Chapter 15
POV: Colt
The files hit every phone at once and the mill turned into a different kind of war zone.
I used the chaos. Men who should have been watching the perimeter were staring at screens instead—ledgers, photographs, names that had stayed buried for twenty years suddenly glowing in their hands.
Shouts rose. Accusations. Someone put a bullet into a former ally before the first full minute ended.
I moved through the blind spots the distraction created, father’s revolver low, boots silent on the grit-covered concrete.
The upper catwalk gave me the angle I needed.
Two guards at the main floor door had their backs turned, arguing over a device.
I dropped the first with a clean shot to the thigh.
The second spun and caught the butt of the revolver across the jaw.
He went down hard. I stepped over him and kicked the door inward.
Ember was in a bolted chair under the fluorescents, white dress ruined, blood drying in a dark line from her temple to her collarbone. Zip ties cut deep into her wrists. She lifted her head when I entered and the look in her eyes was pure unbroken fire.
Cold fury loosened into something sharper. Focused.
I crossed the space in four strides, flicked the knife from my belt, and cut the ties.
She came out of the chair like she had been coiled for exactly this moment.
Her hands found my shirt. Mine found her face.
The reunion was raw—no time for gentle. I kissed her like I was still drowning and she was the only air left.
Teeth. Desperation. The salt of blood and dust.
She kissed back harder, fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise.
“I never stopped,” I whispered against her mouth.
“I know.” Her voice was wrecked. Steady. “Now get us out.”
We moved together. I had the revolver. She took the pistol off the downed guard without asking.
The mill’s main floor was already half lost to smoke from a fire someone had started in the grain sacks—whether to cover an escape or to burn evidence no longer mattered.
We used it. Two more of the puppet master’s men tried to block the side corridor.
Ember shot one in the knee. I put the other through a storage rack hard enough that the metal shelving came down on top of him. We didn’t slow.
The exit door was half-open to the fading light when Rhett Blackthorn stepped through it.
His suit jacket was gone. The shoulder wound from the barn had been hastily packed, but blood still seeped through the bandage.
He held a pistol in his good hand and the look on his face was the kind of unhinged ownership that only came from a man who had just watched his entire future collapse on every screen in the county.
“She’s leaving with me,” he said.
I raised the revolver. Ember’s hand settled on my forearm—light, deliberate.
“No,” she said. Quiet. Final. “He’s mine.”
Rhett laughed, short and ugly, and swung the pistol toward her.
She was already moving. I shifted left to clear her line.
The shot she fired was clean and close. Rhett’s body jerked backward into the doorframe.
He looked down at the new hole in his chest with something like surprise, then his legs gave out and he slid to the concrete in a slow, heavy fold. He didn’t get up.
Ember stood over him for half a second, breathing hard, the borrowed pistol steady in her hand. No triumph on her face. Just the cold completion of a ledger only she could see. I put my hand on the back of her neck, thumb brushing the sticky edge of the cut on her temple.
“We need to move.”
She nodded once. We stepped over Rhett’s body and into the open air.
Smoke poured from the upper vents of the mill, thick and black against the late sky.
Engines revved somewhere beyond the tree line.
I scanned for the black SUV that had taken her from the barn, for any sign of the man who had orchestrated twenty years of quiet ruin.
Movement flickered near a secondary loading bay—tall figure, calm stride, a phone still glowing in one hand as he climbed into a waiting vehicle.
The puppet master. Her mentor. The face that had smiled while he ordered the deaths of her parents and then taught her how to avenge them on his own schedule.
He looked back once, as if he felt the weight of my stare. The distance was too far for a clean shot and he knew it. The SUV door closed. Tires spun on gravel. Smoke from the mill drifted across the gap like a curtain drawn on purpose.
His voice carried on the wind, thin but clear, before the vehicle disappeared down the service road.
“This is only the beginning.”
I kept Ember against my side, revolver still raised, and watched the taillights vanish into the trees. The mill burned behind us. Rhett Blackthorn bled out in a doorway. The files she had unleashed were already rewriting every alliance left standing.
But the man who had started it all was gone into the smoke.
And the reckoning was not finished