Page 108 of Risky Passion

But I shoved those thoughts aside. Negative thinking never helped us find Charlotte, and it wasn’t going to help now. If I let doubt creep in, it would only weigh me down, and I couldn’t afford that. Not when lives were on the line.

Onyx paused, her nose hovering near a mangled slab of tin. Her ears flicked, and her body stiffened, every muscle coiled like a spring.

“Good girl,” I whispered, my heart pounding.

The countdown didn’t matter. The odds didn’t matter.

Blade and Viper were in here.

And we were going to find them.

I followed Onyx’s lead, scanning the debris field. Every step across the twisted wreckage was a fight against gravity, and one wrong move and I’d be eating steal and shit. Shattered beams jutted out like broken ribs. Glass shards sparkled in the sunlight, crunching under the boots I’d borrowed from Parker. Scents of scorched wood mingled with the ocean breeze. But there was also something else. Something metallic, bitter, and wrong. C4 powder maybe. I refused to believe it was anything worse.

“Good girl,” I murmured as Onyx paused near a collapsed section of corrugated iron. Her tail stiffened, nose pressing low, inhaling deep. That was her tell. She’d found something.

I shifted a buckled sheet of corrugated iron, the damn ground tilted beneath my boots, and I froze.

Above, a rusted beam let out a low groan, like the fucking thing was tell me to get the hell away. Onyx, however, didn’t waver.

“Show me, girl,” I said, keeping my voice steady.

She moved forward, threading through a narrow gap in the rubble with the precision of a predator on the hunt. I followed, ducking under a jagged sheet of iron that threatened to take off my head. The air became hotter and somehow thicker, and the stench of charred wood and ash filled my nostrils. Sweat trickled down my spine, soaking into my T-shirt as I crawled deeper.

My knees scraped against something solid. Not tin. Not rubble. Floorboards. Weathered, splintered, but unmistakable.

My chest tightened with a flicker of hope.

Yes. We’ve reached the warehouse floor.

I paused, catching my breath as I panned my flashlight over the chaos. The beam swept across the wreckage, illuminating jagged edges of broken timber and twisted metal. The devastation was overwhelming, a labyrinth of destruction where every step felt like a gamble.

Nobody else had made it this far. The other search teams had kept back, fearing the remaining beams, the few that hadn’t already collapsed in the fall, would come crashing down at any second.

But I wasn’t stopping. If they were alive, they would be somewhere in this section.

The creaking of the structure above me was a constant reminder of just how dangerously close we were to disaster, but I couldn’t let it get to me. I couldn’t let fear win.

Blade and Viper are down here.Keep moving.

“Good girl,” I murmured, resting my hand on Onyx’s back before reaching for my comms. I pressed the button. “We’ve breached the rubble. Going in.”

“Copy that,” Captain Watts’s reply crackled through the static. Hehad been talking about retirement for years. Maybe this disaster would finally push him over the edge.

All the more reason to make sure this operation ended on a high note.

“Onyx, lead,” I said, and Onyx surged forward.

The space narrowed, pressing in from all sides. The air was suffocating. Hotter and somehow thicker.

Onyx froze again, her body rigid but vibrating with tension, like high-tensile wire about to snap. Her nose hovered just above a patch of splintered timber, nostrils flaring as she caught something I couldn’t see.

I crawled in beside her, squinting at the spot, and found a faint outline of something. Fabric maybe? It was hard to tell.

“Good girl,” I said as my pulse quickened.

I brushed away the debris with my gloved fingers and found a torn scrap of fabric, frayed and stiff with what had to be blood, around it was a dark stain on the wood.

Captain Watts had briefed me on what Aria had seen before the explosion: Grant Hughes, strapped to a chair in the center of the warehouse, his head slumped forward, unconscious. His bandaged, amputated legs and hospital gown confirmed his kidnapper had brought him there from the hospital. As Blade checked Grant’s neck for a pulse, Viper had yelled at all of them to run. Maya had sprinted toward Aria, blocking her view of Viper and Blade, and from that moment to when she woke up in the hospital bed, her memory was a blank slate.

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