The berth was the kind of place that smelled like old money and newer crimes. Containers stacked like anonymous altars. Men moved like punctuation marks. We parked out of sight and slipped through the night with Gage and Mara as our blunt instruments and Tyler as our rumor-monger.
I thought I was prepared for the ugly; nothing in me was prepared for the way seeing Dominic behind chain-link made my stomach empty. He’d been moved to a holding pen of sorts—an old storage lot where contractors keep things they mean to disappear. He sat on a milk crate, wrists still marked where the zip-ties had dug in, but his face lit when he saw me—and in that light he looked like the man I’d love even if the world split open.
Before I could run, a boot pressed a little too close to my ankle. One of the co
