Page 42 of Reckless: Collision

I stumble, nearly eating gravel.

“Shut up.” The words rip from my throat as I spot him behind a tree. Logic says he’s not there. The bullet I put in his head says he’s not there. But my broken mind?—

I bolt into the forest.

“Stop!” Birds scatter at my shout, their wings a thunderclap of judgment.

His laughter follows, echoing between trees like a twisted game of Marco Polo.

This isn’t working. I can’t go back to the house like this, can’t let them see me fracturing again. Especially not her.

I veer toward the gatehouse. No guards there, just AI systems that won’t judge my madness and a stash of marijuana to quiet the voices.

Except...

Movement catches my eye. A shadow where no shadow should be.

Everything in me goes still. The feral part of my brain that’s always hunting, always waiting for the next threat, rises to the surface.

Someone’s in our gatehouse.

I drop low, moving from tree to tree with predatory grace. The setting sun paints everything in blood-red warning signs. I catch his scent on the wind—alpha, smoke, foreign.

Kill him.

No. Focus. If we kill him, we can’t protect the pack. Can’t protect Cayenne.

Cayenne.

Red bleeds across my vision. What if he’s here for her?

I scale the nearest tree, muscles moving on pure instinct. From this height, I can see him clearly. Male. Alpha. The scent of gun oil clings to him like cheap cologne.

Threat.

My body moves before my mind can catch up. I launch myself at the fence—the one Ryker thinks can contain me—I’ll never tell him different. The world blurs as I sail over it, landing on the gatehouse roof silent as death.

“What the fu—” A door slams. “Who’s up?—”

I drop on him like judgment from above, driving him face-first into concrete. The crunch of bone on asphalt pleases my demons and I itch to do it again. “Who are you?”

“Hired.” He wheezes. “PCA.”

“Jinx!” Ryker’s voice cuts through the red haze a second before he slams into me.

My head cracks against concrete, and for a moment, I’m thirteen again, tasting blood and failure as my father’s ghost laughs?—

“What the fuck is happening?” Her voice. Sharp as citrus, sweet as sin. “Get off him!”

“Can’t do that, trouble.” Ryker’s weight pins me down, his scent sharp with alarm. Usually, he smells like cracked pepper and wilderness. Now he’s all storm-front warning, his alpha presence pressing down like a physical weight.

“Like fucking hell you can’t.”

A grunt, a shuffle, and suddenly Ryker’s weight vanishes. I suck in air that tastes like lemon drops and danger. Something in my fractured mind clicks back into place, just enough to process the scene around me.

Finn hovers at the edge of my vision, hands raised like he’s approaching a wild animal. Which, fair. Theo’s there too, his omega presence a steady anchor I can’t quite reach.

But it’s her—all fire and fury—that draws my predator’s focus. Her scent cuts through the chaos in my head like a blade of clarity—bright lemon and electric ozone, something that calls to the broken pieces of me in a way that shouldn’t be possible with a beta. The pack bonds pulse with shared recognition, and even through the red haze, I can feel it—the way her presence slots into our fractured pack like the missing piece we never knew we needed.

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