Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dodge
The war room sits between us—a long table covered in phones, laptops, stacks of paperwork with numbers printed in columns that mean nothing good.
Maps pinned to corkboards along every wall.
Winlaw territory outlined in red marker, routes marked, names circled.
The room smells like burned coffee and cigarettes and money that never touched a bank.
Rebel's at my left shoulder. The three men standing along the back wall of the room have already reached for their weapons.
“Don't,” I tell them. They don't listen.
The room explodes all at once. Rebel takes the two on the right before they clear their holsters, and I put the third one down before he finishes his pivot.
Three shots, less than two seconds, and the war room is ringing loud enough that I feel it in my back teeth.
Gallows doesn't flinch. He stands at the far end of the table with his hands loose at his sides, the maps and corkboard behind him, and he watches the three men drop like he's already accounted for them as a loss.
“Outside,” I tell Rebel. Rebel moves through the door at a run, and a second later the compound goes loud—gunfire from the east side of the yard, then the south, then the roof. I keep my eyes on Gallows. “Your men are going to lose this,” I warn him.
“Most men lose eventually,” Gallows snarkily says, reaching toward the table—not for a weapon, just to straighten a stack of papers, but like the noise outside is a minor inconvenience. “What they lose over usually determines whether anyone remembers them.”
My jaw tightens and I order, “Move away from the table, Gallows.”
He takes one step back toward the corkboard wall, hands visible, unhurried.
Outside, the firefight gets louder. I can track it without looking—Cobra's voice cutting through from the south end of the yard, a burst from near the barracks that can only be Speed, then a single clean shot from above that tells me Rebel's already found the high ground.
“You burned my contacts in three states,” Gallows says, conversational as a man discussing weather. “I'll admit I underestimated your reach.”
“Then you knew this was eventually coming.”
“I knew something was coming,” he concedes. “The timeline was faster than I anticipated.” He glances toward the window at the far end of the room, where muzzle flash strobes against the glass. “I take it you don't intend to leave much standing.”
“Nothing,” I tell him, a smirk spreading across my face.
He nods, almost approving. “Thorough.”
The door behind me blows open and two more of his men pour through—not from outside, from the interior corridor I hadn't fully cleared.
The first one catches me in the shoulder and drives me sideways into the table.
The laptops scatter and a phone hits the floor and I get an elbow across the back of my neck before I can turn.
I grab the edge of the table, use it to spin, and put the barrel of my pistol into the second man's ribs before he can get the angle.
The shot is close enough that I feel the percussion against my hand.
He folds. The first man swings again and I let him, stepping inside the arc so the hit glances off my shoulder instead of my jaw, and I drive him back into the door frame hard enough that the frame cracks.
He doesn't get up. I straighten. My arm's bleeding down into my palm from a cut I don't remember taking, and the shoulder's going to be a problem by morning, but I'm standing.
Gallows hasn't moved from the wall of maps.
“You should've run,” I tell him, breathing harder than I'd like.
“And go where?” He tilts his head, a motion that's somehow both curious and dismissive. “You burned every exit months ago. I know how you work, Dodge. I've been watching you work.”
The compound outside goes quiet in pieces—first the south, then the roof, then a few stray shots from the east that trail off into nothing.
One voice calls out somewhere near the barracks, and then there's nothing left but wind and the low hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
Gallows hears it too. Something shifts behind his eyes, but he doesn't let it reach his face.
“Those children's parents made a choice,” he states.
“Don't,” I say, my tone carrying a warning.
“It's a simple truth. They knew what that ledger meant and they chose exposure over a very reasonable offer—”
“They chose not to let you buy your way out of what you did,” I cut him off. “And you had them killed for it.”
“I had a problem managed,” Gallows counters.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “And now I'm managing mine.”
His hand moves toward the table. Not toward the papers this time—toward the edge where the laptop was sitting before I knocked it across the room, where a pistol sits flat against the table surface, half covered by a manila folder.
Slow. Deliberate. Like he still thinks the conversation is running long enough to cover it.
I fire once. The round catches him between the eyes and his head snaps back against the corkboard wall, pinning him there for one suspended second before he slides down and lands at the base of the maps.
The charcoal suit doesn't wrinkle on the way down.
His hand is still four inches from the pistol.
He sits against the wall of his own war room in a pristine charcoal suit, looking almost peaceful in the way that dead men sometimes do.
I stand in the ringing silence for a moment.
There's nothing mystical about it. There's just smoke, busted laptops, scattered paperwork with his crimes typed out in columns, and a man who thought he was untouchable because nobody had ever been willing to pay the price of touching him.
I walk back out into the yard. “Done,” I tell Glacier.
He reads my face and nods. That's all that needs to pass between us.
We move fast after that. Cobra and Rebel drag everything burnable—furniture, curtains, and the papers right off Gallows's own desk into the main building while Speed helps Creeper into position and Pyre wraps his arm tight against his body.
I find the generator, crack the fuel line, and let it pool across the concrete floor of the main building.
I strike the match myself. The place goes up hard and fast, orange light climbing the walls and rolling black smoke into the sky, and we don't wait around to watch it finish.
The warehouse burns behind us. None of us look back.
The ride back is long. Open road, empty sky going gray-pink at the edges, just engine noise and the wind and the low hum of exhaustion settling into my bones.
I push my bike faster than I need to. I'm not running from anything anymore—I just need to get there.
I need to get back to that porch light. It's still on when we roll up the gravel drive.
I cut my engine before the bike's fully stopped, and the front door opens before my boots hit the ground.
Adalynn's standing in the doorway in one of my old shirts, hair loose, eyes red and raw from a night of not sleeping.
Carter's right behind her, arms crossed tight, jaw set in that way he has when he's been holding himself together for hours and doesn't know how to stop.
Behind Carter, Noah and Amelia are pressed into the doorframe in their pajamas, squinting against the early light.
Hulk fills the hallway like a wall that never moved.
“Dodge.” Adalynn's voice breaks on my name.
I close the distance in three steps and she meets me halfway, grabbing the front of my cut with both hands like she needs the grip to stay upright.
I pull her in and wrap both arms around her, and she shakes—full-body shaking, the kind that's been held back all night waiting for somewhere to go.
“It's done,” I inform her, mouth against her hair.
“It's over. He's gone, Adalynn. All of them.”
She doesn't say anything to that. She just holds on tighter.
Over her head, I find Carter. He's looking at me the way a fourteen-year-old looks at something he desperately needs to be true before he lets himself believe it.
I give him one slow nod. Something in his shoulders drops about two inches, and for just a second, he looks exactly his age.
Noah pushes past him without a word and wraps both arms around my leg, face buried against my side.
Amelia follows, pressing in from the other side, and I put one hand down on her head and hold them both there.
Mom appears in the kitchen doorway with a coffee pot already in her hand, eyes bright and steady the way they always are—the way they've always been, every time I came home from something I wasn't sure I'd walk back from.
“Come inside,” she says quietly. “All of you. Come inside.”
I stand there in that gravel drive with Adalynn against my chest, both kids pressed to my sides, Mom behind us, and the sky going pink over the open fields.
Hulk's leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching the road out of habit, doing the job he was left to do right up until there's no job left to do.
The quiet in my head right now isn't the kind I have to fight.
It isn't empty or loud or full of things I've been trying to drink away.
It's just quiet, the real kind, and I let it sit there and stay.
I came back. That's enough. That's everything.