Page 204 of Without a Trace
Just let the silence own what he couldn’t undo.
***
I felt them before I saw them.
The entire manor pulsed, stone and shadow bending around some unspoken truth. My truth. The entryway stretched before me, doors already groaning open as if the house itself had known they were close.
Trace stepped through the manor doors first tattoos alive. Alden followed, silent and locked in. Rhett and Kane flanked them, slower, sharper, bracing for anything.
But the bond was louder than all of them.
It throbbed through me like a second heartbeat, alive in my bones.
I moved forward.
My pulse didn’t spike. My hands didn’t shake. Something deeper settled into place.
This wasn’t fear.
This was the moment fate had been circling since the beginning.
Trace’s chest rose hard. The bond roared, heat rippling between us like an old promise come due.
“Scarlett.”
He didn’t shout it. Just said it low, rough—like he’d carried my name in his mouth for miles.
I stepped forward. Slowly.
Then the voice came from behind me.
“Not another step.”
My father.
He appeared at my back, his guards already forming lines—Red Veil weapons raised, silent, disciplined.
The boys didn’t reach for theirs. But they didn’t move either.
My father walked to my side, eyes never leaving the doorway. “You’re trespassing.”
Trace didn’t blink. “She called us.”
“I didn’t hear her,” my father replied coldly.
“She didn’t have to speak,” Alden said.
The energy cracked—faint, but real.
The pull between us wasn’t metaphor anymore. It hummed in the bones of the house. In the veins beneath my skin.
I stepped past the threshold, placing myself between them.
My father didn’t stop me.
But his voice dropped. “You know what they are.”
“I do.”
