Chapter 23
The line of text burns across my monitor. Everything in me goes still and cold. They're going after her.
Daphne. Nicolas. My chest constricts.
Three seconds to decide.
I'm on my feet, laptop still open on the desk where I've been monitoring Hallstein's communications since dawn.
Two days since I put Daphne in Logan's SUV and sent her to Pristine.
Two days of empty apartment, her vanilla scent fading from the sheets, her lamp still burning beside the bed because I can't bring myself to turn it off.
The channels I've had running for five days have been quiet since Saturday's breach attempt outside the coffee shop.
Hallstein's been operating clean while the Pentagon announcement ticks closer.
Until now.
Keys from the counter. Glock on my hip, silenced secondary from the desk drawer, the go-bag I've kept ready since Tuesday. My hands move fast, but underneath, rage builds. They're going after her because of me.
The apartment behind me holds its emptiness. Bare wall above the bed where her father's painting used to hang, two finishing nails still visible, the drawer with it locked away. Her lamp glowing beside the bed, a beacon for someone who isn't coming back. I don't look as I leave.
Down the back service stairs, taking them three at a time. Through the hallway, past the loading dock's perpetual chill. My truck waits in the shadows. Engine starts rough.
I dial Logan as I pull onto the side street. He answers on the first ring.
"Stand by."
I hang up before he can respond. Nine years under the same roof means he knows that tone.
North on Calle Ocho toward I-95. The math keeps running as I merge into traffic. The extraction team had a fifteen-minute head start. If the dispatch was confirmation of an operation already moving, they could be twenty minutes ahead.
They could already have her.
My hands tighten on the wheel until my knuckles go white. I push the truck to ninety-two, weaving through traffic. Reading patterns three hundred yards ahead, picking lanes by instinct. Fort Lauderdale blurs past. West Palm Beach. Jupiter. Stuart. Each mile marker counting down.
I try Daphne's phone once at mile marker forty-three. Four rings, then her voicemail: "Hi, you've reached Daphne. Please leave a message." Her recorded voice guts me. I don't leave a message. What would I say?
The last time I heard her voice in person, she said "stay alive" at our apartment door.
The citrus country opens up, traffic thinning.
I push to ninety-five. Every mile per hour gained is thirty seconds saved.
The exit for Pristine appears, and I take it at speed that makes the tires scream.
Through town in under ninety seconds. The dairy farm where she probably bought eggs, the bait shop her father frequents, the two-lane stretch she's driven a thousand times, the welcome sign claiming 4,217 souls.
One of them is hers.
I reach the cottage at 9:50.
I kill the engine two blocks out, coast the final stretch in silence. Park behind the cottage on the alley street, the same approach I used when I first came here and took her.
The back gate hangs open. Wrong. Nicolas never leaves it open. Through the gate, his studio door also stands open. My stomach drops.
The easel is overturned, ultramarine and cadmium yellow bleeding across the floor. Paint water spreading dark. One brush snapped in half. The violence started here.
The studio is empty, but the evidence screams. They came for her, found him instead. The path through the garden shows the struggle continued. Herbs trampled, releasing rosemary and basil into morning air. Scuffed grass. One of Nicolas's paint-stained slippers lying in the tomato bed.
The back door of the cottage is ajar.
I approach silent, reading the geometry through the gap.
Kitchen visible and empty. Coffee gone cold on the counter.
Hallway leading toward the living room where voices drift.
Four male voices, low and professional. Then Nicolas, his accent thick with pain: "I don't know where she is. I don't know where she is."
They're torturing him for Daphne's location.
She's not here. She's at Miss Macie's teaching the morning class. The operators don't know she's gone. They're breaking her father to find her.
Rage floods through me, hot and familiar.
I cross the kitchen in three strides, boots silent on linoleum. Stop at the hallway threshold, reading the room through the archway in two seconds.
Four operators. Two standing over Nicolas, who's on the floor against the couch beneath Daphne's portrait.
The painting of her in the summer garden still hanging untouched above him.
His left arm bent wrong. Blood from his mouth staining the carpet.
One operator has his boot on Nicolas's ribs, applying pressure.
The other two watch the front window, backs to me.
I set the silenced secondary on the floor against the wall. The sound would alert the others. This needs to be quiet.
I move.
The first operator never sees me. My arm slides around his throat, finding the carotid. He struggles for three seconds, hands clawing, then goes limp. Eight seconds total. I lower him silent. The boot lifts from Nicolas's ribs as the second one turns.
He reaches for his weapon. My fist connects with his larynx first. Then his temple. He drops in four seconds, pistol hitting the rug with a thump.
The two at the window spin toward me. The third comes with a knife, movement trained but predictable. I flow inside his range, catch his wrist, redirect and twist until bone snaps. The knife transfers to my hand. I drive it into his throat before he can scream.
Three seconds. He drops, blood spreading dark.
The fourth operator bolts for the front door. I'm faster. I catch him at the wall, the knife finding the gap between vest and collar. He drops against the doorframe, eyes going empty.
Two unconscious but breathing. Two dead.
The portrait watches from the wall. Daphne painted in her summer garden, witness to what I've done in her childhood home.
Nicolas breathes shallow on the floor, watching me with eyes that track despite the pain. Wrist broken, maybe the elbow too. Some ribs broken too, from the bruising going purple under his torn shirt. Blood from cuts, not internal. They wanted him to talk, not die.
I kneel beside him, check his pulse. Steady enough. He'll survive if paramedics arrive fast. His eyes hold mine for a moment. He recognizes me. The man who scared him out of the garden in Miami. The monster who took his daughter, now the monster who saved him.
I stand, reaching for my phone to call 911.
The front door opens.
Daphne stands in the doorway holding a brown paper grocery bag.
She's in the wrap skirt over her leotard, the Miss Macie uniform. Hair in that soft teacher's bun. Her face carries that gentle expression from ninety minutes with eight-year-olds.
Her eyes find me first. Standing in the center of her father's living room with blood on my hands, still holding the knife dripping onto carpet.
Then the bodies. Two against the front wall.
Two on the rug. Then Nicolas against the couch beneath her portrait, arm twisted, ribs broken, breathing but broken.
She doesn't drop the groceries. Sets them down careful on the side table. Her body knowing how to be gentle even as her mind fragments. I see the jar of honey through the bag's top, the baguette she probably picked for lunch.
She crosses to Nicolas, dropping to her knees without touching him.
The skirt pulls taut over her thighs. She doesn't touch him right away.
Her hand hovers, fingers shaking, uncertain whether pressure or stillness will hurt him less.
I see the calculation in her eyes—where the blood is pooling, which side of his chest is higher, how to reach him without breaking him further.
Nicolas tries to sit up, fails, grimaces.
He starts to say something in French—"Ma chérie" maybe—but the pain knots the sound.
She hushes him with a gentleness you only learn from loving someone your whole life.
Her other hand goes to his face, two fingertips against his temple, thumb tracing his hairline.
By the time she registers the blood on her hands, her face is already wet with tears.
She doesn't make a sound. Not yet.
Only once she's sure he's breathing, eyes closed but responsive, does she look up at me. There is nothing in her face but exhaustion.
I was prepared for rage, or terror, or that quiet dissociation she used in the beginning when she thought to win me over with politeness.
She presses her palm flat to Nicolas's chest, right over his heart. The movement is slow, as if she's trying to memorize the rhythm in case it stops.
When she looks at me again, her face is ice. Not the kind that burns, but the kind that numbs. I recognize it from my own mirror.
"You need to leave," she says. "Right now."
Her jaw trembles, just once. She blinks, and the tears stop.
"Go," she says.
I don't move. Not right away. I'm still holding the knife, and my hands are red. I want to explain. I want to offer her something—an apology, or a promise, or maybe just the truth, which I've never given her unfiltered. But there's nothing I could say that she doesn't already know.
The two operators who lived are starting to come around. One of them coughs, tries to roll over, but his arms don't work right. The other groans, half-conscious, one hand crawling toward a weapon that is no longer there.
Daphne doesn't look at them. She doesn't look at the knife, or at me, or at the mess in her father's living room. She just sits there, breathing slow and shallow, as if she needs to regulate the oxygen for both of them.
She finally looks at me one last time, and now the anger is there, but it's not jagged. It's the kind of anger that comes with grief, a sadness too large to fit inside her body.
"This is your fault," she says. "All this violence, this blood. You brought it to my father's door."
She looks at her hands, red to the wrists.
"He almost died," she whispers. "My papa almost died because I let you into our lives."
She isn't raising her voice. She doesn't need to. Every syllable is a verdict.
"Stay away from us," she says. "Stay away from me."
The "us" draws the circle. Her and Nicolas inside, me outside.
But I catch the micro-movement: her shoulders shifting toward the door as she says it, her body wanting to follow even as her voice shuts me out.
Her hand tightens on Nicolas's good shoulder, anchoring herself.
Her eyes close once, just for a heartbeat mid-sentence.
I hear what she's really saying. She's not just convicting me. She's convicting herself. The woman who fell for her captor. The woman who painted herself with my garden's flowers and danced for me.
I could name what she's doing to herself. Could force her to see the self-destruction in her verdict. But I don't. Nine years of taking what I'm given. She's spoken. I won't argue.
My voice comes out steady though my chest is caving in. I pull out my phone, dial 911. Report it clean: address, four assailants, two breathing, two not, elderly male with broken ribs and arm needs immediate response. I hang up.
"Paramedics will be here in ten minutes," I say.
I pick up the secondary from against the wall, holster it. Pick up the knife still wet with blood. Walk past Daphne and Nicolas without looking, though everything in me wants to drop beside her.
Out the front door to the porch where morning light makes everything look peaceful.
I stand on the porch in Pristine's morning quiet. No neighbors have emerged. The cottage contained its violence well.
Through the door, I hear Daphne's breathing. Not quite crying, just shaped breaths. The small, wordless sounds of someone whose world just shattered.
The sirens reach me at 11:01. Six minutes since the call. I see the first patrol car turn the corner, lights fracturing morning peace, followed by the ambulance.
I move to the property's edge, stand behind a line of trees.
The paramedics rush in. Thirty seconds later, one emerges calling for the gurney. They bring Nicolas out on it. Oxygen mask, IV in the good arm, broken arm splinted. Daphne follows, wrap skirt streaked with blood, hands still red, face composed.
She climbs into the ambulance with her father. The doors close.
They pull away, sirens wailing.
She never looks toward where I stand.
More vehicles arrive. Patrol cars, unmarked SUVs. Yellow tape goes up. The cottage becomes a crime scene. I walk the long way back to my truck, get in, pull out silent.
I don't replay her words. Don't need to. They're carved into me now, confirmation of what the Army said in 2017, what the world's been telling me. I was that monster before her. For forty days, she made me forget. Now I'll be that monster again.
Good. Let me be that monster. Let me be worse. Because the four operators in Pristine were just Hallstein's opening move, and when he comes for her again, he'll find exactly the devil everyone says I am.