Page 62 of Silk and Sirens

He eyed me a moment, shuffling from one foot to the other. “Of course, the stage and microphone are prepped for you.”

“Good, I’ll be out soon.” I turned away before he could ask any more questions.

Greeting everyone who approached, I let their wandering fingers brush my waist, my arm, and my hip as I passed. The perfect hostess. The perfect mask.

Until a cold prickle raced down my spine.

Turning slowly, I found Renley leaning against a wall, watching me with unapologetic hunger. His gaze dragged over my body like he already owned it, and I was almost grateful Selene had never given him permission to touch me.

Even so, my smile never faltered, not even as disgust coiled tight in my stomach and my skin crawled beneath the weight of his stare.

I made sure to meet his gaze, lifting my chin and holding myself straighter.

This … this was exactly why Fletcher was wrong.

I was always going to come out the winner.

Because losing wasn’t an option.

Chapter 27

Caden

Agitation put more force behind every punch. The bastard hanging from the ceiling wheezed out a broken breath when my fist slammed into his stomach, his body jerking against the chains.

“So,” I said, flexing my aching knuckles, “you going to tell me how you found this place?”

“Fuck … you,” he choked out, not even trying to pretend he was innocent.

So I hit him again, only this time he pissed himself. As I’d hung him upside down, the stream ran straight over his own face.

Fucking lovely.

Building a lab in the King’s Forest had been my idea. The entire woodland sat under a conservation covenant and preservation order, one of those old British protections so layered in procedure that changing it would take years and a minor war in Parliament. No developer could dare sink foundations here, not without triggering a legal avalanche.

Which made it the perfect place to hide an entire drug manufacturing facility.

Except I’d received a call that morning from my chemist, T, telling me the guards had caught this prick lurking around the perimeter with a camera. Luckily he hadn’t found the entrance, but the fact he’d gotten that close at all was a problem.

Now here he was, bloodied and hanging in one of the storage rooms I kept the dried coca leaves, still somehow stupid enough to stay quiet.

“T!” I shouted down the hall, and then immediately regretted it. Calling for her was counterproductive. Anything that disrupted her routine could set her off balance, and Mr No-Name interrupting today’s production had already thrown the entire lab out of rhythm.

Instead, I stepped out, my overalls squeaking as I passed the men and women who were quietly packing the cocaine. A few heads turned as I made my way through the lab, their eyes widening beneath their goggles.

Any one of them could have shared the location, but until Mr No-Name started talking, I had nothing.

“Is it done?” T asked when I stepped into her office, her gaze skimming past me rather than meeting my eyes as she exhaled her displeasure at my presence.

Her desk was immaculate, with pens lined up perfectly parallel, paperwork stacked by size and colour, and every label facing the same direction. Even the monitors were positioned with exact symmetry.

But the disruption in the lab had clearly gotten to her. I could hear it in the clipped precision of her voice, see it in the rigid set of her posture and the way her fingers tapped lightly against the desk in repeating patterns. That tightly wound, hyper-controlled energy would usually set off alarms, but not with T—it was simply her default setting.

She’d been with us nearly eight years, and the only reason she’d lasted longer than the chemists before her was because she was obsessed with the science itself. Where others saw criminality, T saw complexity. A challenge worthy of her attention.

That obsession made her invaluable and loyal. It was also why she was still alive when the others had ended up with bullets in their heads.

“He’s not talking.” I searched the office for something long and heavy. “Do you have a bat?”