Page 25 of Fierce Vows

So much that I halt halfway down the jet’s stairs before my feet can touch the tarmac that will take me to the waiting car.

“What?”

“Come to the house.Now, Rafe.”

“Never, not once, have you given me an order,” I murmur.“This is a new game, Dom.”

“It’s survival,” he says, softly.“I’ll be waiting.”

He ends the call before I can.And for the first time in my life, I head out on the orders of my best friend with no fucking idea of what’s waiting for me ...and knowing it has something to do with my wife.

It’s the only reason I’m not planning a way to dismember Konnor Henney Willow-style right now.

The memory of what Luca did to help her, of the way he reverently held her, made her kiss his blades hurts too fucking much.A second tear joins the first.One each for the most special women in my life I’ve failed to protect.

It’s not a state I’m used to, and it won’t last long.

That’s my new vow as the car pulls up in front of the Hernandez residence where I pulled Willow from over a year back, an unwilling wife.Where I bought her, both of us blindsided by my father’sgiftof our marriage.Orphaned, her uncle happy to be rid of her, but we already had our first night’s tryst back in Cyprus.That place held—holds—such a memory for both of us.

As does this house.

Here she has hurt for me, run from me.Screamed for me and cried for me.

Here I have bled for her and kneeled for her.

Konnor’s words whisper again through my mind, a mere echo of before.What does the man who has my sister know about the man who has my wife?And when did I become so certain that it is a man who has stolen from me?

Because a woman—especially the women inmylife—don’t hide such things.They come straight out into the open and parade their winnings in my face.

This is a hidden act, one of cowardice.

Yes, it is a man’s act, hiding my wife away.There is no winning.

I stare up at the foreboding doors, their black façade etched into my mind.The horrors of this house are burned into my mind.And hers, and her brother’s.And Dom’s.But we, all of us, have done things to set them right.Earn the forgiveness of these walls and those remaining within.The blood and souls shed here at our behest.

And now we will again, banding together to unite the families that someone once tried to tear apart.

Greed.Wealth.

But what’s in play now is about something far more.An evil we’ve hunted for a longer time.I feel it the moment I step through the shadows of the Hernandez residence, I feel Roman, Willow’s younger brother and Don of this house clap my shoulder, greeting me silently as is his custom.

I’ve learned to be silent with him, raising my eyes to meet Dom’s.

“I’m here.Tell me.”

But it’s not Dom who answers my unspoken question.It’s the tiny shadow who slips out from behind him.My once healer, dressed in a blue silk slip that’s belted at her waist, approaches me.Thalia allows Dom’s hand to touch her lower back, their discreet intimacy obvious to my eye.Her hair is tied back in its customary loose knot, her lips are glossed, but that’s the only decoration on the face that’s healed since the day we pulled her out of a shipping container filled with dead women and her the only survivor.

When she says the name I don’t want to hear, the name that brought Thalia to me in the first place, my veins fill with dread.I know I’ve lost the one woman in my life who kept me sane.Because no matter how we hunted, we never found him.Now he’s found us, and he has her.

I won’t get her back.

Thalia looks at me, rage and horrors and scars reflected in her beautiful eyes as her lips form the name of the trafficker who made her as mute as Roman when we found her.

“Singleton.”

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