The Rogue I Shouldn't Love

[POV: RETH | Timeline: Night | Location: Safe House]

The safe house smelled of rust and old cigarettes.

I stood at the kitchen sink, washing blood from my hands—not mine, thank goodness.

The water ran pink, then clear. I let it run longer than necessary.

Old habits die hard.

In the Rogue Underground, cleanliness was one of the few rituals that separated us from animals.

Garrett was still unconscious on the couch behind me.

I had wrapped his shoulder wound as best I could with supplies intended for bullet wounds, not blade wounds.

The distinction mattered in this business.

My phone buzzed.

I didn't look at it.

The news would be bad no matter when I checked.

Dominic's cell had been raided.

Seventeen people had been arrested.

The underground network I’d spent five years building had been dismantled in a single night by the elite military division that hunted Rogues like sport: Enforcement.

I dried my hands on a paper towel and finally looked at my phone.

Seven missed calls. All from the same number: Nora.

My chest tightened.

Nora Caldwell, the Pack doctor.

Her name had lingered in my mind for the past two years.

Not yours. Never yours," I kept telling myself.

But her voice on the voicemail made it hard to maintain that fiction.

"Rhett, they're saying you were involved in the attacks. They said—" She stopped.

I could hear her breathing, and it did something to my chest that I couldn't afford. "Call me back. Please. I need to know you're alive."

I deleted that voicemail and the next six without listening to them.

The coffee maker gurgled in the corner of the safe house kitchen.

It was the only thing we had left from the old days—before the schism, before the massacre at Crescent Lake, and before I was branded a Rogue and hunted like one.

And before I met Nora.

CRASH!

The apartment door crashed open.

Before I could think, I moved, hand on the blade at my hip, body pivoting toward the threat.

"Don't shoot, asshole, it's me."

Iris emerged from the darkness like a shadow taking form.

She was covered in blood—not her own, never hers.

She was grinning like she'd just won the lottery.

"We're out," she said. "All of us who were in the network cells are out. Enforcement hit the main hub, but they missed the secondary clusters. We're scattered, but safe."

"Garrett?" I nodded toward the couch.

"He's stabilizing. He'll live." Iris collapsed into a kitchen chair. "The price just went up, though. They're not just raiding anymore, Reth. They're executing people. Publicly. They want to make an example."

I poured her coffee.

That's what leaders did—perform small courtesies to make people believe you had everything under control, even when the world was burning.

"How much time?"

"Before they find us? Maybe a week." Iris wrapped her hands around the mug. "They're bringing in a new investigator. Someone from the capital. He's good enough to actually hunt us instead of waiting for us to slip up."

The capital?

That meant royal involvement.

This wasn't about containing Rogues anymore; this was about eliminating them.

My phone buzzed again.

It was a text.

Unknown Number: [The Enforcer arriving Tuesday will be a woman.]

[Name: Dr. Nora Caldwell. Consider yourself warned.]

SMASH!

The coffee mug shattered on the tile floor.

I'd trained myself for five years to compartmentalize.

I locked away the part of me that was still Pack, still trained to love, and still broken enough to believe that Nora Caldwell was worth more than my survival.

But hearing her name from someone else, knowing she was coming, shattered every wall I'd built.

"What?" Iris was on her feet immediately. "What is it?"

"Nothing." The word came out wrong. "It's nothing."

But it wasn't nothing; it was catastrophic.

The one person in the world who could break my focus was coming to hunt me down:

Nora Caldwell—the woman I’d loved for two years—was coming to kill me.

Worse yet, she had no idea who I really was.