Chapter Eleven #2
We sit huddled around the table, the shape of revenge settling into our bones. The name on all our lips is the same one that makes the air go cold, the one we have to take apart without giving him any clean excuse to come at us hard. Bryce. Saying it aloud is like choosing the battlefield.
Emerson leans forward, fingers steepled, eyes bright with a worry that keeps you honest. “We do not let him have a single clean reason to march down on us,” he says.
“No public provocation that looks like bloodlust. He needs to be eroded. We make their world messy, not by burning his house down but by making the people who feed him nervous. Partners, investors, the guys who move products. Make them doubt him. Make his leverage evaporate.”
Rowan snorts a low laugh and then goes quiet, folding his hands as if weighing the sound of the plan before he lets it loose.
“We do it with proof,” he says. “Not gossip. Paper that bites, tape that proves, witnesses that are trustworthy. We leak an invoice here, a shipment discrepancy there. Someone on his payroll decides the risk isn’t worth the payout.
When his buyers ask questions, Bryce will look around and wonder who’s pulling the rug beneath him. ”
I push my chair back and walk in a slow circle.
The idea sits in my gut like a grenade you can’t quite defuse.
Expose him, isolate him, strip his support until he stands naked and alone.
“He expects fireworks,” I say, low and steady.
“He expects a show—an obvious, loud answer that plays right into his script. So, we don’t give him one.
We feed his fear and let him flinch first. Make him scramble, second-guess his men, cut friends off at the knees.
” Their faces tighten as they picture it, and I let the silence hang long enough for the image to settle in.
Then I push it further. “Let him unravel himself. Make him panic, patch holes, and point fingers until he serves us the openings on a platter. While he’s busy fighting fires, he and Dean won’t see us coming—and they certainly won’t know Berk’s risen from the dead until she strikes.
” A hard, ugly grin curls at the corner of my mouth—something more animal than human—and I can feel the feral satisfaction roll through me.
The thought of them unraveling, of the two men who thought they were untouchable being forced to play defense, lights something in my chest that hasn’t burned in a long time.
Emerson rubs his temple, a tired edge to his voice.
“Remember that Bryce already knows we have Kimber. He will be extra venomous because he thinks that gives him leverage. Don’t forget we burned the house and moved locations.
He will read that as an act of war and answer in kind.
Dean might already know more than we think.
” He looks at us as if daring us to pretend otherwise.
“We have to assume every move we make is being watched. That means plausible deniability in public and precision where it counts.”
Rowan’s jaw tightens, and his hands curl until his knuckles pale.
“She stays hidden,” he says flatly. “No parade. No public appearances. Not until we pick the moment and the way to show her without giving him a beacon. She’s too valuable to throw into the open.
We protect Berk with everything we have, not because she’s leverage, but because she’s ours. ”
I can feel the needle of anger settle into a steady hum.
“We already hit his second,” I remind them again.
“Trent tried to kill me. Taking him out removed one dangerous piece and gave us a window. Now we use that window to show the world the cracks we’ve been sitting on for years.
” My voice stays hard—there’s a grim pleasure beneath it, but mostly a cold, methodical hunger.
Emerson shakes his head once, hard. “We push where it hurts. Make his partners nervous. We do not hand him the narrative that we’re irrational. We make him look guilty of his own habits. When the people who back him pull away, he’ll implode.”
Rowan nods and adds something that cuts sharper than any knife. “We move in circles he doesn’t expect. Use Berkley’s eyes and our history to craft the hits. We leak proof, not accusations. He’ll double down, and every time he tries to punish us, he’ll expose himself more.”
Berk will stay in the shadows, eyes on everything.
She’s already crippled their network by taking out the men who thought they were untouchable and torching the warehouses that made their ledger breathe.
Let her keep watching. Let her keep compiling the footage and the little honest receipts that will make our case when we need to shove it in the light.
Emerson takes the paper trail. Legal is his battlefield now, the quiet warfare of signatures and filings and the little irregularities that make a clean ledger crack.
He’ll pull at threads the way a surgeon teases a single stitch, and when a tidy surface peels back, the rot underneath will show.
Rowan and I handle containment and consequences.
We’ll be the blunt instrument that makes sure any move they make will have a cost. We’ll strike with teeth and then vanish before they can spin the story into something that paints us as monsters.
If Bryce tries to cast us as the villains first, we’ll have the proof, the witnesses, and the pressure to bury his lies in public.
Emerson looks up at me, the exhaustion in his expression raw. “Dean will try to use Kimber to bait us into mistakes. We do not let him. We make him the one who looks reckless.”
Rowan’s voice drops to a hard whisper that still carries through the room. “And if he moves at her,” he says, “we do not give him the satisfaction of chaos. We respond with consequences. Take his ability to hide behind fear. We strip him of allies, so he has no hand to lift against her.”
We keep talking, pushing at edges and closing off escape routes in theory only, refusing to step into specifics that would turn this from fiction into a how-to.
The mood changes from grief and confession to a cold, shared resolve.
Each of us adds a small piece to the architecture of their dismantling until we have a map we can all understand.
When we finally lean back, the room is quieter but sharper.
We know what we want, and we know a war is coming, but we will not provide the ones we love as pawns.
Instead, we will be slow, precise, and relentless, exposing them the way light finds rot.
Berk sits in the center of it now, the eye of the storm and the hand that will pull threads until their empire unravels.
We set the rules. No reckless noise. No traceable phones.
The fallout house becomes the hub. Berk’s network feeds us targets, and we build cases on each one—proof laid bare, their crimes exposed for exactly what they are.
We apply pressure first. Make them shift.
Make them panic. We don’t step into the open for some melodramatic endgame.
We strip away their allies one by one and let the empire rot from the inside until there’s nothing left standing to shield them.
Unfortunately for Bryce, fate handed him the short straw, and that makes him our unlucky next target.
“And if he makes a move?” Emerson asks.
“We respond,” I say, unflinching. “Not fast. Not loud. We make him feel it later. Every move becomes a lesson. He’ll come to dread the moment his choices catch up with him.”
When the conversation grinds to a stop, Rowan rubs his hands together and gives that crooked smile that used to mean trouble. “We start tomorrow,” he says. “Slow. Quiet. Exact.” I feel the old heat lifting, not gone but redirected into something sharp and useful.
Emerson nods in agreement.
We all know the stakes. We’ve already lost too much to consider turning back now.
Silence hangs thick enough to chew, and I can feel the questions building like pressure behind my brothers’ teeth.
Finally, Rowan snaps, eyes flaring as if he can’t stand the quiet any longer.
“Are you fucking her?” he asks, the words blunt and ugly and impossibly small for the thing they try to hold.
Emerson buries his head in his hands, a slow shake of disbelief.
I grin because, fuck it—the truth is mine to give.
“Fuck yeah,” I say, loud, proud and a little dangerous.
“Gods yes. She was mine once already tonight. We demolished Trent, then I pulled her into his blood, and we didn’t waste a second.
” I give them the image like a dare, flicking my head toward the doorway where Berk sleeps.
“I rinsed her clean in the shower after, washing away every trace of him so she wouldn’t have to wake up with his filth still on her skin…
and when she was finally warm and new beneath my hands, I took her again.
” The memory tastes like iron and satisfaction.
I’m bold enough to own it, to make it a piece of the night we’ve just survived.
Rowan growls, and I like that noise because it’s still him, angry and clumsy and brutally loyal. “You’re an asshole,” he says, half accusation, half laugh.
“You’re one to talk,” I snap back before I can stop myself.
The jab lands sharp. He blinks, that expression folding into something else—something like regret and memory—and the room shifts.
“You,” I say, softer now but deliberate in every damn syllable, “you took her first. You didn’t tell us.
” The words cut through the air between us, heavy and true.
Emerson looks from me to Rowan, eyes wide. “Is that true?” he asks quietly.