Chapter 63 I’ll Hunt You Down
They arrived forty-seven minutes too late.
Enzo knew it the moment they pulled up to the facility and he saw the gates. They were open, not forced into or broken, but opened with the particular deliberateness of people who had known exactly what they were doing and had taken their time doing it. No alarm was sounding. No lights were flashing. The place sat quiet under the grey predawn sky with the specific silence of somewhere that had been emptied out, and Enzo sat in the vehicle for exactly three seconds looking at those open gates before he got out.
His men filed out behind him without needing to be told, spreading instinctively into a loose formation as they moved toward the entrance. They were good men, trained, disciplined, and alert even at this hour. They read the silence the same way he did and their hands moved to weapons they didn’t draw yet because the threat here, whatever it had been, was already gone.
The main doors had been left open too. Inside, the corridor lights were still running, humming steadily over a scene that told its story clearly enough. Overturned equipment. A monitoring station with dark screens where the security feed had been cut cleanly and professionally. The body of a guard near the east corridor entrance.
Enzo moved through it all with his jaw set and his eyes cataloguing everything, his chest getting tighter with every confirmation of what he already knew.
He walked the length of the main cell block and looked at the open doors stretching out in both directions, every single one of them, standing open. The cells weren’t just empty, they’d been emptied. There was a difference, and Enzo felt it.
“Fuck.”
The word came out low and controlled, which somehow made it carry more weight than if he’d shouted it. He stood at the centre of the cell block with his hands at his sides and felt the full measure of it land on him. This was the rogue king’s men announcing themselves again, making a point, operating with a confidence and efficiency that was becoming increasingly difficult to explain away as luck or opportunism.
They had known this facility was here and had known its layout, its security schedule, its vulnerabilities. They had come prepared, executed, and left before Enzo’s people had even received the alert.
“Who could have done this?” Micah spoke up behind him, it was obvious he was just trying to fill the silence because everyone already knew the answer.
Enzo didn’t turn around.
This whole operation had the rogue king all over it. The timing, the complete absence of unnecessary errors. Whoever ran that operation understood how to move through a secured facility without leaving survivors in inconvenient places, and they understood how to get in and out clean. This wasn’t the work of a disorganised rogue group acting on impulse. This was structured. Coordinated. The work of people who had leadership worth the name.
‘Dammit.’
He turned to face his men.
“Search the facility,” he said. “All of it. Every room, every corridor, every space that could have held something or someone. I want to know if they left anything behind—documents, equipment, anything. Go.”
The men dispersed quickly, moving in pairs down the various corridors, and the cell block emptied out until it was just Enzo, Zion, and Micah standing among the open doors and the hum of suppression units that were still running pointlessly with nothing left to suppress.
Micah gripped Enzo’s shoulders, “We’ll get them, alright.” He said turning to leave, “and don’t look all mopey Zion, if I didn’t know better I’ll say you’re blending perfectly with these drab walls.” He grinned and jogged away.
Though Zion had his lighthearted moments sometimes, between the three of them, Micah was always the one who somehow tried to diffuse situations and make them feel better, either with his actions or smartass comments.
Zion hadn’t moved toward the corridors with the others. He’d stayed, which meant he had something to say, and the particular set of his expression meant he’d been holding it for a while and had decided that now was the moment to let it out. Enzo looked at him recognizing all of this and decided to get ahead of it.
“Say it,” Enzo said flatly. “Whatever it is you’ve been sitting on. Say it.”
Zion met his eyes steadily, “Grace,” he said simply.
Enzo said nothing.
“Was it wise?” Zion continued, his voice measured and careful but not backing down. “To leave her the way you did, without any instructions or telling her anything, without even making arrangements for her safety or even—” He paused, choosing the next words. “Without acknowledging her. Was that wise?”
The question sat in the space between them with more weight than its words technically warranted, and both of them knew it.
Enzo looked at Zion for a long moment. Something moved through his expression that he brought back under control quickly, the way he always did, it was a brief disruption on an otherwise managed surface.
“Is she your mate,” Enzo said quietly, “or mine?”
It wasn’t really a question. It was a boundary, drawn clearly without particular aggression but drawn nonetheless, and Zion heard it exactly as it was intended. His jaw tightened slightly. He held Enzo’s gaze for another beat, and then he nodded once—a small, clipped acknowledgement that said he’d heard, that he wasn’t going to push further, and that he had his own thoughts about all of it that he was choosing to keep to himself.
He turned and walked toward the nearest corridor to join the search, and Enzo watched him go.
Then he turned back to the empty cell block and stood in the quiet with nobody watching him.
What he’d done to Grace wasn’t right. He was aware of that. He’d been aware of it the morning he’d woken up and found her beside him, her face relaxed in sleep in the way faces are when a person finally lets their guard down completely, her body warm and present next to his. He’d lain there in those first unclear moments of waking and felt something he hadn’t been prepared for, the pull of it, simple and honest, the desire to close the distance between them and put his arm around her and just stay there for a while.
He’d let himself feel it for exactly as long as it took him to come fully awake.
And then Matteo was there. It wasn’t a memory he’d chosen to access, it never was. It just arrived the way it always did, heavy and unasked for, and everything else rearranged itself around it.
He’d gotten up without waking her and he’d left, and he hadn’t looked back because looking back would have required him to make a decision he wasn’t ready to make.
He wasn’t proud of it. But pride had very little to do with most of the decisions he made these days.
He thought about her now, standing in this gutted corridor, and tried to construct a reasonable prediction of what she would do. Grace was not passive, he’d established that much fairly quickly.
She didn’t sit and wait when things became unclear. She moved, she pushed and she made decisions even when the information available to her was incomplete. It was one of the things about her that had gotten under his skin without his permission.
Being with her for those three days made him realize that she was stubborn in a way that was less about inflexibility and more about a kind of bone-deep refusal to be managed, and he respected that even when he felt like it was complicating things.
He felt her anger the moment he’d marked her, the rage she felt at the fact that he did something so serious without her permission.
‘She would make a choice.’
He’d left her in a situation with no guidance and no instruction, she would read that situation and she would make a choice based on what she concluded, and honestly, that was as it should be. He wasn’t in a position to hold her hand through a decision he needed her to make independently.
If she’d left, if she’d taken the opening and gone, then good. That was the smart thing, it was the thing that removed her from a situation that was going to become increasingly dangerous when his father came back into the picture, and his father was not a gentle or forgiving presence to be around if you were a young woman with a complicated attachment to his son.
But if she’d stayed.
Enzo let the thought finish itself.
If she’d stayed, it meant she’d decided to wait for him. It meant that whatever he’d done by leaving without a word, she’d weighed it and arrived at a decision that wasn’t the obvious one, and that would be stupid, it would say something about her that he wasn’t sure he knew what to do with yet.
‘What would Grace do?’
He didn’t know. And the fact that he didn’t know, the fact that she was genuinely unpredictable to him in a way that very few people ever were sat in his chest in a way he couldn’t quite classify.
He pushed it aside and started moving down the corridor.
The search was methodical and Enzo moved through it with the focus of someone who’d learned to work through distraction, checking rooms and making mental notes and gradually building a picture of how the raid had been carried out. The sophistication of it bothered him more the longer he looked at it. This facility had been one of the more secure holdings in the region, it was not maximum containment, but significant.
The inmates had been dangerous people, most of them. Warriors from various packs who’d crossed lines that couldn’t be uncrossed, individuals whose capabilities made conventional holding difficult. The suppression technology had been the main safeguard.
And someone had walked through it like it was a door left unlocked.
He was moving toward the far end of the last corridor when something made him stop.
It was a sound, very small like it was barely there at all, the kind of thing that existed right at the edge of perception and would have been easy to explain away as the building settling or the ventilation system shifting. But something in him that operated below the level of conscious reasoning said it was neither of those things, and he turned toward it and followed it to a storage room near the end of the corridor with the door pushed most of the way but not entirely closed.
He pushed it open slowly.
The room was dim, lit only by the residual light from the corridor, and he scanned it quickly. Shelving units, equipment crates, and the general disorder of a space that had been hastily searched and left messy. He moved further in, following the direction of the sound he thought he’d heard, and then he stopped.
Something was behind the far shelving unit, it was something small.
He moved around it carefully.
And then the smell reached him causing him to go very still.
He knew what that smell was, It was unmistakable in the way that only certain things are unmistakable. The smell of a life that had ended not so long ago, still present in the air, still telling its story.
He crouched down slowly.
The child couldn’t have been more than six years old. He was small, slight, and tucked into the space behind the shelving unit in a way that suggested someone had put them on it hurriedly.
Someone had either hidden him or he’d hidden himself trying to get away from something that had found him anyway. The little boy’s face was peaceful in the terrible way that faces are in these circumstances, past fear now, past everything, it was just still.
Enzo didn’t move for a long moment.
Then he straightened up and walked back out into the corridor and kept walking, the tightness in his chest had become something different now. Something hotter and harder, with edges to it.
He found more in the next few minutes.
Not guards. Not combatants. The bodies he found tucked into corners and storerooms and the far end of the west corridor were not people who had been holding weapons when they died. A woman in her fifties near the laundry facilities. Two more children in a room that appeared to have been used as some kind of informal living space, with a makeshift mat on the floor and a few small objects that might have been toys in a former life. Another woman closer to the main block, older, her hands still curled around each other the way hands curl when someone is afraid.
Enzo stood in the middle of the corridor with all of it spreading out around him in his mind, connecting into a shape he didn’t want to look at directly but couldn’t avoid.
The rogues had freed the prisoners. And whoever had not chosen to follow them, whoever had not made the decision to fall in line with the rogue king’s people had been killed for it.
Enzo felt his fists close at his sides. Slowly, with the particular controlled quality of someone containing something that would be destructive if it weren’t contained. The knuckles went tight and the tendons in his forearms pulled taut and he stood there in the grey corridor light with the full weight of it sitting on him.
He had seen a great deal of inhumanity in his life. He had grown up in a world that was not clean or gentle, had been shaped by a father whose methods he did not entirely share and whose conception of acceptable losses he found increasingly difficult to reconcile with his own. He was not a naive man and he did not operate under the illusion that the world was fair.
But children.
There was no world in which this was acceptable. No logic, no strategy, no conception of the greater picture that made this the right call. These were not casualties of a battle. These were not unfortunate byproducts of a necessary operation. Someone had made a decision. A specific, deliberate decision that these lives were worth less than the inconvenience of leaving them behind, and that decision was the kind that told you everything you needed to know about the people who’d made it.
The rogue king wanted to present himself as something different. Liberation. Choice. Free wolves and free will and a king who dealt in dignity rather than ownership. Enzo had heard the shape of that narrative from the intelligence reports, had understood what it was designed to do and who it was designed to appeal to.
And then there was this corridor. This room, the little boy behind the shelving unit.
The anger in Enzo’s chest was clean and absolute, it was completely without ambiguity, which was a rare thing for him. Most things in his life existed in complicated territory, layered with considerations and competing priorities and the exhausting weight of context. But not this. This was simple.
He unclenched his fists.
He turned and walked back toward the main block where his men were completing their search, and his face by the time he reached them was composed and still in the way it was always composed and still when he had decided that what he was feeling needed to be set aside in favour of what needed to be done.
But underneath that stillness, something had solidified.
He would find the rogue king.
And when he did, he would make sure that every decision that had been made in this building tonight had an answer attached to it.