Chapter 12
POV: Ember
The dress felt like a shroud from the first step.
White silk, heavy enough to drag against the dark runner, fitted close enough that every breath reminded me I was wrapped in someone else’s idea of ownership.
The bouquet hid the hard drive in a hollow space beneath the roses and eucalyptus.
My hands stayed steady around the stems.
Ice-cold determination settled over the heartbreak like a second skin.
I had one job left: reach the altar, say the words the puppet master expected, and then burn the entire board to the ground.
The barn doors stood open. Late afternoon light cut across the packed rows in long gold bars.
Blackthorns on the right. Voss faces scattered through the left like they had been invited to a funeral and decided to stay for the show.
I recognized some of them from childhood.
Others were newer, harder. All of them watched me walk.
Step.
The runner muffled the sound of the borrowed heels. My pulse stayed even. I had practiced this countdown in my head since the moment I climbed into the Blackthorn car. Fifty steps. Maybe fewer. Each one a second closer to the only ending that mattered.
I kept my chin level and my eyes forward. Rhett stood at the altar in a black suit that looked expensive and wrong, hands folded, the smug curve of his mouth already imagining the night that would follow the vows. He believed he had won. That belief was the last useful thing about him.
Step.
Movement in the deep shadows along the far wall caught my peripheral vision.
I did not turn my head. I did not need to.
Colt. I felt the exact moment his eyes locked on me the same way I used to feel weather changing over the ridge.
Seven years of silence and blood and unanswered texts collapsed into the single line of sight between us.
He stood half-hidden behind a support beam, dark clothes, lethal stillness.
The same man who had pinned me to a kitchen wall and broken on the words I just got you back.
The same man who had promised one breath was all he would need.
I let myself look for half a second. Just long enough for him to see that I was still here, still executing the plan, still his even while I walked toward someone else. Then I faced forward again.
Step.
The air inside the barn smelled like flowers and gun oil and the particular tension that lives in rooms full of men who have killed for less.
Someone coughed. A chair creaked. I counted the faces that did not belong to either family—quiet men near the exits, hands too still.
The puppet master’s people. Exactly as designed.
Step.
Rhett’s eyes tracked me the way a man tracks a horse he plans to break.
I gave him nothing. The cut on my temple had been covered with makeup, but I could still feel it pull when I breathed.
The empty place on my finger where his ring had sat felt like a brand of its own.
Colt had thrown the first one into the dark. This walk would finish the rest.
Step.
The altar was ten paces away. Then five.
Then I was there, turning to face Rhett under a wooden arch draped in white fabric that fluttered in the draft like a surrender flag.
The officiant—some local judge who had been paid well enough not to ask questions—cleared his throat and began the words the puppet master expected me to answer.
I delivered them.
Clear. Steady. The exact script that would keep every player in their seats until the moment I chose. Rhett’s hand closed around mine. His palm was dry. Certain. He squeezed once, a private reminder of what he believed came next. I squeezed back just hard enough to make his eyes narrow.
The officiant reached the portion about objections. No one spoke. Of course they didn’t. The real objection was already in my hands.
I pulled the hard drive free from the bouquet in one clean motion and threw it onto the floorboards at the feet of the gathered men.
The plastic casing skidded across the wood and stopped in the open space between the first rows.
Roses scattered. The barn went silent in the way rooms do right before the lightning strikes.
“Every deal,” I said. My voice carried farther than it should have. “Every body. Every traitor.”
For one perfect second no one moved.
Then chaos exploded.
Chairs scraped. Men stood. Voices rose in overlapping shouts as the ones who understood the drive’s contents reached for it and the ones who did not reached for weapons. Rhett’s face transformed from smug ownership to pure fury. He lunged for me. I stepped back on pure instinct.
Gunfire erupted from the left side of the barn—sharp, controlled, the sound of Voss men announcing they had never planned to let the vows finish.
Someone on the Blackthorn side answered.
The white fabric above the altar jerked and tore as a round punched through it.
Screams cut across the space. Bodies dropped or scrambled for cover.
Rhett’s body jerked hard to the right. A dark bloom spread across the shoulder of his perfect suit. He looked down at it like the blood was a personal insult, then his knees buckled. I did not see who fired the shot. I did not have time.
Unknown hands locked around my upper arms from behind and dragged me backward with brutal efficiency.
My heels left the runner. The bouquet fell.
I twisted hard enough to catch one last glimpse of the barn—Colt moving through the smoke and muzzle flashes like the reckoning he had always promised, Rhett on the floor clutching his shoulder, the hard drive already in someone else’s fist.
Then the hands hauled me through a side door into the sudden cooler air of late afternoon, and the barn’s chaos swallowed the rest of the world