Page 3 of Red Dreams

The last thing I'd seen was Kaden’s face twisted in anguish. The last thing he'd seen was his daughter orchestrating my abduction.

Both of us helpless to stop it.

A sob rips from my throat, but I force myself to keep watching. To witness every second of our separation, to burn it into my memory in case it’s all I have left.

“Your biggest weakness?” Cassie prods. “It's not your fear. It's not even your need for him. It's that you actually believe love can save a monster like my father.”

“You're wrong,” I whisper, but the words catch in my throat as she pulls out a rope of red licorice and chews on it like she’s eating movie theater snacks. “The real monster is what Morelli turned you into.”

Her face contorts before she spits a wad of chewed-up licorice at my face. It lands against my cheek with a wet smack before sliding down my chest and landing between my knees on the floor.

“I’ve seeneverything,” Cassie seethes. “Every nightmare he gave you, every time he made you come. And now?” She trails a finger down my cheek, following the path of her sugar-sweet saliva. “Now I get to break you the same way Morelli broke me. Only this time, Daddy gets to watch.”

2

KADEN

The bullet in my shoulder burns like hellfire as I force myself back to consciousness. Layla's scream as she was dragged away echoes in my mind; the last thing I heard and saw before everything went black. As I blink awake in what seems to be a basement, panic grips my soul.

Where the fuck is Layla?

I try to sit up, but a wave of dizziness slams me back down onto the couch. The room spins, and I clutch the torn upholstery, willing the nausea away. I need to move. I need to find her.

A figure stirs in the dim light. For a moment, hope surges—Layla?

But as my vision clears, I see it's Ethan, hunched over a neon-orange plastic desk and sitting in a tiny yellow chair, the glow of his laptop illuminating his haggard face.

“Ethan,” I say, my voice one notch above a rasp.

He jumps, nearly knocking over an energy drink can. “You're awake!”

He scrambles over, worry etched on his face. “How—how are you feeling?”

“Like shit.” I wince, fighting the endless agony as I push myself up. “What happened? Where's Layla?”

Ethan's expression falls, and my stomach drops.

“I don't know,” he admits. “When I got to Pulse, it was chaos. Alarms blaring, security everywhere. I found you unconscious in a service corridor near the server room. Layla was ... gone.”

The amount of air in the room suddenly shrinks.

I grunt, grimacing as I shift on the couch. “You patch me up?”

Ethan nods, pushing his glasses up. “Yeah. CIA recruitment wasn't all computers. Basic field med was part of the training. They don’t tell people that, though … I’m probably not supposed to tell you that.”

It’s too easy to forget that the kid's got some skills beyond hacking, and that a dumb college prank kicked him out of likely becoming a successful spook. The way his stolen records explained it, Ethan never made it to the recruitment phase. Yet my stitches say otherwise. He could be an asset going forward. But then reality crashes back.

“How long?” I demand.

“You've been out for almost seventy-two hours,” Ethan says, his voice barely above a whisper. “I brought you to my cousin's place.”

I blearily glance around the room with small rectangular windows near the ceiling. A basement, then. In one corner, a plastic play kitchen overflows with miniature pots, pans, and brightly colored fake foods. Nearby, a tower of wooden blocks teeters precariously. A worn, patterned carpet stretches across the floor, its once vibrant colors now muted by years of spilled juice and stomping feet. The walls are a warm, inviting shade of yellow, though the paint is chipped in places.

Ethan adds, “He and his family are out of town, and I knew we needed to lay low.”

I tear my gaze away from a child’s prized doodles adorning the walls.

Seventy-two hours. Seventy-two fucking hours of Layla missing. The thought makes me sick.

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