Chapter 12 Dante #3
But when I look at her, she is far from rattled. She offers me a nearly invisible nod, like a flint strike of permission. I take it for the cue it is and pivot on my heel, falling into step behind Owen without rushing.
The back of his head fills my vision, a map of posture and intent. My fingers close around the rifle, feeling the cold metal, hard reassurance against the skin of my palms. I imagine, with a clarity that makes my mouth dry, lifting it and putting a single, clean bullet where it matters.
“So you’re her new fuckboy, huh?” he asks, and the image collapses like glass.
The question snaps the fantasy away as confusion knots my brow. He glances over his shoulder, half chiding, half demanding an answer.
“What?”
He stops, forcing me to do the same. The world narrows to the scrape of gravel under our boots, the faint chirp of an insect, the rustle of dead leaves. Slowly, he turns so we face each other, his features lit by a hard, small sun of self-satisfaction.
“Come on, man. It’s so fucking obvious.” He spreads his arms like a carnival barker displaying a prize. “I’m not judging here. I mean, she’s such a piece of ass, I can’t blame you.”
The words strike like a live wire. Fury surges through me so fast it feels like an animal breaking loose, a bright, hot current that tightens every muscle. My grip on the rifle goes white, and my jaw clenches until my teeth ache.
If we weren’t on the mission, I would take him apart limb from limb for the way he talks about her.
“I’m just trying to warn you,” he says, as if his nastiness were charity, before falling back into step, moving with the jaunty rhythm of a man who thinks himself untouchable.
I match his pace, my anger entwined with a coarse, jealous ache.
There’s a thread of something older between them, one I had suspected but never named.
In a quiet, ungentle corner of my mind, I had known; in another, I had refused to believe it.
Now the possibility blooms between my ribs like a festering wound.
“Warn me about what, exactly?” I ask, and the question is softer than the anger that fuels it, edged with something I don’t want to admit.
“Whatever she told you, she’s playing you,” he states. “Don’t trust her. She’ll use you and toss you aside the moment you stop being her shiny toy.”
“You had a thing, huh?” I ask, each syllable dragged out like a stone grinding over gravel. I used to have the patience of a saint. Now I can feel it cracking, thin fractures spreading through it. “Something serious?”
“I tried to put some sense into her head,” he explains, with a bitter chuckle that curdles into self-pity. “Tried to fix her. Change her for the better. But she just wouldn’t fucking listen. She’s a psycho, man. Completely gone. Lost fucking case.”
I bite my tongue so hard that iron floods my mouth. The taste of blood grounds me, a reminder that I can still feel, still restrain myself, albeit barely. Each word he throws out pushes me closer to the edge. The desire to break him claws up my spine like fire under skin.
And the funniest part is that he believes every word he’s saying. In his mind, he’s the savior. The fucking hero of a story he wrote for himself.
Pressure builds in my chest, heavy and relentless. The past presses against the edges of my vision—flashes, voices, the dull ache of something I thought I’d buried, and just like that, I hear her again.
I just want to help you. You could be better. You need to change.
My ex, the one who thought love meant repair. I gave her everything I had, stripped myself bare until there was nothing left to give. Still, it wasn’t enough. I became a project. A thing to be mended, improved, reassembled into something more palatable.
She wanted to fix me, too.
And when I failed to become the version she wanted, she looked at me with that same hollow disappointment, the kind that makes you wish you could carve yourself open and start again.
I drag in a breath, grounding myself in the weight of the rifle in my hands.
“How did you meet?” I ask, forcing my tone soft, though bitterness still leaks through like water through cracked stone.
I hate every word, but he’s the only lead I have—the only window into Estella’s past that she refuses to open herself.
He shrugs, eyes flicking toward the trees. “On one of the missions, similar to this one. Both she and I had a similar past.”
I don’t believe that for a second. Estella and he don’t belong in the same sentence, much less the same story. “Like what?” I pry.
He snorts, spitting a laugh into the dirt. “Like both of us living in shitholes. Fucking Gravemoor. Mine had a shitty name too—”
He keeps rambling, and I let it slide off like rain on leather, tuning him out.
Amid those sounds, I try to focus on the name Gravemoor.
It rings unfamiliar, and I’ve been in enough holes to know the map of human misery by heart.
Something alive stirs at the edges of me, a tightening hunger, a pulse akin to excitement.
Every scrap I learn about her peels back another layer, brings me closer to the shape of who Estella really is.
I want more.
I need more.
A dull, hard slam against my ribs snaps the reverie clean. My breath hiccups, and my eyes go wide.
Ezra.
Owen crouches low with me behind the shadowed flank of the house, and together we watch him move toward the shed.
The man looks wrecked—cavernous bags under his eyes, skin paper-thin from too many sleepless nights.
Fatigue clings to him like a second skin.
He scans the wrong directions in a panic; his head jerks like a puppet pulled by fraying strings.
Adrenaline floods my system, but before I can lay out three clean steps in my head, Owen pushes himself up and bolts for the shed.
Fucking idiot.
I follow him, silent cursing pasted to the inside of my teeth.
Owen nudges the door, and Ezra lets out a scream.
The next moment erupts before I can think twice—a raw, crystalline sound echoes as the world compresses into the barrel of my rifle.
I breathe out and fire, and the bullet finds the back of Owen’s head with a thump that feels like the end of something old and rotten.
He collapses, the impact rattling through my boots when his weight hits the floor. For a moment, the shed is filled with only the sound of his body folding.
Fucking finally.
“Please, don’t kill me,” Ezra stammers, sliding down onto his ass and scrambling backward, palms desperate on splintered boards. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
Blood spreads beneath Owen like ink dropped into water, a dark, ravenous bloom swallowing the pale light. A cold, steady satisfaction runs through me as I can’t look away.
“Oh God, Dante, I’m so sorry—” His voice breaks, a thin thread trying to stitch itself into something human.
I force my eyes up to him and raise the rifle until the stock bites into my shoulder.
His whining becomes a serrated noise at the edge of my hearing.
I scan the shed while he babbles: the rough wooden planks drink in the light and cast a honeyed glow, their fibers dry and pine-sweet with the ghost of old smoke.
Moss and lichen crawl along the lower boards, softening the hard seam where timber meets stone like slow, living bruises.
“Nice place,” I comment, voice low, the rifle aimed at his face. “Care to explain this?”
His hands flutter up like a bad joke, shaky and useless. “I didn’t tell them anything!” he howls. “I swear, Dante, I lied, and I made it look believable. They don’t know anything. They won’t know!”
The words fan the coals in me. I can see the sweat beading at his temple, the tremor in a hand that wants to cover a lie and can’t.
“We trusted you,” I say through clenched teeth. “Jason considered you a friend. You fucking betrayed us.”
“I did what I had to do to survive!” he yells, voice cracking under the weight of desperation. His gaze darts to the door, sharp and panicked, and instinctively, I follow.
It’s only a matter of time before Estella and Emmett get here. And when they do, she won’t hesitate. One glance at him sprawled across the floor, and she’ll pull the trigger without blinking.
“They threatened my family!” he continues, chest heaving, voice splitting into something close to a sob. “I did what I had to, to protect them!”
I roll my eyes, a bitter snort escaping before I can stop it.
How convenient. The same old excuse—survival, family, guilt. If he’d come to us the moment The Order cornered him, we could’ve helped. Found a way out. But now, it’s far too late.
I can’t trust him.
I don’t want to trust him.
He’s a cornered rat, trying to save his skin by hiding behind his family. Even now, he lies through his teeth. I can feel it—he played both sides until the walls started closing in.
He knows what he’s done.
“Who are they? Where are they hiding?” I demand, clinging onto a fragile hope that I can still get something out of him.
“I swear, I don’t know! I tried to find them, but I couldn’t!
Dante, please,” he pleads, each word shaking.
“There’s a hatch under the floorboards that leads to the woods.
I can make it to the highway, head straight to your base.
We can fix this, I swear. You don’t have to do this.
” His eyes meet mine, desperate and glistening. “I know you. You’re not like them.”
“Do you?” I ask quietly, my jaw tightening until it aches. “Do you really know me?”
Tears cut thin, shining lines down his dirt-streaked face. His breathing turns shallow, erratic. There’s a gun in his waistband, but he doesn’t reach for it. Maybe he’s given up. Or maybe he’s still hoping I’ll break.
“You’re a good man,” he stammers. “With a good cause. We’re on the same side. You don’t kill the innocent.”