Page 85 of Yours on the Canvas

A series of fives.

They grow day by day, group by group. Right now, there are four clearly marked groups of fives sitting on the wall, twenty agonising days of imprisonment. Twenty days of living in a tomb. Twenty days since I last felt the warmth of Silas’s hands on my face.

On the twenty-first day, the heavy deadbolt turns with a sharp, metallic screech that makes me flinch. The door pulls open, my uncle walks in, his gun aimed directly at my chest.

“Get up,” he barks. “We’re going.”

My legs feel weak and unsteady as I stand from the cot, my body aching from yesterday’s beating. They throw a coarse, oversized hoodie at me, and I pull it over my shoulders, pulling the hood low over my face, and then march me up the stairs.

As I step across the threshold and out into the open air for the first time in three weeks, the light breeze hits my face. It’s cold, sharp, and smells of rain and pine, and it feels like a physical shock to my system. The blinding glare of harsh daylight that makes my eyes scream in protest. I throw my arm up, squinting through my fingers as my dad stands by the car, his face carved from stone.

I take a deep, desperate breath, but my lungs seize up with sudden, blinding terror.

They are driving me to my first fight. They are leading me out to the slaughterhouse, and every step forward feels like I am walking closer to an executioner’s block. My heart hammers against my ribs like a trapped bird, and a cold sweat breaks out across my skin as the terrifying reality crashes over me.

I am trapped in their world again, and there is no escape.

22

Silas

The hum of the Operations room is a low, sickening mockery of life.

Days haven’t blurred together; they’ve fractured into a nightmare of repeating, agonising loops, each one worse than the last. My eyes burn, raw and overworked, the glowing code melting into warped, taunting shadows on the screen

I don’t need databases or bureaucratic permission. I know the filth Dale and Ray come from. They’re not ghosts. They’re parasites– and parasites always leave a trail of rot in their wake.

My laptop is open on the large table that sits in the centre of the Operations room, the casing burning hot against my wrists as I dive deep into the underground forums.

The dark corners of the web where a fucker like Ray finds what he needs, blood sports, illegal fighting circuits, and broken human beings bought and sold like cattle. My fingers punch the keys, ripping through aliases, ring names, location tags, and every filthy promoter running fights in the Pacific Northwest.

Nothing.

No chatter about a new fighter stepping onto the canvas. No whispers of a fresh, broken soul entering the circuit. They’ve scrubbed him clean, burying him in a grave before he’s even dead.

I pull up financial ledgers, dummy shell companies, and cross-border property holdings tied to Jack’s uncle and father. I tracked their car across the border into Seattle hours after Jack vanished, catching their plates on traffic cameras before they went dark. But when Deck and CJ physically swept every known property, every old haunt, every shadow tied to Ray and Dale… they found empty rooms. Dust on the counters. Silence.

Nothing.

My chest caves in, a violent, suffocating pressure crushing my ribs until I can barely drag enough oxygen into my lungs. I can’t find him. I’m staring at a blank map on my screen, and every ticking second feels like a knife twisting deeper into my gut.

I failed him.

I told him I would burn the world down, but right now, the world is winning, and my dove is trapped somewhere in the dark, bleeding for my mistakes.

I don’t leave this room. I haven’t changed my clothes in days, the scent of stale coffee, sweat, and cheap takeout clinging to my skin like a second layer.

Sleep is a joke. Whenever my eyelids feel heavy, I dump ice-cold water over my face or jam my fingers into my desk until the sharp pain forces me awake. I refuse to rest while he’s caged.

I lean back in my chair, dragging a hand hard down my face. The gold ring on my pinkie finger, Jack’s mother’s ring, catches the pale glare of the monitor. It doesn’t warm up. It burns cold against my skin, a sharp, bittter reminder that he’s gone, that I let him walk right out of my life because I didn’t give him enough reason to stay, because I was too blind to see the noose tightening around his neck.

Around me, the room is thick with jagged, suffocating tension. Eli paces near the window like a caged beast, his jaw locked tight enough to shatter teeth. CJ sits on the arm of the couch, a plastic pen snapping in his grip with a sharp crack. Finn and Mack are working the phones in the corner, leaning on every underworld runner and underground contact we have left, pressing for scraps of information that never materialise.

“Still nothing on the dock circuits,” Callan mutters, tossing his phone onto the coffee table with a dull thud. “Our guys checked every warehouse and shipping yard from Tacoma up to Everett. If they’re keeping him somewhere, it’s an airtight vault.”

“They can’t keep him invisible forever,” Finn says, though his voice lacks conviction, echoing hollowly off the concrete walls. “Someone always talks, especially in the betting circuits. We just need a break.”

I stand up from the desk, my joints stiff, my blood buzzing with a frantic, homicidal fury. I don’t want words.