Chapter 15
Seth
By the time we land in Fresno, the sun is already climbing the horizon. We jack a black SUV from a long-term parking lot near the airport, Beau hotwires it in under thirty seconds like it is just another Tuesday. No plates, tinted windows, half a tank of gas. Good enough.
The drive to John and Mary’s neighborhood is quiet. When we finally turn onto their street, the houses look washed out in the early morning light. Peaceful, like nothing has ever happened here. Like Brooke isn’t missing. Like we aren’t about to turn this place inside out.
Travis kills the engine and wipes a hand down his face. “Okay. We’re here. Just… maybe no murder unless it’s absolutely necessary?”
Beau's already opening the door. “Only if they make us.”
Travis lets out a strangled noise that might be a whimper.
I step out last. My shoulder burns with every movement. The gauze at my ribs is soaked through again, sticking to my skin. It doesn’t matter. Pain doesn’t matter. Not when Brooke is still out there.
“Let’s move.”
Beau falls in behind me without a word. Travis stays rooted in place, sweat beading on his forehead, his hands twitching against his thighs.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he says. “Can I stay out here? I’ll keep watch. I swear. I’ll scream if I see anything.”
“Yes,” Beau says, not even turning around. “Please do.”
Travis bolts to the corner of the house, muttering something about heart attacks and federal charges and dying young.
We keep walking. Straight toward the house that is about to stop being peaceful.
I walk straight to the door. I don’t knock. I lift my boot and kick with everything I have. The door buckles inward and slams against the wall with a bang loud enough to shake picture frames in the hallway. Beau steadies it with his boot, suppressor already raised on his Glock.
Mary stumbles out of the hallway, hand over her mouth, eyes huge.
“S-Seth? Oh my—”
“Where is she?” I demand.
No warm-up. No easing into it. I’m not here to talk.
“I—Seth—sweetheart, I don’t—”
“I’m only going to say this once.”
I cross the room and grab her by the front of her shirt, dragging her into the living room until her back hits the wall with a crack.
“Where. Is. Brooke?”
She cries instantly. “I swear, I don’t know!”
I shove the barrel of my gun under her chin. “You know, Mary, I have been falling for this sweet, innocent aunt act since the day I met you. And I hate being lied to. You are going to cut the bullshit now unless you want your brain to coat the fucking wallpaper.”
Mary’s voice shakes so violently it breaks apart. “I’m telling the truth! John—John let Grant take her!”
The world goes silent. John let him take her.
“Why?” My voice drops to something quiet and violent. “Why would he let him take her?”
Mary’s chin trembles. “That was The Collective’s decision. They sent her to Elliot’s Manor.”
Everything in me goes cold.
“What the fuck is Elliot’s Manor?” I ask.
“It is where they send… the ones they want to punish,” Mary whispers. “It’s like a correctional facility for The Collective.”
I tighten my grip on her shirt. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” she sobs. “I swear I don’t know. I only know what it is.”
I shove the muzzle of my Glock under her chin. “If you lie again, this gun is gonna answer for you.”
She sobs harder. “I’m not lying.”
“Where is John?”
“He left right after Grant did,” Mary says, tears streaming down her face. “He said he had to prepare. I don’t know where he went.”
I stare at her. “Did you know about any of this?”
Mary nods miserably. “I did. I knew there were… expectations, plans. I didn’t know it would happen this soon.”
“You knew everything,” I snap. “You knew what he planned for her.”
She shakes her head weakly. “I… didn’t want Brooke to die like my sister.”
“You let them murder your sister,” I say. “And you let them take your niece to whatever fucked up prison they have hidden.”
Mary breaks into full sobs. “I begged John not to kill Brooke. I begged him. He spared her. So we raised her.”
“You call that raising?” I hiss. “Letting her grow up in the house of the man who killed her parents?”
Mary cries harder, like that is supposed to buy her mercy. “I didn’t want them to do this to Brooke. I couldn’t stop them.”
My jaw locks. The thought hits me all at once. John had Brooke in this house her entire life. He watched her grow up. He trained her. Men like him don’t keep that kind of access without crossing lines, and the idea of him putting his hands on her makes something vicious tear loose in my chest.
I step closer. “Did he ever touch her?”
She understands the implication immediately.
“No,” Mary says quickly. “No. Never. Never anything like that. He thought of her as his prodigy. John watched her grow up. That is the closest he has ever come to raising a child. He didn’t want one, but he always believed Brooke would be useful.”
My jaw tightens. “So you were complicit. You knew all of this all along, and you let John kill your sister.”
Mary glares at me. “Didn’t you kill Luke?”
I shift the gun slow enough for her to hear every millimeter of metal moving.
“Say his name again.”
She freezes.
I lean in closer. “Do you know she’s pregnant?”
Mary nods immediately, terrified. “She told me right before they took her. I tried—I begged them not to hurt her—”
“You didn’t do enough.”
“I swear—”
“If Brooke is dead,” I whisper, “I’m coming back to kill you.”
She collapses against the wall, shaking.
“But if she’s alive,” I continue, “I’m saving you for her.”
Her eyes widen. She understands what that means.
I let go of her shirt and step back. “Now, where the fuck is my dog and cat?”
She points toward the hallway with a trembling hand. “In the—guest room.”
Beau goes immediately to open the guest room door.
Krueger sprints out, nails scraping the floor.
Luna comes out last, slow, terrified, her tail tucked tight against her body. When she sees me, she darts forward and presses her trembling body against my shin, letting out a small, broken chirp before climbing into my arms.
I hold her against my chest, even as my stitches burn and blood soaks through my shirt. Her purring is frantic and uneven, a sound cats make when they are terrified but clinging to the only safety they know.
“You’re pathetic,” I tell Mary. “You deserve everything coming to you. And if Brooke decides not to kill you, you’ll never see her again. You’ll never meet our kid. And you’ll die with the monster you chose.”
Mary’s legs give out. She slides down the wall, sobbing into her hands.
I turn away from her and walk toward John’s office. Because I’m not here for her. I’m here for answers.
“Office,” I tell Beau.
The moment we step into John’s office, the smell hits me.
Cigar smoke, old paper, floor polish.
Beau starts pulling open drawers immediately. “Half of this shit is empty.”
I look around. Gaps on the bookshelves. Dust outlines where boxes have been. Open safe, hollow and scraped clean.
“John pulled almost everything.”
Beau glances over. “Which means?”
“He knew we were coming.”
He has prepared for this moment. We tear through the room anyway. Two filing cabinets are empty. The third is too heavy.
Beau frowns. “That drawer’s wrong.”
“Move.”
He steps aside, and I yank the drawer out so hard it hits the ground. A false bottom pops loose.
Underneath the drawer sits a thick black leather binder with worn edges and creased leather that looks like it has been handled for years.
The symbol burned into the center of the cover makes something heavy drop straight into my stomach the second I see it.
A ring of horns wrapped around a faceless silhouette.
I know that symbol the moment my eyes land on it.
My father had it tattooed across his chest, right over his heart. I remember seeing it when I was a kid while he stood in the bathroom mirror shaving. When I asked him what it meant, he pulled his shirt back down and told me to mind my own business.
Luke had the same one inked along his ribs.
At the time I figured it was some stupid matching tattoo. Luke never explained it when I asked him about it.
He always avoided the question.
A memory from the basement pushes forward.
My father had Luke pinned against the concrete wall by the collar, demanding to know if he had talked.
I thought he was about to kill him. I grabbed a knife and drove it into my father’s side.
When he came at me, I picked up the tire iron and swung until he didn’t have a fucking face anymore.
At the time I believed I had just stopped my father from killing Luke.
Standing here now with the binder open in my hands, something finally clicks into place.
My father and Luke had been in The Collective together.
I open the binder.
Photographs fill the pages along with printed lists, coded assignments, and organized entries that read like a ledger built to track violence.
Victims are cataloged with dates and locations.
Rankings are recorded beside names that mean something inside this organization.
Every page shows the same level of cold structure.
This is not chaos or random brutality. This is a system.
This is The Collective’s record. Their playbook. Everything they have done, everything they plan, written down.
And John left it here.
Not by accident.
For me.
My mind moves back through every moment I have spent inside John and Mary’s house, and the pattern is suddenly obvious. The way they watched me when they thought I was not paying attention. The way their conversations sometimes stopped the moment I walked into the room.
They knew exactly who I was the entire time. They knew whose son had been standing in their living room. They knew about my father. They knew what my father and Luke were involved in.
They knew what they were planning to do with Brooke.
Every visit. Every conversation. Every time they looked at me across that house suddenly feels different now that I understand the truth. They have never been surprised by my presence. They have been studying me.
They've been waiting.
My jaw tightens harder while the weight of it settles in completely.
I turn another page and feel something in my chest twist when I see the next section.
Forum screenshots. Encrypted message threads. Usernames that I recognize immediately.
Luke’s name sits in the conversation logs. Nick’s name appears in multiple threads.
I read through the messages and feel the full weight of what I'm looking at settle into place piece by piece.
Luke and Nick had been in The Collective together.
They trade ideas with other members about killing methods and targets.
They talk about violence the way some people talk about hobbies or art.
They debate techniques. They plan meetings. They treat murder like a competition.
Luke didn’t fall into this by accident.
My father had been preparing him for it his entire life.
Every violent lesson. Every twisted expectation. Every moment my father tortured us suddenly makes sense.
And Luke chose this.
That realization sits in my chest.
Every time Luke said people were watching Brooke, I thought he was trying to get under my skin. He was telling the truth. And he had been reporting back.
The Collective has been watching Brooke through him the entire time.
The muscles in my jaw tighten until the pressure starts to ache.
Luke didn’t try to kill me because I locked him in the basement. He tried to kill me because The Collective told him to.
Because somewhere inside this organization my name had already been marked.
Beau flips through another set of papers. I stop when I recognize someone in a photo. A man we know from the hotel.
Connor. The dumb one. The one who split off from our group during the massacre. The one we assumed died.
He is smiling in the photo with a VossTech badge clipped to his shirt.
I exhale once. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
A sinking realization hits. “He wasn’t trapped with us. He was planted.”
I grab the binder and march toward the front door.
Travis scrambles up from the side of the house when he sees me. “What—what did you find? Why do you look like that? Why is the binder so—oh God, did you find something bad?”
I shove the page with Connor’s photo into his hands.
Travis stares. His face goes from confused to horrified to offended. “You mean to tell me that Connor—lazy, asshole, always-stealing-my-energy-drinks Connor—was a plant? He’s not dead? He works for VossTech? And he was part of this murder cult shit?”
“Yup,” I say.
Travis rubs his face hard. “Great. Amazing. Perfect. Now I get to deal with work problems and murder problems at the same time. Fucking Fantastic.”
I walk past him. “We are heading to Silicon Valley.”
Travis groans.
Beau pats him on the shoulder. “I’d drive quickly if I were you.”
Travis whimpers.
And I walk toward the car with the binder under my arm, my pulse thundering.
They marked me. That was their first mistake.
The second is letting me live.