. It’s not enough.”

“I don’t— He didn’t tell me⁠—”

I squeeze, not hard enough to break, just enough to remind him what holds his face together. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He contacts us through burner phones.”

“When’s the next contact?”

“Tomorrow. He said he’d call when it was done⁠—”

I bring my free hand up, press my thumb to his swollen eye. Not hard. Just enough pressure to turn the pain nuclear, to make his entire world shrink to this one, unbearable point.

He screams. The sound bounces off the walls, inhuman and distorted.

“When it was done,” I repeat, thumb still resting on his ruined eye. “When you had her. When you delivered her to him.”