Page 101 of The Florist and Her Alphas

A figure at the door. Tall, narrow-shouldered, wearing a dark coat collar. Bram. He crouches at the biometric panel with a small handheld device. Forty seconds. The lock disengages. He steps inside like he owns the place.

I switch feeds. Front of the shop. Three minutes later Hugo walks through the front door with a key in his hand.

My jaw goes tight. Nobody has that key code. I set that code myself six days ago. Somewhere, somehow, they got a copy, and I don’t know how yet, and that failure sits in my chest like a stone.

Back to the rear camera. Eleven twenty-eight.

Silus walks in through the open back door, unhurried, coat dark, hands in his pockets. The audio is thin, degraded by distance from the mic, but I can hear her voice underneath it, sharp, furious, and then I watch her lunge with the shears still in her hand and slash at Bram’s forearm. I watch him twist her wrist until the shears drop. I watch Hugo’s hand clamp over her mouth from behind. I watch her try to fight them off.

I watch Hugo press a cloth over her nose and mouth and hold it there, and she goes still.

“No!” shouts August.

“Fuck.”

He carries her out the back door. I switch to the back alley camera. Eleven thirty-one, the SUV pulls out of frame and is gone.

I close the footage, hands shaking. “We need to get to her.”

The bell at the front of the shop rings hard enough to nearly come off its hook, and running footsteps hit the corridor, and Ezra and Julian are in the doorway of the back room together, chests heaving, and they both go dead still at the bloody shears.

Ezra’s growl comes up from somewhere low in his chest, a sound I’ve heard from him exactly twice in my life. “Where is she?!”

I turn the tablet toward them and run it again from the start. “They took her.”

Ezra watches without blinking. Without breathing, as far as I can tell. When Bram’s fingers close around the ring on the screen, something happens behind Ezra’s eyes that I don’t have a name for. When the footage ends, he steps forward, picks the actual ring up from where it sits, closes his fist around it, and doesn’t speak. His knuckles have gone white around it.

I pull up a second application on the tablet. One none of them have seen before. A map of New York blinks open, and a small green dot pulses steadily on the FDR Drive, moving north, passing the exit for the bridge.

“What’s that?” asks August.

“Her location,” I explain. “I put a chip in her locket while she was sleeping.”

Nobody says anything for a second.

Ezra looks at me. He doesn’t ask why I didn’t tell him. There isn’t time, and all we want is for her to be safe.

We’re through the corridor and out the front door in seconds, and I nearly collide with a body on the sidewalk. Her friend Mira.

She looks at my face, and she knows.

Her eyes fill instantly. “Where is she?” Not a question. A demand, breaking apart even as she says it. “Where is she? She’s not answering her calls.”

I have half a second to decide. I could send her home with something untrue and let her carry the not-knowing instead of the knowing.

“She’s been kidnapped,” I say, deciding to be truthful. “We’re going to look for her now.”

Tears run down her face. “Please find her.”

“Stay at the bakery,” I tell her. “Keep your phone on you.”

“Bring her back,” she says, voice cracking.

“I will.”

She turns and walks back to her shop, and I rush to the car.

We’re in the car in seconds, and I pull off the curb hard enough that the tires shriek against wet asphalt and a woman on the corner jumps back with her dog.