One minute later and I’m at her door, my lungs working overtime and my hair plastered to my forehead, beads of sweat making their way down my face. I take a second to catch my breath and, raising my fist, I rap my knuckles against the door. To my surprise, the door simply swings back on its hinges.

“Cara?” I call her, but the only reply I get is a cold silence. “Oh fuck,” I mutter, stepping inside her apartment and taking in the scenery. Her couch has been turned upside down and the coffee table moved out of place, all of its drawers hanging open like lolling tongues. “Fuck,” I repeat, walking into her bedroom. The mattress has been ripped apart, slashed by the sharp blades, and every single drawer in the room is open. The floor is completely littered with her clothes, making it look like as if a crowd of madmen had the time of their lives inside this room.

I didn’t make it in time, and now only God knows where Cara is. Swear to God, if I could put my hands on Sienna I would —

Hearing noises coming from the living room, I press my back against the wall and hold my breath. Suddenly wishing I had a gun, I ball both my hands into two hard fists, ready to knock down whoever’s behind this.

That’s when I hear their voices.

“We’re fuckin’ late!” Mason growls.

“That bitch moved fast,” Parker adds, his tone of voice fraught with tension. I step out of Cara’s bedroom, my heart beating a thousand miles per hour, and I simply look at them both.

Parker moves toward the couch and, pushing on it, he takes it to its rightful place. He sinks down on it, and then runs one hand through his hair, a gesture of pure desperation. “What the fuck do we now?” I ask Mason and Parker, his lips turned into a thin line of both anger and calculation.

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Parker replies, suddenly jumping up to his feet and moving toward the window. His gaze roams over the adjoining buildings, and he simply stands there in complete silence as he works through whatever’s on his mind.

“There’s no other way,” Mason agrees, and he joins Parker by the window.

“What way?” I ask them, joining them by the window as I feel all that anger bubbling up inside of me. “We need to go and find Sienna, that’s what we need to do right now!” I try and tell them, but they just stare at me and lower their gaze.

“I know, man,” Parker whispers, digging his fingernails so deep into the palm of his hands that his knuckles have turned white. “But we need to think this through. We need to be careful.”

“Careful? We have no idea what happened to Cara, and you want us to be careful?”

“He’s right, Derek,” Mason joins in, placing one hand on my shoulder. “I want to confront Sienna as much as you do, but we do what’s best for Cara. And right now what’s best for Cara is that we keep focused.”

They’re talking in riddles, but I can grasp the meaning behind their words. This situation has spun out of control faster than we had anticipated, and now it’s time we call in the artillery.

“Okay, I’ll follow your lead on this one,” I say, nodding.

“Do it, Parker,” Mason says, his gaze still lost somewhere on the horizon. “It’s time we bring in the big guns.”

Chapter 24

Derek

It’s only noon, but the main floor of the convention hall is already packed. There are thousands of people in here, all of them bumping shoulders as they flow around one another, walking from booth to booth as they try to keep up with the hundreds of romance authors trying to peddle their latest books.

The Romance Guild of America Authors convention is the biggest event of the genre, and people from all over the world gather here to keep their fingers on the pulse of the industry. Models, agents, publishers, authors, and adoring fans—all of them under a single roof.

Last year the convention was set ablaze with Naughty Angel Publ

ishing, and its confrontation with Bad Boy Publishing. This year, though, there’s a different battle to take head on.

Most of the crowd has gathered around Sienna Sinner’s booth, the largest one in the convention this year, and everyone’s dying to know what the new champion of the romance charts has prepared. Rumour has it that Sienna has prepared a major presentation, one that will take place on the main stage. The way I see it, the bigger the stage, the happier we’ll all be.

You see, we didn’t sit on our asses these past months, just praying to God for some magical-rainbow-wizard to swoop down from the heavens and save us all. Oh, no, we prepared for war. Sienna might have won a few battles, but that has only hardened our resolve.

She messed with the wrong fucking guys.

And she really screwed up when she messed with Cara. Parker, Mason, and I ... we can take a punch. Or a dozen of them. But mess with the woman we love and prepare to be ripped apart. You read that right ... the woman we love.

There’s really no other way of putting it. She waltzed in our life like a summer storm, and she took us all by surprise. The moment we realized what had happened, there was nothing we could do

about it. Our hearts were already beating at the same pace, and they were doing it because of Cara.

I’ve known her for quite a while, and I always struggled against that primal urge to simply pin her against the wall and fuck her until my whole body shut down. There was always that whenever Cara was close to me, but ever since that first time, at the bar ... I can’t put it into words, but something changed that day.

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