Chapter 12 Dante #4
My hands tremble, but my finger stays on the trigger. His words slip through me like cold water, twisting, coiling. I can almost feel the unsteady hesitation hovering in my throat.
Could I really let him go? Let him disappear into the trees, vanish into the static of a new identity, his family safe, The Order fooled?
For a moment, my mind betrays me. I see it play out like a film: Ezra running through the woods under a washed-out dawn, his wife clutching their daughter’s hand, the three of them boarding a plane under false names, breathing the first air of freedom.
But then, as quickly as it appeared, the fantasy shatters.
What would I tell Estella? That I let a traitor go because he cried hard enough? That I believed the same man who sold us out?
I could stage it—say Ezra killed Owen, that he shot at me too before fleeing. Maybe they’d buy it. But I know what that would mean.
Every step I’ve taken, every risk, every careful plan wiped clean; my name dragged through the dirt, my purpose reduced to nothing. And somewhere in the back of my mind, the question gnaws, soft but relentless.
Am I really not like them?
Estella. I can already see the shades of disappointment carving across her face, a slow work of art she won’t bother to correct.
She’ll refuse to meet my eyes, folding her attention inward as she spins a plan to find Ezra and finish the job herself.
Cane will tilt his head the same way—wearing that small, cautious suspicion that grows teeth.
Both of them will grow cold toward me. I will disappoint them.
I will disappoint her.
I can’t let him go. Too many seams gape already; too many holes would yaw open if he slips away and someone else starts threading answers through them.
I level the rifle between his eyes. The shed shrinks to a narrow corridor of metal and breath as everything reduces to the cold weight in my hands and the black holes where his pupils fight to hold the light.
I press the trigger. The shot is a soft, clinical whisper, the silencer dulling the world to a distant, indifferent hum. Ezra’s body convulses, a ragged silhouette folding inward.
Blood blossoms from the center of his skull in a dark, viscous eruption that paints the air with iron and pine sap.
He goes slack, and the world reasserts itself in slow motion: the sag of his jaw, the flutter of lashes, the way the light catches on the new, wet wound like a smear across a photograph.
My heart hammers so hard my ribs might split while a heavy knot settles in my throat. The decision weighs like a small boulder on my shoulders, but the feeling that follows surprises me.
Guilt does not come. Instead, a warm, sharp clarity washes through my limbs, a steadying that tastes like resolve.
Heat spreads in small electric pricks under my skin, a sense of rightness that stands in stark contrast to the cool, pine-smoke calm of the shed.
A slow exhale leaves me, and the space narrows.
No more paranoia. No anxious whispers about who will talk. No widening holes that I can’t plug. The future simplifies into a single, luminous thing—the mission, uninterrupted. I can give myself to it now, whole and unfractured.
Footsteps and muffled voices bruise the quiet outside, and I glance back. The door remains shut, a thin barrier against revelation. My gaze slides over the dark pool beneath Owen, and a curse slips out of me.
Then I look at Ezra. His clothes darken as the blood spreads, the color crawling up the fabric like ivy. The floor beneath him, however, is strangely untainted beyond the pool, a clean line where the scene could be arranged, and the thought moves through me.
I can make this look like he turned on Owen. I can spin a story—a man cornered, a desperate shot, a fleeing traitor. Emmett will explode when he realizes his partner is dead, and Estella will understand the raw calculus behind a field kill. She’ll know I did what needed doing.
For her.
I twist the rifle to my back in one smooth motion and dive toward Ezra, sliding my hands beneath his armpits. His weight is awkward, unsteady as I lift him, dragging him across the shed floor to the far wall. I ease him down into a sitting position, his back pressing against the rough timber.
From his waistband, I pull a gun and shove it into his hand, angling it just so—an illusion of culpability. It isn’t perfect, since the bullets won’t match Owen’s wound. I know that. But Emmett won’t care about minutiae. He’ll see what he needs to see and nothing more.
I step back, letting the rifle slide into my hands again, muscles coiled and alert. The door bursts open before I can take a full breath.
“What the fuck happened?” Emmett shouts, eyes locked on Owen’s lifeless body.
Estella sweeps in immediately, hands gripping her weapon, eyes scanning every shadow, every corner of the room. She pauses at Owen, lips tipping downward in a silent frown, then swings her gaze to Ezra. “Nice job,” she murmurs.
“He was aggressive,” I lie, keeping my voice steady. “I had to be quick.”
Her eyes snap to mine, amber sparks catching in the dim light. The flicker of something new flashes in them, something akin to… pride? It’s gone as quickly as it appeared, but it leaves a charge in the air between us, invisible yet palpable.
“Just sad I missed all the fun,” she whispers, a hint of a smirk brushing her lips before retreating, swallowed by control.
Around us, the world blurs, dissolving into background noise. All that exists is the space between us, thick and electric, alive with emotions we have yet to name. It thrums with a raw, uncharted energy, a current we feel in our bones, impossible to ignore and impossible to resist.
“I don’t believe you,” Emmett states, and I can’t help the roll of my eyes. He’s been spoon-feeding me doubt since the shed, and he’s still acting like I can’t read the room. “He was skilled enough to look around instead of walking straight into the middle of the shed and getting shot like that.”
“He acted before he thought. Bad things happen when you move on impulse,” I say, my fingers brushing over the pendant in my pocket.
I was the last to leave the shed, and I couldn’t resist the urge when I leaned down and snatched the pendant from Owen’s neck. His death was more satisfying than Ezra’s, and right now, the little souvenir grounds me as I touch it.
Estella and I move toward the van seats, ready to close this scene and leave it behind. Emmett lingers at the trunk, hands hovering over the fabric that hides our arsenal as if he’s trying to solve a puzzle with pieces that never fit.
“Look, you can whine on the road,” Estella suggests, acid-soft, her palm flat against the van’s cool side. “We need to get out of here.”
The way those two dithered still puzzles me. They dangled performance over purpose—more interested in posture than practice. Disorganized, unimaginative, dull as the blunt edge of a blade. A parody of what assassins should be.
“I need a moment,” Emmett says at last. He snaps the trunk shut and leans his palms into the metal, head dipping as he chews his bottom lip like a man trying to swallow his failure whole.
Estella and I exchange a look before we slide into the van—her in the driver’s seat, me beside her. The doors close around us with a practiced hush, sealing the world out until only the interior and its small truths remain.
“I killed him,” I confess, a weight lifting off my tongue. Carefully, I pull the pendant from my pocket and show it to her. “He annoyed the fuck out of me.”
Estella’s face remains still, a mask that reveals nothing, as she looks at the pendant before shifting her eyes to mine.
Slowly, a grin cracks through—small and knowing, teasing at something hidden.
She leans back, the leather beneath her shifting with a soft sigh, and a quiet laugh escapes her, bright, sharp, and dangerous, curling through the space between us.
“I know,” she says, a note of pride coloring her voice while I shove the pendant back into my pocket. “I felt it.”
Without breaking eye contact, she lowers her window and tilts her head toward the opening. “We’ll start the van to warm it up,” she tells Emmett before turning the key. The engine coughs and swells into a throaty growl that vibrates through the metal.
Her eyes drift upward to the rearview mirror, and mine follow, drawn as if by an invisible thread. Our gazes meet there, colliding and locking me in place. My breath thins until it halts entirely.
Her eyes are soft, deceptively calm, yet a spike of something lethal glints within them—sharp and hidden like a blade beneath silk. I hold her stare, the dark temper reflected there matching the harsh lines at the corners of my own eyes, raw and carved from too many sleepless nights.
Silence thickens around us, swelling until it feels alive. Beneath it, a subtle, confusing current of recognition threads through me, the slow awakening of a feeling I cannot name.
We hail from opposite edges of the world, and yet beneath the hard veneer, there is this strange, uncanny kinship.
A flicker of familiarity, a delicate comfort that should not exist where blades and blood are our companions.
The sensation is both wrong and right, like an old scar that remembers warmth.
She glances back, catching Emmett as he steps away from the trunk and stamps out the cigarette with a lazy kick. He straightens, shoulders bunched, ready to get in the van. In the same instant, her foot finds the pedal and the van lunges.
The impact is a brutal punctuation, sending a heavy thud that ripples through metal and marrow. Emmett’s raw scream rents the air, and for a moment it is all sound—a jagged, animal keening that climbs into the sky.
I am frozen, lips parted in shock, as the van rides over him.
The chassis judders, a violent staccato of flesh and bone against rubber.
There’s a close, sickening crunch that would set a normal person’s teeth on edge.
His cries taper, breaking up into thin, ragged sobs as motion and breath struggle for purchase.
She eases forward, glances over her shoulder at the mess of broken bones under the tires, then backs up with a mechanical calm.
The van rolls again, deliberate and clinical, flattening movement into certainty.
When she finishes, she leans her back against the seat, a ghost of fake remorse taking over her face.
“Oops,” she drawls, the word soft and mocking, eyes widening in an exaggerated show of surprise.
Something in the innocence radiating off her and in that one hushed word makes me laugh—the sound shaking my chest before it turns into a snort.
At the dash, she finds a disc already seated in the player. With one finger, she presses play, and the first song blooms into the cabin.
Insane in the Brain by Cypress Hill floods the space, the bass thumping against the metal frame of the van, vibrating through my chest and rattling the air like a pulse.
I can’t stop the smirk that curls against my lips, a low, hot thrill spiraling through me and knotting warmth and adrenaline together in one sharp coil.
“Teamwork sucks,” Estella mutters, shooting me a glare that’s half irritation, half amusement. Then her lips twitch, a smile breaking through, the familiar psychotic gleam lighting up the depths of her eyes. “But at least he’s got good taste in music.”
Her laugh blends with the beat, and for a moment, the van feels like the only world that matters—a moving bubble where chaos, blood, and the thrill of the hunt collide.