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)
I listen, breathless, captivated, and devastated as he shares glimpses into his imprisoned childhood with Leo and Kody. The harrowing helplessness they must have felt, trapped and motherless, with only their captor to raise them.
But they escaped. They learned how to fly, left the horrors behind, and built a happy life on this paradise island.
They’re finally safe, and they need to stay that way.
Four walls, no windows, and a single door bolted from the inside. This is my confession booth. A concrete tool shed behind an abandoned house on a dead-end road that no one visits.
Just a couple of blocks from the tattoo shop, dead freight piles up outside. Busted pallets lean against the weathered blue exterior.
Blue princess.
Nobody looks twice.
Inside, though? Inside is mine. Stacks of towers. Rows of monitors. Thirty eyes, all open and unblinking.
Here lies the equipment Wolf asked to see.
My hunting ground.
I lean back in the chair, fingers spidering over the keyboard, pulling up feeds.
Thanks to Frankie Strakh, I can type with both hands again, only slightly limited by the splint on my wrist.
The screen on my left streams in real time, showing footage from the street outside this room. The one above it loops through the morning hours, time stamp after time stamp.
All the rest, dozens of displays, monitor Dove’s walking paths to the mechanic shop, inside the garage bays, the deli where she grabs lunch, the private slips where she comes and goes by yacht. Every angle of her little Alaskan life recorded in grainy black-and-white.
Except the island. The Strakh fortress is impenetrable.
For everyone but me.
I take grim satisfaction in knowing which island is theirs and how to breach the security.
But I’m backed into a corner. If I drag her out now, I’ll lose the bodyguards who are protecting her. If I leave her there, I’ll lose her to Wolf.
Either way, one of us gets hurt.
Better me than her.
She’s safe with the Strakhs. Safer than she ever was with Gavin.
Safer than she is with me.
I hate that.
Since the night I butchered our parents’ murderer, I’ve been on the run, using fake names everywhere, from Colombia to Bangkok, across borders and burner phones. But Sitka Tattoo carries my real name. A signal flare in the night. Not because I want to be found, but because I want to see who’s brave enough to come looking.
Last year, the feds found me in California. But the tail on Dove yesterday and today? That wasn’t government-issued.
A far deadlier threat has arrived in Sitka, and I’m not ready. I don’t have the money or manpower to win this war.
It’s time to call in a favor.
I reach for a burner phone and hesitate, the splint on my wrist transporting me back to this morning.
The shape of Wolf’s mouth against mine, the taste of his defiance, the punishing hand job, the way he didn’t pull away, and the moment I realized he isn’t just another mark.
There’s no denying it. He was into it, into me, and goddammit, I didn’t want him to leave.
My fever took hours to break, but I wanted another round with that complicated dark angel and his vicious hands. More conversation, more heat, more of that razor-wire tension that makes me feel alive. But he bolted. Like I knew he would.
Did he run straight to Dove? Put his cruel mouth all over her? Shove his virgin cock up between her legs? Slack all that wild hunger I stirred in him?
Grinding my teeth hard enough to crack enamel, I shove closer to the keyboard and click back to earlier footage, the minutes after he fled the shop.
Where are you, Wolf? Where did you go?
There.
I scrub forward, camera by camera, and watch him stagger down the street. Shoulders tight, gait unsteady, he walks like his legs don’t trust him, like he’s drowning in air.
What the hell is wrong with him?
When he heads to the harbor, I split the feed between two angles. At the entrance, he stumbles, falling down the embankment and tucking under the pier, knees pulled to his chest, and arms wrapped around his skull.
Small as I’ve ever seen him. Like a child hiding from the belt. Shaking, clutching his hair, mouth open on a sound the recording doesn’t capture.
But I feel it. Real, unguarded, paralyzing panic. He’s having a full-blown attack.
A vein throbs in my temple.
I should enjoy this. I should take notes and catalog the weakness. Watch, record, exploit. Every tic, every flinch, every strangled gasp is ammunition. That’s what I do, what I’ve always done to protect my little bird.
But I’m not cataloging. I’m staring with a hundred-pound lump in my throat.
He tries to get up. Tries to board the yacht. The crowd presses too close. Someone bumps into him, and he snaps like a wild dog, snarling and baring his teeth.
People scatter. He bites at the air, chest heaving, face half-mad.