The officer looked directly at Kade. "Cases involving Dakota."
Silence descended in a physical way—complete, absolute. The air felt thinner. Dakota's past—those fractured years she could not remember, the absences in her history—shifted from being private gaps to a line of inquiry now snarling its head into the present.
The blood oath pulsed beneath Kade's skin with a new ferocity, hard and violent. He reached for it and the connection answered with a punch of sensation: fear, confusion, a wash of darkness. For an instant the command center's hum fell away and he felt Dakota like a live wire.
Then, layered under that, something else: a voice, distant and fractured—too faint to parse into words, but present enough to be an alarm. Dakota was not isolated. Someone else occupied the space she was in. Someone watching. Someone with intent.
