Chapter 31
WYATT
We started climbing the bridge hand in hand, and I felt it before I saw it—the fog rolling in from the harbor like a living thing, thick and gray and purposeful, moving across the water with the kind of deliberate intent that made you think of old ghost stories and warnings about the sea.
Sophie noticed, too, glancing out at the darkening sky where city lights were starting to blur into halos. "Maybe it's an omen," she said, her voice lighter than I expected given what we were doing, given the fear she was facing. "Help from the universe so I can't look down and see the water."
I squeezed her hand, grateful for the humor even if it was covering nerves, even if I could feel the slight tremor in her fingers. "Whatever works."
The fog came in fast—faster than seemed natural, faster than any weather I'd seen in Charleston—swallowing the city behind us first, then the lights along the bridge, then the water below us, until we were walking through cloud, surrounded by white-gray nothing that muffled sound and made the world feel smaller, more intimate, more isolated.
By the time we reached the top of the span—farther than Sophie had wanted to go, farther than we'd planned—we couldn't see the harbor beneath us at all.
Couldn't see the city we'd left behind or the shore ahead.
Couldn't see anything except a few feet of walkway in either direction and the cables rising up into the mist like something from a dream.
She stopped, eyes closing, chest rising and falling as she pulled in deep breaths.
I waited beside her, not pushing, not talking, not doing anything except being present. Watching her face in the diffused light, the way the fog caught in her hair like something ethereal, like she was part of the landscape instead of separate from it.
Then a voice cut through the mist, billowing from somewhere ahead of us, distorted by the fog.
"Wyatt Dane."
My entire body went cold, every instinct I'd honed over years of combat firing at once, adrenaline flooding my system.
Klein.
He materialized from the fog like something conjured from nightmare, walking toward us with that same sleazy grin I'd seen at Mama P's, but his eyes were different now. Wild. Unhinged. Burning with something that looked like madness barely contained behind a thin veneer of control.
His hair was disheveled, sticking up at odd angles like he'd been running his hands through it obsessively for hours.
His suit was rumpled, tie loosened and askew, collar unbuttoned.
He looked like he hadn't slept in days, like something had broken inside him and he'd stopped caring about the facade.
Something was deeply wrong with him—more wrong than the garden-variety asshole with a grudge I'd dealt with before.
He pointed a finger at me but spoke directly to Sophie, his voice dripping with contempt and something darker. "Do you know the kind of criminal you're choosing to spend time with? The kind of man he really is underneath that heroic act?"
Every muscle in my body tensed, coiling tight, preparing for violence. But Sophie stepped forward slightly instead of back, chin lifting in defiance. "Wyatt didn't do anything wrong."
Klein laughed—sharp, bitter, the sound of a man who'd lost his grip on reality and found something twisted in its place. "You have no idea what he's done. What he's part of. What secrets he's keeping from you, even now."
Then his gaze snapped to me, eyes gleaming with something manic and triumphant, like he'd finally found the answer to a question that had been eating him alive.
"I'm putting it all together, Dane. Victoria helped me see it—the patterns I couldn't see before.
All the pieces are falling into place now.
Your whole file is being dissected as we speak.
Every deployment. Every mission. Every connection you've ever made. "
Victoria. The name meant nothing to me, rang no bells, but clearly it meant everything to him.
"Thank you," he continued, voice rising with fervor, gesturing wildly with his free hand like a preacher delivering a sermon, "for connecting me to Dominion Hall.
I don't know what it is yet, but I will.
I'll find out. I'll tear it all down—you, your career, whatever shadow operation you're all running.
I'll expose every lie, every cover-up, every dirty secret. "
Then he stepped over the line.
His gaze slid to Sophie, lingering in a way that made my skin crawl, made violence simmer hot and immediate in my blood. "A pretty girl like this would be better off with a real man. A man of substance. Someone with a future instead of a criminal record. Someone like me."
Something snapped inside me.
I stepped forward, instinct overriding thought, every protective impulse I had firing at once, not caring about the gun or the danger or anything except getting between him and her.
And Klein pulled his service weapon.
The gun came up fast— standard FBI issue—barrel pointed at my chest, his hand shaking just enough to make him more dangerous, not less.
Shaking hands pulled triggers accidentally. Shaking hands missed center mass and hit something vital, anyway.
"Don't," I said, voice low and controlled despite the adrenaline screaming through my veins, immediately shifting my body in front of Sophie, making myself the bigger target. "Put it down, Klein. Right now. This doesn't end well for anyone if you don't."
But his eyes were too bright, too far gone, pupils blown wide with whatever cocktail of obsession and delusion and sleeplessness was driving him.
The zealot I'd known before—the one who'd made my life hell at Bragg—had found blood in the water and wanted the kill, wanted the vindication he thought would come with destroying me.
"We can talk," I said, hands coming up slowly, palms out in the universal gesture of non-threat, trying to de-escalate even as my mind cataloged distances, angles, options for disarming him. "Somewhere else. Off the bridge. We can figure this out like professionals."
Klein laughed again, but it was hollow, broken, the sound of something that used to be human. "Talk? You want to talk? Like that helped before? Like talking kept you from ruining everything?"
"Klein—"
"You ruined me!" he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth, face contorting with rage that had been building for years. "I lost everything because of you! My reputation in the Bureau. My investigations. My life. Everything!"
"That wasn't my fault," I said firmly, trying to ground him in reality, in facts instead of delusion. "I was clean. The investigation cleared me. I'm still clean. You know that."
We'd been shifting as we talked, both of us moving instinctively—him advancing with the confidence of armed authority, me backing up slowly, angling us along the walkway, trying to create distance from Sophie.
The railing was close now, maybe five feet to my right, fog swirling thick and impenetrable below us, hiding the deadly two-hundred-foot drop to the harbor.
"You were never clean," Klein spat, gun still trained on me, barrel unwavering even as his hand trembled.
"You just had people protecting you. Your CO.
Dominion Hall now, probably. Whatever shadow shit you're part of.
But I'm going to expose all of it. I'm going to get it all back—my career, my standing, my life.
I'm going to build it on the bones of Wyatt Fucking Dane and all your pals. "
Then something changed in his face. The mania drained away for a moment, replaced by cold calculation, and that scared me more than the rage had because rage was predictable and calculation wasn't.
"You know what?" he said quietly, almost conversationally, like we were discussing weather instead of murder. "Maybe I should just end it right now. Save everyone the trouble. One bullet. Self-defense. You attacked a federal agent. No one would question it."
I saw his finger tighten on the trigger, saw the decision crystallize in his eyes, saw the moment when talking stopped being an option.
I moved—fast, years of training taking over—turning my body, trying to minimize the target, trying to get small.
The gunshot was deafening in the fog, sound bouncing off water and concrete and metal cables, echoing like cannon fire.
Pain exploded in my shoulder, white-hot and immediate, the round biting deep into muscle and tissue, tearing through meat.
I stumbled, gasping, hand coming up instinctively to the wound, feeling hot blood already soaking through my shirt—
And turned just in time to see Klein slam into the railing, his back hitting first as momentum drove him over.
His arms flailed wildly, fingers clawing at air as the gun tore free from his grip and vanished into the fog.
Then he was gone—body tipping backward, swallowed whole by the white nothing below.
A scream—Sophie's voice, raw and terrified and disbelieving.
She was at the edge, hands outstretched like she'd just pushed something away from her, eyes wide with shock and horror.
She'd pushed him.
To save me. To stop him from shooting again. To end the threat.
But he was gone now. Over the edge. Falling two hundred feet into dark water that would hit like concrete at that speed.
Fuck.
My shoulder was on fire, blood running hot down my arm, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was Sophie standing at the railing, staring down into the fog where Klein had disappeared.
What mattered was that she'd just pushed a federal agent off a bridge.
What mattered was figuring out what the hell we were going to do now.
I pressed my hand harder against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding, trying to think through the pain and shock.
Sophie turned to me, face pale in the fog, eyes huge and dark. "Wyatt—you're bleeding—he shot you—"
"I'm okay," I said, though I wasn't sure that was true. The bullet had gone through, I could feel that much, but I didn't know what it had hit on the way. "Sophie, are you hurt?"
She shook her head, still staring at me like she couldn't quite believe what had just happened. "He was going to kill you. He was going to shoot you again. I just—I didn't think—I just pushed him and—"
Her voice was rising, panic threading through it.
"Hey," I said, moving toward her despite the pain screaming in my shoulder, despite the blood soaking through my shirt. "Look at me. Sophie. Look at me."
Her eyes snapped to mine.
"You saved my life," I said clearly, firmly, needing her to hear it, to understand it. "He was going to kill me. You did what you had to do."
"But he's—" She looked back at the railing, at the fog hiding the water below. "He's dead. I killed him."
"We don't know that yet," I said, though we both knew the fall would be fatal, knew no one survived a drop like that. "And even if—Sophie, this was self-defense. He shot me. He was going to shoot again. You protected both of us."
She was shaking now, adrenaline hitting her system hard.
I pulled out my phone with my good hand, wincing at the movement. No signal. Maybe the fog was interfering, or just fate. Didn't matter. We needed to get down, needed to call this in, needed to get ahead of the story before it got ahead of us.
"We need to move," I said. "Can you walk?"
She nodded, still pale but focused now, training or instinct or something kicking in.
I took her hand with my good arm, leaving bloody fingerprints on her skin but not caring. "Stay close to me. We're going to walk down slowly. When we get to the bottom, we’ll call my family. Tell them the truth."
"The truth," she repeated, like she was trying to anchor herself to it.
We started moving, my shoulder screaming with every step, Sophie's hand tight in mine.
The fog was still thick, still hiding us, and I was grateful for that, at least. Grateful no one had seen what happened up here, no cameras this far up the pedestrian walkway to capture it.
Just us and Klein and the truth.
And somewhere below, probably broken on impact, the body of a man who'd let obsession destroy him.