Page 55 of The Scout

“I don’t know.”

Her head snapped up. “This was last night?”

I nodded.

Her lips parted slightly, her shock morphing into something else. Something dangerous.

“You were in a pool? And someone was watching you?”

The weight of it pressed down on me all over again.

I hugged my arms around myself, my fingers digging into my skin. “Yes. And yes, looks like it.”

Sasha cursed under her breath.

She paced the small office, running a hand through her hair, muttering something about this being insane, about how she had heard rumors about the men at Dominion Hall.

I frowned. “What rumors?”

Sasha hesitated.

Then, she sighed. “Look, I don’t know if any of it’s true, but people talk. They say those guys don’t just run a business. That they handle problems the way normal people don’t.”

A chill crept down my spine.

“Like what?” I pressed.

Sasha met my gaze, her expression serious.

“Like bodies disappear when they need to.”

The words hung between us, thick and suffocating.

I swallowed.

I had always known that Ryker wasn’t like other men. That his world wasn’t clean. But he wasn’t the only danger. Someone else had been watching me.

And now? Now I had no idea who to be afraid of.

18

RYKER

Iwas already pissed. The fact that my tech team couldn’t trace the text message Isabel received only sent me deeper into the kind of rage that made men fear me.

“You’re telling me,” I said slowly, barely keeping my voice even, “that with all the fucking resources we have, you can’t tell me who sent a goddamn text?”

Elias, our head of cyber ops, shifted in his seat, looking just uncomfortable enough to tell me he knew exactly how much trouble he was in. “It was a one-time encrypted message. No metadata, no routing logs. Burned the second it was sent.”

“So, someone with high-level tech experience?”

“Very high,” Elias confirmed. “They knew what they were doing.”

That didn’t sit well with me.

Our business was dangerous, borderline suicidal at times, but most of the threats were overseas. Places where war was a constant hum in the background, wheredeals were struck in the shadows and lives were snuffed out just as easily. But now?

Now it was here.

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