Chapter 294

ALINA

The alarm had been screaming for what felt like forever.

Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Time had stopped making sense the moment the first distant gunshots echoed down through the concrete.

I had been alone in the cold, unfinished room for hours before that — wrists raw from the metal cuffs chained to the pipe, body aching, the sour smell of my own sickness still clinging to the air from earlier.

I had spent most of that time dreading the moment Santos would come back.

Then the alarm started. Then the shooting. Down here the sound was muffled, distorted, but I could still tell there was chaos above me.

My heart had sped up the second I understood what it meant.

Alexander had found me.

Hope and terror tangled so tightly in my chest I could barely breathe.

The door slammed open.

Santos stumbled in like a man already half-mad, eyes wild, face flushed.

He spun and locked the heavy door behind him with shaking hands, throwing the deadbolt and then bracing his back against it for a second as if that would stop what was coming.

He didn’t look at me at first.

He started pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Hard, uneven steps across the bare concrete, muttering under his breath like a man trying to rewrite reality by force of will.

“How the fuck did he find this place?” His voice was rising, cracking.

“It was supposed to be clean. Off every map. No records. No fucking paper trail. The location was buried. I paid a shitload for this place. I paid—”

He dragged both hands through his hair, gripping hard enough that I saw his knuckles go white.

“Fucking lucky I had those alarms set up. I thought I was being paranoid. I almost didn’t bother. Almost told them it was overkill. And now—” He let out a short, hysterical laugh that sounded nothing like humor.

“Now the whole fucking place is compromised because that obsessive psycho Alexander Dimitri can’t take a fucking hint and stay the hell away from what’s mine.”

'What’s mine.' I almost laughed out loud at the delusion.

In what twisted little fantasy did this man think I had ever been his?

He kept pacing. The room was small enough that his path was barely six steps each way, but he made it feel smaller. Every turn of his boots scraped against the concrete. Every breath came faster than the last.

Then his eyes finally landed on me.

The shift was immediate. The panic didn’t leave his face — it just redirected, sharpened, turned into something uglier.

“You.”

He crossed the space in three strides and dropped into a crouch in front of me, close enough that I could smell the sour sweat on him and the faint metallic tang of fear.

“How the fuck did he know you were here?” His voice dropped into something low and vicious.

“Hmm? Did you somehow signal him? Leave a trail? What did you do?”

I stared back at him, throat dry, wrists burning where the cuffs had rubbed the skin raw. I didn’t answer at first. I didn’t trust my voice not to shake.

Santos’s hand shot out and grabbed my jaw hard, forcing my face up.

“Answer me.”

I let out a rough, humorless breath.

“Yeah,” I rasped. “I mind-linked him and said, ‘Here’s the address, baby, come and get me.’ Complete with a little map and a smiley face. How the hell do you think I did it while chained to a pipe?”

His eyes flashed. “You bitch. Tell me how he knew you were here.”

“I don’t know, you moron,” I managed. The words came out hoarse. “I don’t have a fucking phone.”

“Bullshit.” He squeezed harder. “He may be good, but he’s not a miracle worker. He couldn’t find a place like this that quickly or by accident. He doesn’t just stumble into a warehouse that doesn’t exist on any official record. Someone told him. Or something led him.”

His eyes searched my face like he expected to find the answer written there. “Did one of my men sell me out?”

I genuinely had no idea how Alexander had managed to find me here. A few moments passed Then it hit me.

Sharp. Immediate. Obvious. The tracker. Of course.

That was the only explanation that made any sense.

Arthur. My father — the manipulative, calculating bastard who had spent most of my life treating people like pieces on a board — had done one useful thing in his entire miserable existence.

The bastard had used a tracker to keep tabs on me without me having the slightest fucking clue.

And Alexander must have beaten the truth out of him to learn how it worked.

I didn’t know the details. I didn’t need to. The only reason my husband was tearing this place apart right now was because Arthur had given him a way to find me.

A small, fierce flicker of pride cut through the fear and exhaustion.

God, he’s good.

When I got out of here, I wasn’t just going to tell him how pleased I was. I was going to show him.

And for the first time in my life, I felt a flicker of genuine, bitter gratitude toward the man who had raised me.

Thank you, you absolute asshole.

Santos released my jaw with a rough shove and stood again, pacing once more.

His breathing was loud in the small space. He pulled his phone from his pocket with unsteady hands and swiped through something — security feeds, I realized. Hidden cameras.

I watched his face change as he scrolled.

Whatever he saw made the last of the color drain from his skin.

“No… no, no, no—”

He zoomed in on something, then another feed, then another. His free hand curled into a fist at his side.

“They’re dropping,” he whispered. “My men are falling like fucking flies.”

He looked up at the ceiling as if he could see through the concrete to the warehouse above.

The distant gunfire had grown more sporadic. That wasn’t a good sign for him. It meant Alexander’s people were winning.

Santos’s eyes came back to me, wide and frantic.

“If he finds this room — if he finds me — I’m dead. You understand that? He’s not going to negotiate. He’s not going to trade. He’s going to walk in here and put a bullet in my head or worse.”

I let out a short, tired breath that was almost a laugh. “Good.”

His head snapped toward me.

“What did you just say?”

I met his stare without flinching, even though every part of me hurt and the cuffs were cutting into my wrists and the smell in the room still made my stomach turn.

“I said good,” I repeated, voice rough but steady. “He came. Of course he came. You really thought you could take me and he wouldn’t burn the world down to get me back? You thought a hidden basement and a few locked doors were going to stop him?”

Santos’s face twisted. “You think this is funny?”

“I think it’s pathetic,” I said. “You’re down here pacing like a cornered animal while the man you decided to provoke is upstairs killing every single person who stands between him and this door. And instead of doing something useful, you’re blaming me for the fact that he found you.”

He took a step toward me again, fist raised like he might hit me just to shut me up.

I didn’t look away. “Go ahead,” I said quietly. “Hit me. It won’t change the fact that he’s already here. It won’t change the fact that your men are dying. And it won’t change the fact that when that door opens, you’re the one who’s finished.”

Santos’s hand hovered in the air for a second longer. Then he dropped it, breathing hard, and turned back to his phone.

He kept refreshing the camera feeds as if the images might suddenly rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic.

They didn’t. I could see it in the way his shoulders tensed, the way his thumb kept swiping faster. Whatever was happening above us was getting worse for him by the minute.

He started muttering again, almost to himself.

“There has to be another way out. A secondary exit. Something. I planned for this. I—” He stopped, then let out a sharp, frustrated sound.

“There isn’t. Of course there fucking isn’t. I didn’t build an escape because I didn’t think anyone would ever find this place.”

He looked at me again, and for a moment the obsession and the fear mixed into something truly unhinged.

“This is your fault,” he said. “All of it. If you had just—”

“If I had just what?” I cut in. “Gone with you willingly? Pretended I wanted any of this? You’re the one who took me. You’re the one who chained me in a hole that smells like a toilet. You’re the one who thought you could play games with Alexander Dimitri and walk away clean.”

I shifted against the pipe, the metal cuffs clinking softly.

“He’s here,” I said. “And from the sound of things, he’s already through most of your men. So maybe stop yelling at me and start figuring out how you plan to survive the next ten minutes. Because when that door opens, the only thing that’s going to matter is whether he decides to kill you quickly… or take his time.”

Santos stared at me like he couldn’t decide whether to strangle me or keep using me as a shield.

Then the distant shooting above us stopped. The sudden silence was worse than the noise.

Santos froze, phone still in his hand, eyes locked on the door.

I felt my heart start to race for an entirely different reason.

Alexander was close. I could feel it the same way I had felt it the moment the alarm first went off — that bone-deep certainty that he was coming, that nothing short of death would stop him.

Santos must have felt it too, because the last of his bravado cracked wide open.

He backed toward the far wall, still between me and the door, as if keeping me in the room somehow improved his odds.

“He’s going to kill me,” he whispered.

I watched him, exhausted and aching and still somehow able to find the sharp edge of my own voice.

“Yes,” I said. “He is.”

And for the first time since he had dragged me into this place, I almost smiled.

Then the world exploded. A deafening blast ripped through the door, the force of it slamming into the room like a physical blow. Metal screamed. Wood and concrete fragments flew inward in a cloud of smoke and dust.

The heavy door that had sealed us in was torn halfway off its hinges, hanging crooked and useless.

Santos staggered back with a choked sound, eyes wide with pure terror.

Through the settling smoke and the ringing in my ears, I saw movement in the ruined doorway.

Tall. Broad. Familiar. Alexander.