Chapter Fifteen #2
Instead, my mother forces out my name, her voice a thin, defiant rasp that cuts through the room.
“Emerson,” she whispers, each syllable weighted with urgency, “don’t bring her back here.
Ever. They killed Daphne and Evelyn.” Her eyes slide toward the twins, their faces just visible in the corner of the phone’s frame, and her expression crumples into something heavy with grief and sorrow—like she’s carrying the past, the truth, and the warning all at once.
The admission freezes us in place, the air snapping still around us.
Berk and the twins go rigid beside me, their shoulders tense, eyes wide and unfocused as the weight of it sinks in.
The room fills with a thick, suffocating silence that presses down like a physical thing, heavy with shock and disbelief.
Bryce leans in closer, ugly and triumphant.
He taunts her, leans down—too close—and then my mother moves.
It’s a sudden, desperate lunge, animal and terrible.
She bites his neck, and it turns into chaos.
There’s a struggle in the frame, grunts and a scuffle of limbs and Bryce shouts.
I can’t see the whole scene clearly through the video, but a shot cracks the room apart, then I see my mother go down.
My mother crumples sideways, her body folding as if something vital has been cut loose.
Her eyes go glassy, unfocused, and she hits the floor hard.
Bryce staggers back, the gun still clenched in his hand, its muzzle smoking as it skitters from his grip and slides across the floor, stopping in a widening pool of blood that wasn’t there a moment ago.
He drops to his knees like the weight of it finally finds him, then lurches upright again, panic snapping through his limbs.
The camera jerks violently as he stumbles into it, the frame filling with his face.
He claws at his neck, breath coming too fast, blood already seeping between his fingers where he’s pressed too hard, too instinctively, like he’s trying to hold himself together.
For one horrifying second, he looks both monstrously dangerous and unbearably small—undone by what’s just transpired.
He snarls at us through the screen, hysteria bleeding through every word. “You’ll pay,” he spits. “I swear—you’ll pay.”
I don’t hesitate. I don’t reach for calm or restraint or any of the careful masks I’ve worn over the years.
I choose fury. It surges through me so fast the world tilts on its axis, and every meticulous plan we built frays into a single, brutal need.
I lean into the phone until his smirking face fills the screen, until the room feels too tight to breathe in.
My voice comes out level, razor-cold, honed by years of restraint.
“Listen to me, Bryce.” Each word is precise, deliberate.
“We’ve been coming for you for a long time.
Haven’t you noticed?” I watch his expression flicker as I keep going.
“The buildings turning to ash. Your partners disappearing. The phone calls that stop getting returned.” I let the silence between each accusation stretch, forcing them to sink in, forcing him to feel it.
I don’t say Berk’s name. She doesn’t exist in this frame—she’s exactly where she needs to be, hidden, protected.
“You touch Kimber,” I continue, my voice dropping lower, deadlier, “or you threaten anyone who matters to me ever again, and I will make sure you regret the day you were born.” My gaze never leaves his. “We are coming for you. Both of you.”
There’s nothing left after that. No explanations or mercy. No one left to protect except the people standing in this room with me. My thumb hovers for a single heartbeat before I end the call, cutting off the last echo of Bryce’s voice mid-breath.
The screen goes black, and I stare at my reflection glaring back—my face pale, hollowed, stripped bare. The world feels unbearably loud and eerily silent all at once, like everything has shifted and there’s no going back.
Berk is suddenly in front of me, her hands warm against my cheeks, pulling me back into the world. “Em,” she says softly, searching my eyes. “Are you okay?”
Her voice cracks something in me. I blink, throat working as I try to answer. “Yeah,” I say, though it sounds wrong, broken in the air between us. “Yeah, I’m good.” But the words taste like ash.
Ronan and Rowan close in, silent but solid, each resting a hand on my shoulders. The weight of their touch steadies me in a way I didn’t know I needed. For a moment, none of us breathes. The room feels like it’s holding itself together by sheer force of will.
Then, a sound breaks it. A small, trembling whimper from behind us. We turn at once. Kimber stands in the doorway, wide-eyed and shaking, tears already slipping down her cheeks. Her lower lip quivers as she tries to speak, but the words catch in her throat.
Berk moves faster than any of us, rushing to her side. “Oh, baby,” she murmurs, kneeling in front of her. “What did you see?”
Kimber’s voice comes out tiny and wrecked. “All of it,” she whispers, before the dam bursts. The sobs shake her tiny frame as she collapses against Berk, clinging to her neck like a lifeline.
Berk’s eyes lift to ours over Kimber’s shoulder, full of concern and silent fury. The twins and I stand frozen for a heartbeat, useless statues in our own grief. Then Berk wraps Kimber tighter, rocking her gently, whispering soft reassurances into her hair.
I drag a shaking hand through my hair, fingers catching, tugging too hard, like the pain might anchor me.
My chest locks until every breath feels shallow and wrong.
My mom is gone—just like that, ripped out of the world in a blink.
Kimber watched it happen. Saw it. Heard it.
That truth alone feels like it’s carving me open from the inside.
Then there’s Bryce. Still breathing. Still standing.
Still out there after what he just admitted—after confirming, without even meaning to, that he and Dean were responsible for the car accident.
That Daphne and Evelyn didn’t die by chance or fate or bad luck.
They were taken. Murdered. Hearing it out loud detonates something inside me, makes the years between then and now collapse into nothing.
The grief doesn’t feel old anymore. It feels brand-new, raw and bleeding, like we just lost them yesterday.
Everything hurts at once—the past, the present, the futures they stole.
The lies we were forced to live inside for years.
Bryce is still out there, and now there’s no distance left between what he did then and what he’s done now.
It’s all the same violence, the same cruelty, the same man.
And I don’t know how I’m supposed to breathe knowing that.
That thought steadies me again. Because as much as grief scorches, vengeance burns hotter—and right now, it’s the only thing keeping me upright.
By the time Kimber finally drifts off, it isn’t just Berk who gets her there.
Berk hums softly, a low, familiar sound that wraps around Kimber like a shield, but I’m there too—kneeling beside the bed, one hand smoothing through her hair, the other pressing gently between her shoulders when the shakes come.
I murmur to her, grounding, steady, helping Berk hold her together until sleep finally takes her.
When her breathing evens out and her body slackens with exhaustion, the house seems to exhale with her, like it’s been waiting for that moment.
The silence that settles afterward isn’t empty—it’s loaded, tense, like we’re all bracing, keeping our pieces in place until the next move is made.
I make sure she’s tucked in, that there’s water on the nightstand, a nightlight casting a soft glow across the walls, and I give her the promise she needs most—that she’s not going back.
Then we ease the door shut and head down the hall, toward the War Room, toward what comes next.
Berk drops into the desk chair like she’s come home, fingers already flicking across keys.
The glow from the monitors paints her face the color of someone possessed—calm, dangerous, and beautiful in the way she focuses.
“One warehouse left,” she says without looking up, and the way she says it is matter-of-fact, not triumphant.
She brings up feeds and files, three screens filling with the breadcrumbs she’s been collecting for months.
Her voice is steady as she scrolls through names and dates, the paper trail of a rotten empire.
“Bryce is next,” I say. The words hit the room with the weight of a command, then fracture into quiet movement and murmured strategy.
Ronan leans back in his chair, arms crossed, a grin pulling at his mouth that never reaches his eyes.
Rowan’s attention stays on Berk, studying her like a map he’s only just learned how to read—careful, intent, memorizing every line.
And there it is again—that old, fierce sense of us. Dangerous. Disciplined. Aligned. A kind of unity that doesn’t need reassurance, only direction.
Berk tilts her head and taps the corner of a file.
“We don’t hit him with a single loud blow,” she says.
“We erode him. Take away his support, his money, his lanes of operation. We show the world what he did in ways he can’t gaslight.
” She doesn’t outline explosives or revenge fantasies.
Her plan is surgical in tone—public, precise, and humiliating for a man who hides behind cash and muscle.
“Let’s start with proof,” she says, and from there the room fills with quiet, focused argument. We break it down piece by piece—what goes to a lawyer, what becomes leverage, how to stage a leak clean enough that the people who rely on Bryce start seeing him as a liability instead of an asset.