Page 206 of My Unhinged Alphas
Marek plants his feet for half a second, then Vale shoulders in beside him, and the door gives. Marek stumbles backward into the apartment with a curse, and we follow him in before he can decide whether to shout.
“We’re closed,” he says.
“We need some help,” I tell him.
He looks from me to Vale to Havoc and understands all at once that this is not social.
The apartment is small and careful. Desk against the far wall. Curtains drawn. Three burners on the stove, none used tonight.Router lights blinking under a shelf. Everything arranged for a man who spends a lot of time watching other people’s mistakes and very little time making his own.
“Do you make a habit of breaking into places when you want favors?”
“Only the places of people who might say no,” Havoc says.
Marek glares at him. “Charming.”
“No,” Vale says, voice flat. “Urgent.”
That gets him to really look at us.
He says, more carefully, “What happened?”
I open my mouth. For one second, nothing comes out.
We had cleared the house first. Every room. Every door. Every blind corner. Havoc took the upper floor with Vale while I hit the downstairs again because I didn’t trust my own eyes anymore. We checked bathrooms, closets, under beds, behind curtains, window locks, every useless square foot of polished floor and rich silence.
No Lena.
At first I told myself she had moved. That she was in another room and one of us had missed it in the panic.
Then I went back to the bedroom.
The bed was wrong. Not ruined. Not torn apart. Just wrong. One side of the blanket folded back too neatly. The air still carrying that faint chemical sweetness beneath sex and sleep and steam. I could smell it before I wanted to admit what it was.
Chloroform.
Havoc found the hidden seam in the wall paneling beside the built-in wardrobe. Vale forced it open. Behind it, a narrow stairwell dropped into darkness, unfinished wood and concrete, service architecture disguised inside the room like the house had been built for this from the beginning.
On the third step down, there was a bracelet.
Lena’s.
Small. Bent at the clasp where it had caught on something. Still warm from the room above or my imagination, I couldn’t tell which.
That was how they got in. That was how they took her.
Right out of the middle of us.
I picked up that bracelet and knew, with a certainty so complete it felt like being hollowed out, that we had not merely been found. We had been mapped. Studied. Positioned. Someone knew where she would be and how to reach her without waking the rest of us in time.
Someone set us up.
And all I could think, standing there with her bracelet in my hand, was that I had failed her. I had let myself believe one locked door and one night’s trust could hold against whatever was coming. I had kissed her and told her I’d keep her safe, and somewhere between that promise and sunrise the floor had opened beneath us.
Marek says, “Knox.”
I blink and the apartment comes back into focus.
Marek is still standing three feet inside his own doorway, looking from one of us to the other like he’s trying to decide whether throwing us back out is worth the attempt. It isn’t. We all know it. Havoc is already too far in, leaning one shoulder against the wall like he belongs here. Vale is quiet beside me, bruised face unreadable in the low light. I can still feel the edge of the empty bed in my hands, the shape of the hidden stairwell, the bright little glint of Lena’s bracelet caught on splintered wood.
