Page 133 of The Vigilant

He was my prey now.

I bent forward. “Kang is dead. Your men are dead. Your operation here—done. The only thing you have left is your life,” I said low. “You want that, tell me where Mara Chen is.”

Behind me, I heard Tynan’s footsteps stop. He wasn’t close. He didn’t stand right next to me and use his stature or his weapon to intimidate Carson. No, he let me do that all on my own.

“Where’s Mara?” The tip of my knife broke his skin.

“Back corner. Cage,” he gritted, the hope to live in his gaze extinguished with wide eyes as I drove the knife through the center of his throat.

The women he’d kidnapped and trafficked never had a choice, why the fuck should he?

I didn’t stick around to see his body fall.

“Mara!” I pulled my knife free and sprinted down the aisle. I didn’t care how every footfall made my head burst with pain. I didn’t care that blood from my scalp was running down my chest.

I didn’t care about anything except finally finding my friend.

The aisles wove in a path that funneled to the back corner of the warehouse where the shipping containers housed humans. The doors had been broken open, the women inside in various shades of unconsciousness.

They were safe now. Still, my chest felt impossibly tight.

I knew I was near the back corner because I could see it on the ceiling. My steps slowed as I rounded the last container and then stopped.

Ahead of me, men—Carson’s men judging by their automatic weapons—lay in a path of broken bodies leading to the large cage at the end.

An empty cage.

No.

No. No. No.

“What the hell?” Tynan’s voice rumbled behind me, and I shot forward, weaving through the bodies until I reached the door.

“Sutton…”

I stepped inside, dragging in deep breaths as adrenaline and fear finally started to make my body shake.

A mattress on the floor. A single blanket. A bucket in the other corner.

Maybe it wasn’t Mara who’d been here. Maybe Carson lied and she was in one of the containers. Maybe…

My failing attempt at hope sagged completely when I lifted the blanket off the floor and saw the truth staring back at me; between the bars, someone had scratched a crude wasp into the floor.

“She was here.” I finally looked at him. “Mara was here.”

His arms were around me, and only then did I break.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Tynan

There was a mess to handle, and Sutton refused to leave until there was nothing more to do. And until she was sure with her own two eyes that Mara was nowhere in the warehouse.

With Creed’s help, she and Robyn retrieved the women from the shipping containers. Unfortunately, none of them were Mara, and all of them had been kept in such a drugged, docile state that no one could remember the girl in the cage.

The total came in at sixty-seven women who’d been kidnapped and held hostage, waiting to be sold. Meanwhile, Harm, Dare, and I dealt with the dead, cataloging names and faces for our own files.

“We didn’t kill these men,” Dare muttered out of earshot of Sutton.

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