Page 78 of Knuckles & Knives
“Absolutely,” Kieran agrees, pressing a kiss to my shoulder.
“No regrets,” Axel adds, his usual wild energy subdued to something warm and tender.
“Never,” Marcus confirms, his analytical mind for once completely focused on emotion rather than strategy.
We lie there as the sun rises, five people who’ve become something more than the sum of their parts. Tomorrow night we’ll face the greatest challenge of our lives, but right now, in this moment, we’re perfect.
We’re family. We’re united. We’re ready for war.
And whatever Richard Sterling throws at us, he’s about to learn what happens when you threaten something this precious, this powerful, this absolutely unbreakable.
The final battle is coming. But first, we had this night—this perfect, beautiful, connecting night that’s forged us into something unstoppable.
Now it’s time to show the world what we’ve become.
CHAPTER 24
The emergency alert comes at 6:47 AM, shattering the fragile afterglow of our night together. Marcus’s secure phone blares first, then Dom’s, Kieran’s, and Axel’s in a cascade of urgency. We’re instantly alert.
“Talk to me,” Marcus says into his phone, already moving toward his emergency laptop setup while the rest of us gather around him.
The voice on the other end is one of his deep-cover assets, words crackling through encrypted channels with barely controlled panic. “Sterling knows. Everything. Your girl’s real identity, your alliances, the safe houses, finances—he has it all.”
My blood turns to ice. “How?”
Marcus’s face is grim as he pulls up multiple screens, each one showing a different aspect of our suddenly compromised operation. “Comprehensive leak. This is elite intelligence—law enforcement, corporate, black market.”
“Show me,” I demand, wrapping a sheet around myself as I move to look over his shoulder.
Multiple monitors bloom with horror: dossiers on each of us, facial recognition scans, psych profiles. There I am—Raven Blackwood, daughter of Vincent. A target.
“This is professional grade intelligence,” Kieran observes, his business mind already calculating implications as he reads over the data. “Someone with access to law enforcement databases, corporate records, and underground networks.”
“More than that,” Dom growls, his enforcer instincts recognizing the threat pattern. “This is a kill dossier, not just surveillance. They’re gearing up for elimination.”
Axel appears at my other side, his wild energy channeled into deadly focus as he scans the information. “They know about the penthouse, the Obsidian, Marcus’s safe houses, even the backup extraction points we established yesterday.”
The scope of the leak is devastating. Every advantage we thought we had, every secret we thought we kept, laid bare for our enemies to exploit.
Marcus’s face is a storm—rage, disbelief, something dangerously close to guilt. “They outmaneuvered me. I should’ve seen it coming.”
I touch his arm. “We’ll fix it. Together.”
“This isn’t code we’re rewriting,” he says. “This is blood, and they’re already spilling it.”
“Who else has access to this level of information about us?” I ask, though part of me already dreads the answer.
Marcus’s fingers fly over his keyboard, cross-referencing data sources and tracking digital footprints. “Limited pool. This required access to Sterling intelligence networks, law enforcement databases, and detailed surveillance of all our operations over the past six months.”
“Internal leak,” Dom says flatly. “Has to be. Someone close enough to observe all of us, with connections to feed information to Sterling.”
Someone we trusted, someone who’s been in our inner circle, has systematically betrayed every piece of intelligence that could destroy us.
“We’ll hunt them down later,” I say, forcing my mind toward immediate tactical concerns. “Right now, we need to assess damage and adapt. How exposed are we?”
“Completely,” Marcus replies grimly. “They know our assault plan for tonight, our backup strategies, even our individual psychological profiles and how we’re likely to react under pressure.”
Kieran moves to the windows, his sharp eyes scanning the street below. “More immediate problem. If they have this level of intelligence, they’re not waiting for us to come to them.”
