Page 28 of Reckless: Chaos

The tactical team secures the perimeter, but I already know they won’t find our hunter. Someone that precise, that practiced, doesn’t get caught unless they want to be.

“Sir?” One of Quinn’s people approaches cautiously. “Alpha Locke is two minutes out.”

“Fantastic.” I adjust Cayenne more securely in my arms as the medics finish bandaging her shoulder. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell him I died heroically in the firefight?”

Cayenne’s laugh turns into a pained cough. “He’ll just resurrect you to kill you himself.”

“True.” I press my lips to her forehead, inhaling the scent of gunpowder and courage and pure stupid sacrifice. “Worth it though.”

“Yeah?” Her eyes are getting heavy, but she fights to keep them open.

“Yeah.” I watch the door, waiting for our Alpha to arrive and tear my world apart. But I have Cayenne’s blood on my costume and her trust in my arms, and somehow that makes everything else bearable. “Some performances are worth any price.”

Her breathing evens out as she finally lets the medication pull her under. I hold her closer, remembering those green eyes behind the mask. The way they’d widened when she fell. The familiar gold flecks that now haunt my memories.

Something tells me this was just the opening act.

And the next performance might cost us everything.

Chapter 7

Cayenne

Consciousness returnsin fragments like corrupted data packets. Theo’s voice rising an octave above its usual melody. Jinx’s throat making that distinct wet gurgle as they peel fabric from my wound, his boots scuffing as he stumbles away. Ryker’s words piercing the haze—staccato and precise, each syllable functioning like a command prompt that forces order into chaos.

“Hold her.” A stranger’s voice. “This is going to hurt.”

Pain blazed white-hot through my shoulder as they dug for the bullet. I think I screamed. I know I fought. It took all four of them to hold me down—Theo crying, Jinx still gagging, Finn murmuring statistics about survival rates, and Ryker... Ryker’s hands gentle on my face even as his voice carried enough alpha command to drop a charging rhino.

“Stay with us, little hacker. That’s an order.”

The next few hours blur into a morphine haze of movement. Being carried. The scratch of strange sheets. The sharp antiseptic smell of a medical facility. Voices arguing about security versus proper medical care.

I surface slowly through layers of chemical fog, awareness returning in patches like a fragmented hard drive rebuilding itself.

“Never again.” Ryker’s voice slices through my painkiller haze like a system breach alert, carrying all the warmth of a midwinter server crash.

“She really is fearless.” Finn’s attempt at clinical detachment fractures around the edges, betraying the tremor underneath. His fingers tap an anxious rhythm against the medical chart he’s been studying for the past hour, like debugging code that refuses to compile.

“Or stupid.” The rawness in Jinx’s voice feels like someone took a razor to my code. He’s been pacing the same three-meter strip of floor since they brought me in, movements sharp and feral.

“Brave.” Theo’s musical tone carries a discordant note I’ve never heard before, like a corrupted audio file. He hasn’t left my bedside, his omega scent thick with distress and guilt. The bullet was meant for him. We both know it.

“Idiotic.” Ryker again, his words landing with the finality of a kill switch. He stands at parade rest by the window, silhouetted against city lights that blur and shift in my drug-hazed vision. The rigid line of his shoulders broadcasts fury, but his scent... his scent tells a different story. Cedar and steel wrapped in something that smells suspiciously like fear.

“I’m so proud of her.” Pride bleeds through Finn’s analytical façade like a poorly patched security hole. The sound of paper rustling suggests he’s reviewing my charts again, probably calculating drug dosages and recovery timelines with that beautiful statistical brain of his.

“Fucking foolish.” Jinx’s voice splinters, each syllable sharp enough to rival the burning in my shoulder. His pacing stutters to a halt as he turns to stare at me with eyes that glow like warning lights in the dark.

Their voices ping around my consciousness like persistent malware alerts, a symphony of concern I can’t quite quarantine.The sounds weave together, creating patterns my drug-addled brain tries to decrypt without success. Everything feels soft around the edges, reality buffering at 56k modem speeds.

“Let a girl sleep,” I mumble, the words executing with all the processing power of Windows 95. Whatever they’re pumping through my IV must be military grade—the kind usually reserved for feral alphas or, apparently, betas stupid enough to take bullets for their pack.

Wait.

Not their pack. The pack. Just... the pack.

A correction flag I’ll have to debug later when my system isn’t running on backup power. The thought makes me snicker internally. Look at that—even mostly offline, I still make terrible tech puns.

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