Page 159 of Crave
Jude stopped pacing. His gaze flicked toward the warehouse entrance, then back toward me. There was something there—something unreadable in his eyes—but before I could place it, he looked away.
I swallowed against the dryness in my throat. My pulse was too loud in my ears, the weight of everything pressing down harder, suffocating.
Silas had said we needed to move. That the house wasn’t safe. But was anywhere?
The radio crackled again, this time with something quieter. More urgent.
I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I saw the way Gabe’s expression changed.
Saw the way Theo went still.
Saw the way Jude’s fingers flexed at his sides.
And then Gabe turned toward me, his expression grim, his voice edged with something cold.
“They took someone.”
Took. Someone?
What did that even mean?
The moment I asked myself the question, images of blood and terror surfaced.
The world tilted.
I stepped forward, my stomach twisting. “Who?”
His gaze met mine, sharp as a blade.
“Penn Hargreaves.”
Penn?
As inmyPenn?
“What?” I didn’t understand. My mind struggled to keep up.
Silence settled over the warehouse like a storm about to break.
Penn was gone.
The words still hung in the air, suspended between us, crackling with something thick and wrong.
Theo was the first to react. His body jerked like a live wire, rage sharpening his every movement. “The fuck do you mean they took him? The Cartel?”
No one answered right away. Gabe was staring at the ground, jaw tight, and Jude had gone still. Too still.
Silas barely moved. His face was unreadable, but I could see it—the way his fingers curled slightly, the way his breathing slowed like he was working through the pieces of a puzzle he didn’t like the shape of.
“They don’t just take people,” Theo snapped, turning sharply toward Silas. “Why the fuck would they take him?”
Jude exhaled sharply, rubbing a hand over his mouth, his brows drawn together in something close to frustration. “It doesn’t make sense.”
I shifted, my stomach twisting. He was right. None of this made sense.
The Cartel didn’t take people alive. They killed them. Quickly, brutally, without hesitation. A bullet to the head. A knife to the throat.
But they had taken Penn. Alive.
