Page 92 of Yours on the Canvas

Reid hesitated, his expression twisting with a mix of awe and sickness. “But… God, Silas. He didn’t look like Jack anymore. He was skin and bone, covered in fresh bruises, moving like his ribs were cracked. He looked so tired he could barely stand, and those bastards just dragged him back out into the dark. I tried to follow them, but they got lost in the crowd.”

I didn’t realise I was sliding down onto the floor until my knees hit the wooden surface. The air rushes out of my lungs in a sharp, violent sob I couldn’t swallow back. I curl into myself, my hands clawing into my face as the tears, the ones I had hidden for three agonising months,finally shatter through my armour.

Reid freezes, staring down at me, stunned. Guys like us didn’t break. Not like this.

“Silas… fuck, man,” Reid muttered, stepping forward, his voice cracking. “I… I’m so sorry, Rook.”

I couldn’t answer. I just curl inward on the floor, the image of my broken, starving dove fighting for his life in a cage burning a hole straight through my soul.

The grief didn’t break me; it sharpened me into a blade.

The moment Reid sat on the couch, the tears stopped, drying up into something cold, heavy, and lethal. I pull myself off the floor, wipe my face, and turn back to the main console.

I was a weapon again, and we had a location, a starting point.

* * *

Within minutes, the office is wide awake.

I patch into every comms line, pull Eli, Deck, Mack, and Callan into the war room. I lay out Reid’s intel across the main screens: the location of the underground circuit, the blueprints of the building, and the shadowy network of fixers running the venue.

“We aren’t going in blind,” I told the room, my voice flat, dead-eyed, the gold ring on my pinkie finger digging a fiery circle into my skin. “They want to hide him in the dirt? We tear the dirt apart. Mack, Callan, you’re heading down there tonight. Find where he was held, find his locker, find anything.”

They don’t waste a second. With Reid at the controls of our bird, they were in the air within thirty minutes. Six hours later, they were slipping into the underground holding pens of the Seattle circuit, moving like shadows while the security was distracted upstairs.

I watched through their compact, tactical cameras, my knuckles white as I grip the edge of my desk. They move with lethal precision, breaking into the row of rusted steel lockers assigned to the fighters. Most were filled with dirty wraps and old tape, but when they reached the last locker, Callan’s fingers brushed over something wedged behind a metal bracket.

A crumpled piece of torn notebook paper.

I watched as Mack carefully smoothed it out under the dim, flickering light of the hallway. Scrawled across the page in Jack’s shaky handwriting were words that made the breath catch in my throat:

Sol. Find Peter Sale. I love you.

I punch the name into my laptop, and stare at the name on my monitor. Peter Sale.

My fingers hit the keyboard, the code flying across the dark screens faster than it ever had before. Dale and Ray thought they could bury him. They thought they could keep my dove locked away in the dark. But they made one fatal mistake.

They underestimated my boy, and he had left a breadcrumb.

I stand up, the chair clattering loudly to the floor behind me. I look at the team, my eyes burning with a promise of absolute, unmitigated violence.

“They’re dead,” I whispered, the words echoing with a terrifying finality. “Every single one of them. Pack the heavy gear. We’re going to war.”

25

Silas

The night air outside the PalMerc office was biting, but the frost in my veins was far colder.

We didn’t talk as we loaded the weapons into the helicopter. Reid had pulled out what he called his old faithful, an old Huey that was already warming up on the tarmac when we pulled up.

Within ten minutes, we were in the air.

The name Peter Sale had blown the doors off every encrypted firewall, property registry, and police file I could pull from the States in less than twenty minutes once Mack and Callan beamed that scrap of paper back to us.

Peter Sale.

An old-school friend of Ray’s from their juvenile detention days, a fixer deep within the Seattle syndicate, and the owner of a secluded property registered under his dead wife’s name, a woman whose death had conveniently been ruled an “accident” years ago before Peter inherited her estate.