Bob had never been in love before.

Not real love. Not like this.

Before her, it had all been too small. Fleeting little attractions that flickered out as fast as they started, shallow connections that never dug their teeth into anything real. But she—god, she was everything. From the moment she smiled at him—no, looked at him—something in his brain detonated and rearranged itself.

She was beautiful, of course. In that classic, devastating kind of way. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t why he wanted to sit cross-legged on the floor like a dumbass and kick his feet in the air whenever she walked into the room. That wasn’t why he caught himself grinning at nothing when he remembered how she once adjusted his collar, muttering something about “not dressing like a raccoon in a hurricane.” That wasn’t why she made him feel like he could finally exhale for the first time in years.

No, it was the way she carried herself—calm, focused, razor-sharp, and somehow still warm in the cracks between. It was the way she always noticed when someone else needed space, or quiet, or backup. It was the way she talked to him like he wasn’t broken, like he wasn’t just a stray dog picked up from a pile of failed missions and bloodstained files.

She talked to him like he mattered.

Bob had it bad.

He’d never admit it aloud—he wasn’t suicidal—but if anyone knew the extent of it, he’d never hear the end of it. The kicking-his-feet thing wasn’t even a joke. He’d caught himself doing it once after she’d ruffled his hair and winked at him for a mission well done. Actual giggling followed. He nearly put his head through a wall after realizing what he’d done.

But… he liked it. He liked her. In his head, he built a hundred thousand possible futures where they sat on a rooftop eating takeout or watching dumb movies in someone’s safehouse. Where she leaned against him like she chose to, not like she needed to.

And then she was gone.

It happened like a bad dream you can’t claw yourself awake from. One minute, she was there—rolling her eyes, calling him “rookie” even though he outranked her in the field—and the next, there was nothing but static on the comms and a last location ping in a part of the world he had begged her never to return to.

The Red Room had her again.

Bob felt the void open under his ribs.

He didn’t remember the next twelve hours. Just blood. Just screaming. Just walls punched until bone split and skin gave way. He stopped talking. He stopped eating. For a week, he didn’t sleep—not really. The only sound in his apartment was the constant spin of his knife through his fingers, again and again, while his thoughts circled like vultures.

They took her.

The most perfect thing he’d ever seen, the only person he’d ever wanted to be good for, gone, dragged back into that hell-pit of mind control and compliance and pain.

He couldn’t stand the thought of her in that place again. Not after everything she’d done to stay out. Not after all the scars she’d let him see. Not after the way her voice sometimes cracked on old Russian lullabies when she thought no one was listening.

Bob had been many things—mercenary, assassin, wet work specialist—but he had never been someone who cared.

Now, he was only that.

Only vengeance. Only grief. Only love, twisted into something feral and sick and loud inside his head.

He would get her back.

Whatever it took.

Even if he had to burn the Red Room to ash with his bare hands.