Chapter 13
POV: Colt
The barn doors were already chaos when I hit them.
Gunfire cracked from both sides. Men shouted.
Chairs overturned. White fabric from the altar arch hung in torn strips.
I went in low and fast, father’s revolver in one hand, the other empty and ready.
Jax’s voice crackled once in my earpiece—ridge team engaging—then the noise swallowed everything else.
A Blackthorn soldier swung toward me with a pistol.
Too close for a clean shot. I closed the distance, slammed the revolver across his temple, and felt the bone give.
He dropped. I took his weapon and kept moving.
Another one came from the right, knife already out.
I caught the wrist, twisted until something snapped, and drove my forehead into his face.
Cartilage crunched. He went down hard and stayed there. Bare hands. Necessary. Fast.
Blood slicked my knuckles. I didn’t feel it.
Ember was near the altar. White dress streaked with dust and someone else’s blood.
Rhett had her by one arm, wounded shoulder dark and wet, dragging her toward a side exit while the rest of the barn tore itself apart.
She fought him—elbows, heels, pure fury—but he was bigger and the bullet in his shoulder hadn’t slowed him enough.
I reached them as he yanked her off the runner.
Rhett saw me coming and tried to put her body between us. Mistake. I hit him low and mean, shoulder into the bleeding side. We went down in a tangle of silk and curses. Ember rolled clear. Good. I needed her clear.
The fight turned personal the second we hit the floorboards.
Rhett got a knee up. Caught me in the ribs.
Pain flared white. I answered with an elbow to the same shoulder the bullet had already ruined.
He screamed. The sound fed the thing inside me that had been waiting since the night I cut her out of those ropes.
I straddled him, drove a fist into his face once, twice.
Cartilage shifted under my knuckles. Blood sprayed across the white runner.
He clawed for the pistol at his belt. I got there first and flung it into the chaos.
“She’s not yours,” I told him. Voice flat. Final. “She was never yours.”
He spat red and tried to buck me off. I hit him again.
The reckoning my father had beaten into me at fifteen finally had a clean target.
Every unanswered text. Every year of silence.
Every second she had walked that aisle in a dress that looked like a death shroud.
I poured it into my fists until Rhett stopped trying to fight and started trying to breathe.
Hands grabbed my shoulders from behind. I spun, ready to kill whoever it was, and found Jax hauling me up.
“She’s gone,” he shouted over the gunfire. “Side door. Three men. Not Blackthorn.”
I looked.
The space where Ember had been was empty. A trail of white silk and rose petals led toward the open side door. Outside, engines were already revving. I shoved past Jax and ran.
Late sun hit my eyes like a slap. Gravel spun under tires. A black SUV kicked dust as it tore toward the service road. I raised the revolver and put three rounds into the rear window. Glass starred. The vehicle didn’t slow. It vanished around the bend in a cloud of Montana dirt.
I stood there breathing like a bellows, blood dripping from my hands onto the ground.
Behind me the barn fight was winding down—Voss men securing the last of the Blackthorn holdouts, someone calling for a medic, the hard drive already in Jax’s possession. None of it mattered.
I walked back through the side door. The runner was sticky. Spent casings winked in the light. Near the place Rhett had tried to drag her I found the veil. Torn. Bloodied along one edge. Her blood or someone else’s—I couldn’t tell. Under it, weighted with a single spent casing, lay a folded note.
I picked it up with fingers that left red prints on the paper.
Come alone or she dies screaming.
No signature. No demands beyond that. Just the words and the certain knowledge that the puppet master had decided the next move belonged to me.
I closed my fist around the veil until the silk tore further.
Jax appeared at my shoulder. “We can track the vehicle. Give me ten minutes—”
“No.” I holstered the revolver. The metal was warm from my hand. “He wants me alone. He gets me alone.”
The reckoning had a new direction.
I walked out of the barn with Ember’s bloodied veil in one fist and the note in the other, already counting the miles between this place and whatever hole the puppet master had chosen for the final act.
She had given me one breath.
I was coming to collect the rest