Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
I hate how helpless time makes you. It doesn’t care about love. Or fear. Or promises.
When the sun starts to fade, I move. I shower. I braid my hair tight. I put on black jeans and boots that can run or kick or both.
I’m aiming for understated lethal. Then I open the side closet and pull out the mask. The one I brought because I never fully trust “safe.” The one I promised myself I wouldn’t need again.
I hold it in my hands for a long beat.
Then I strap it on.
The last thing I grab is my bat.
I tuck a compact blade into my boot. I slide a burner into my pocket. And then, I check myself in the mirror.
The woman staring back at me is not a little sister. Not a crush. Not a girl waiting to be rescued.
She’s a weapon who learned love isn’t passive. Love is action. Love is showing up.
Night settles over Halo City like a curtain. By the time I’m two blocks from The Monarch, I can hear it. Bass thumping faintly through the pavement. Laughter spilling out in sharp bursts. The glow of wealth and rot.
The front entrance is exactly what I expected: lavish, guarded, expensive in the way that screams we can erase you with a phone call.
I don’t go near it.
I cut around.
My footsteps are quiet in the alley. The dumpsters smell like old beer and bad secrets. The brick walls are tagged with graffiti that looks like warnings if you know how to read them.
I keep my head down and keep moving. Two blocks off the main strip, I find the service entrance Arrow mentioned. It’s a metal door with a keypad that looks ten years out of date. There’s a security camera angled slightly too high to be useful.
My pulse steadies. This is the part where fear becomes focus. I press my ear to the door and hear muffled voices. There’s also music like a heartbeat.
The kind of place that swallows people whole.
“Knight,” I whisper, not a prayer—more like a promise.
I’m not here to ruin his plan.
I’m here because if he’s in trouble, there is no universe where I let him face it alone.
I grip the bat tighter.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
And step into the shadows of The Monarch—
ready to drag my reckless, romantic, infuriating man back into the light.
TWENTY-ONE
THE MONARCH BASEMENT
KNIGHT
The basement smells like bleach, cigar smoke, and the kind of money that thinks consequences are for poor people.
I’ve been down here long enough to memorize the drip pattern from a pipe overhead. Long enough to count the cracks in the concrete. Long enough to hate myself for every second I believed I could end this without Lark getting pulled into the blast radius.
My wrists are zip-tied to a steel chair bolted into the floor. My mouth tastes like blood. My ribs feel like they had a meeting and voted to mutiny. And the worst part? I’m not even surprised.
The Monarch is built like a predator’s nest.
Upstairs is velvet and deception—private booths, red-lit hallways, guards in expensive suits who smile like they’re thinking about your obituary.
Down here is where the truth lives.
I made it past the service entrance with Arrow’s intel, faked a maintenance identity, slipped into back corridors long enough to spot three things that confirmed my gut:
Luka’s security footprint is bigger than a club needs.
There are new faces I don’t recognize—teams rented from somewhere else.
The supply room has a second door that doesn’t exist on the building schematics.
I didn’t get to investigate number three. Because a man with a tattooed throat and eyes like shark glass recognized me.
He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t have to, but the smile he gave me was all teeth. Then the world got fast. He put his hands on my shoulders. And pressed a gun to my ribs.
With a calm voice in my ear, he said, “Boss has been hoping you’d visit.”
I fought. Because of course I did. I took two of them down before the third cracked a baton into the back of my skull and turned my vision into fireworks.
When I woke up, I was here.
Everything after that is a slow-motion punishment. Hours of silence. The occasional footstep overhead. A guard checking my restraints with bored efficiency. The kind of captivity designed to make you feel insignificant.
I don’t feel insignificant.
I feel furious.
Because Lark is out there, and I left her behind like that was protection instead of a lie I told myself to justify doing something reckless.
I promised her together.
Then I broke it. And if I live through this, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
The steel door at the top of the stairs scrapes open. Sound carries weirdly in basements—every footfall is amplified into something ceremonial.
Slow.
Deliberate.
A performance.
The guards speak first. “Boss.”
My spine goes rigid. Because I’ve never met Viktor Luka in person. But I’ve seen the photos in our compiled threat documents. I’ve studied the face. The history. The pattern of blood and bribery he leaves behind like a signature.