Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“I said burn it the fuck down,” I repeat, my voice flat and final.
I grabbed the kerosene lamp from the sidebar and smashed it on the floor.
The glass shatters. Fuel spreads across the rug, soaking into the bloodstain where Wade lies, turning the oak boards glossy and black.
“No fucking disposal team. No fucking cleaning. Let the goddamn house take him. Let it fucking take everything.” Tears burn down my face—angry, conflicted, furious at him, at her, at myself for still feeling anything at all.
Sterling studies my face, choosing not to say anything.
Then nods once. He moves to the drapes and yanks them down in heavy sweeps, letting moonlight flood the room.
“Lila,” he spoke into his comm, voice calm and decisive, “get Mrs. Whitley to her car. Send her home. We’re torching the manor in two minutes. ”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lila’s voice crackles back through the comm, equal parts disbelief and reluctant admiration. “You two get more psychotic as this goes. Moving her now.”
I dragged the heavy velvet curtains over Wade’s body, covering him like a shroud.
He didn’t deserve a burial, but he deserves to burn here, in the same place he made my mother bleed.
I pull the silver matches from the desk drawer, engraved with the Hawthorne crest, and strike one.
The flame dances, small and yellow, reflecting in Wade’s dead, open eyes.
Sterling gathers the files, the maps, and anything that looks important from the briefcase, shoving them into a fireproof bag. “Ready?”
I dropped the match onto the kerosene-soaked rug.
The room erupts. Flames climbed the drapes in seconds, licking greedily up the bookshelves, devouring the mahogany desk where Wade tried to make me sign away my life.
The heat shoves us backward, and black smoke billows thick toward the ceiling. “Move,” Sterling says, grabbing my arm.
The servant’s passage is narrow and dark behind the bookshelf.
We move by memory and instinct, Sterling ahead with the fireproof bag, me covering our exit with the Glock drawn.
The heat follows us like a living thing hungry for oxygen, chasing us through the walls.
We burst out through the gardener’s shed into cold night air, gasping.
Mrs. Whitley is already at her car, a silver sedan parked on the gravel driveway beyond the garden gate.
Lila stands by the open driver’s door, helping the older woman into the seat and pressing the keys into her hand.
Sterling throws the fireproof bag into the truck bed while I run to the car window.
Mrs. Whitley looks up at me, her eyes wet and sharp, her wool shawl pulled tight around her shoulders.
“Go straight to your house,” I say, leaning through the window.
“Not the cottage. Your real house. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
Mrs. Whitley’s eyes glisten as she grips the steering wheel tighter, her voice cracking just slightly. “I’ll be gone before the engines arrive.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, my fingers gently brushing her weathered cheek. “For the keys. For keeping the secret. For everything you’ve done for me…for us.”
“You’re your mother’s daughter,” Mrs. Whitley says, catching my hand in both of hers, her grip surprisingly strong. “Not his. Remember that, little one.”
“I will,” I promise, my voice thick. “Now go.”
She nods, shifting the car into drive. “Call me when you can, little one.”
The sedan crunches down the gravel drive and disappears into the dark tree line, heading toward the main road and the home she kept off the property. The one Wade had never known about, the one where she’d finally be safe.
Behind us, the manor’s windows explode outward in a shower of glass and fire.
Flames devour the second story, greedy and unstoppable.
The roof sags, then collapses inward with a thunderous crack, sending a storm of sparks spiraling into the night sky like dying stars.
Lila is already in the truck, rifle stowed, files spread across her lap.
I climb into the passenger seat, slamming the door as Sterling guns the engine, and the first distant sirens begin to wail from the valley below.
No one speaks until we hit the interstate.
Lila breaks the silence first, her voice shaky as she shifts through the files in the fireproof bag. “There’s a facility address. Upstate. Near the mountains.” She swallows hard. “And...Jesus, Kiera, there are kids’ names in here. Dozens of them.”
“Cam,” Sterling says into his earpiece, voice flat and hard. “We’re inbound. Twenty minutes. Have the scanners ready and the coffee hot. We’ve got a lot of reading to do.”
I touch the pearls at my throat and stare out the window at the dark highway unwinding before us. The fire is behind us. The Nesting House is ahead. And somewhere in the weight of these files, in the third pearl on the left side of my necklace, was the reason she’d died humming my song.
“We’re coming,” I whisper to the glass. The truck ate up the miles, carrying us back toward the warehouse where Cam waited with his screens and his silence. toward the next war.