Page 107 of The Viper
She coughed, blood flecking her lips. “Don’t …”
“What?” I leaned closer. “Don’t what?”
Her fingers went slack. Her eyes rolled back.
“Pulse is weak!” someone shouted.
I couldn’t breathe. The world narrowed to the sound of sirens getting closer, the blur of uniforms rushing in, hands pulling me back.
“Ms. Montgomery, you need to step away.”
I stumbled, my palms slick with her blood. Carrie caught me before I hit the ground. “Come on,” she whispered. “Let them work.”
But I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t stop seeing the moment she turned toward me—the calm, the surrender, the way she’d saidyou already know.
I didn’t. Not really.
As I watched them lift her onto the stretcher, something cold and certain settled in my chest. Someone had been pulling the strings all along. Someone close. Hannah.
And whatever Hannah had gotten tangled in—it wasn’t over.
I stood there in the driveway, the sun burning hot on my face, the world spinning out beneath my feet. The paramedics loaded her into the ambulance, doors slamming shut, sirens wailing as they sped away.
Franklin’s voice was somewhere behind me, barking into his phone, security radios crackling, but I barely heard it.
I could still feel her hand in mine. Cold. Trembling. Trusting me with a secret she hadn’t been able to say.
Carrie’s voice broke through, soft and scared. “Lexi … what did she mean?”
I stared at the empty road where the ambulance had gone.
“I don’t know,” I said. My throat burned. “But I’m going to find out.”
I lifted my gaze to the house, to the shattered window above, where the curtain still fluttered.
I watched the ambulance disappear down the road and felt the world contract until it was nothing but the hollowed-out space Hannah had left behind. The sirens receded and the noise of the set came back in shards. My chest ached with a dozen things at once: grief, anger, a cold, keening fury that wanted someone to answer for this. But beneath it all there was something steadier, a line of clarity.
Dominion Hall had my back now. The men there—Lucas, Noah, Ethan, Atlas, Ryker, Elias, and the others—moved with the single-mindedness of people who protected what they loved. They didn’t look at me like I was a liability or a problem to be managed by PR. They moved like family. That mattered. That made them allies in the only way that will help me now: withmuscle, with reach, and with a kind of fierce loyalty that isn’t performative.
Someone had sent a message in a red rose. They thought they’d scared me back into whatever corner they wanted. They were wrong. I would be there when Dominion Hall got their hands on whoever Hannah had gotten tangled up with. And we would make them pay.
I wiped my hands on my jeans, squared my shoulders, and walked back toward the house. The curtain over the broken window still fluttered, and I let that small, stubborn movement be a promise: This wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot.
36
LUCAS
The condo was dead quiet.
I'd been sitting in the dark for over an hour, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the building settling. My pistol rested on my thigh, finger off the trigger but ready. Waiting was part of the job—I'd spent days in hides, watching targets through scopes, breathing shallow, heart rate controlled. But this was different.
This was personal.
Every minute that ticked by was another minute Lexi was without me, another minute these bastards had to make their next move. My jaw ached from clenching, tension coiling tighter with each passing second. I'd made the call to stay, and I stood by it. But that didn't make it easier.
The sound of voices in the hallway snapped me to attention.
Male. Young. Laughing.
