The Dark Elite (The Dark Elite 1)

“Grace is gone.” I cut to the chase, not bothering to preface it with anything else.

“What the fuck?” Lucas’s voice is loud as he glances

toward the stairs—toward the second floor room where Grace should be. “How?”

I glance at Ciro’s cool disappointment, swallowing hard. I want to default to my usual confident arrogance, but the hollow guilt inside my chest won’t let me.

“What happened?” Zaid steps closer, his green eyes burning. Tension fills his body, and I know it has nothing to do with the possibility of failing in our mission. It’s about losing Grace. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know.” I lick my lips, dragging my phone out of my pocket. The sight of the empty bed sobered me up real fuckin’ quick, although my temples still pound with a massive headache. I press a button and glance down at the screen. “I was with her around midnight. I must’ve fucked up her binds, because she managed to slip them. So she’s been gone for three hours.”

“Shit.” Zaid curses, but I can feel Lucas’s gaze on me. Probably wondering why I had to redo her binds at midnight. Why she wasn’t tied up already.

It’s a question I could put to Ciro too. How the fuck did Grace end up wandering the halls by herself before I found her outside my office? There’s enough blame to go around, but I’ll take most of it. I’m the leader, so it falls on my fucking shoulders. I should’ve handled all of this better.

But I know why we’ve all gotten sloppier with her restraints these past couple days. Because we all, whether we’ve wanted to admit it or not, hate the idea of keeping her captive more and more.

Not because we don’t want her here.

But because we wish she was here for a different reason.

And now she isn’t even here at all.

She’s got a three hour head start, and Grace is strong, determined, and resourceful. We can ransack the house looking for clues as to how she escaped, and that might give us something to go on as we try to track her down. But it’s a long shot that we’ll find her again—especially since she’ll know we’re coming this time.

Doesn’t fucking mean I’m not gonna try though.

“Zaid. Lucas.” I jerk my chin at them. “Take the first floor. Do a sweep for anything she might’ve left behind, any sign of where she’s been. Ciro and I will head upstairs and do the same thing. We need to start somewhere.”

“I’ve got a better place to start.” Ciro speaks up for the first time, shaking his head as he meets my gaze.

His reaction to hearing about Grace’s disappearance was more muted than the twins’, but that’s just how Ciro is. He processes things in his own way, on his own terms. Now, his slate-gray eyes burn with intensity as he stares at me, his spine stiff and straight.

“Yeah? What?” I trust him like a brother, so if he’s got a suggestion, I want to hear it.

He glances at Zaid and Lucas, then back to me. “I put a tracker in her shoe. We can use that.”

My eyebrows shoot up, shock warring with hope as my mind grapples with which emotion to experience first. “You did? I never gave the order for that. It’s not protocol with a prisoner.”

“I know.” He pushes his sleeves up, revealing the dark ink on his forearms. “But I did it anyway.”

“Why?”

Something passes over his face. An expression I haven’t seen him wear in years—maybe longer. He holds my gaze as he says, “Because I didn’t want to lose her.”

21

Grace

Consciousness returns in a wave of nausea that I fight to keep down, followed by terror. My body is scrunched up in a fetal position, but not because I’m tied up—I physically can’t move because of the close walls and ceiling surrounding me.

The whole room seems to lurch and I hit my head on something, my forehead burning with friction.

Carpet?

It slowly dawns on me that the stop and go of movement and the confined space isn’t actually a room, but the trunk of a car. I’ve been shoved carelessly in, hands tied expertly behind my back.

By Brian.