Chapter 16
POV: The Puppet Master
The highway north was a black ribbon under a moonless sky.
I kept the speedometer needle locked at ninety and the headlights off.
Running dark was a risk on these empty stretches, but the greater risk was being seen.
Every mile marker that flashed past in the weak dash light felt like a countdown I no longer controlled.
The Canadian border sat sixty-three miles ahead.
A private airstrip beyond that. A plane that would take me somewhere the names on those files could not follow.
In theory.
My phone had not stopped lighting up since the failsafe detonated.
I had turned off the notification sounds an hour ago.
The screen still bloomed again and again in the cup holder—messages, warnings, threats, desperate offers of loyalty from men who had already begun calculating how to sell me out for their own survival.
Twenty years of careful architecture reduced to a cascading list of glowing betrayals.
I answered none of them.
Control had always been a matter of information and timing.
I had owned both. The girl had been my finest instrument—orphaned at the precise moment grief would make her malleable, trained in the exact skills that would let her gather the evidence I needed while believing the crusade was her own.
The cowboy had been the predictable counterweight.
Put enough silence between them and he would spend years sharpening himself into a weapon I could eventually point wherever I wished.
The wedding was supposed to be the final pressure point.
Both families in one place. Both sets of secrets ready to burn.
I would walk away with the territory while they finished destroying each other.
Instead the drive she threw on the barn floor had been only the opening move. The real payload had been waiting for her command. And she had given it while zip-tied to a chair in a feed mill I had chosen specifically because no one would look there until I was finished.
First real fear sat cold and unfamiliar under my ribs.
I thumbed the phone awake and scrolled past the flood of incoming damage reports until I found the clean-up crew’s encrypted channel.
Three men. Expensive. Reliable for exactly this kind of contingency.
I had paid them enough over the years that they should have been waiting at a prearranged junction with a second vehicle and clean papers.
The call rang once. Twice. Five times.
No answer.
I ended it and tried again. Same result. The third attempt went straight to a generic voicemail box that had never existed on their end before. They were gone. Or worse—they had looked at the files, seen their own names, and decided the highest bidder was no longer me.
The needle on the speedometer crept past ninety-five.
The empty highway stretched on. No other headlights.
No patrols. Just the low roar of the engine and the sound of my own breathing inside the sealed cabin.
Paranoia whispered that every dark shape along the tree line was a Voss rifle.
That every mile of open road was a killing field the cowboy had already mapped.
I forced the thought down. Fear was a liability. I had taught the girl that lesson myself.
Another incoming message lit the phone. I glanced at it against my better judgment. A former Blackthorn lieutenant—one of the first men I had bought—sending a single line: They’re coming for all of us. You first.
I deleted it and threw the phone onto the passenger seat.
The device continued to glow and vibrate like a living thing that refused to die.
Every man who had ever taken my money now had a target painted on his back in digital ink.
Some would run. Some would try to cut deals.
Most would simply start shooting the nearest available scapegoat.
The empire I had built in the spaces between two families was collapsing in real time, and the architect was sixty-three miles from a border that might already be watched.
I checked the rearview mirror out of habit.
Nothing.
I checked it again thirty seconds later.
Still nothing.
The third time, a pair of headlights appeared far back on the highway. High beams. Steady. Closing.
I told myself it was a trucker. A local.
Anyone else. The alternative was unacceptable.
I had left the cowboy in the smoke of the feed mill with a bleeding girl and a dead Blackthorn heir.
He should have been occupied. He should have been choosing between her wounds and the wreckage of his own family name.
The headlights kept coming.
Faster than a trucker. Faster than anyone with ordinary business on this stretch of road. The vehicle’s shape resolved gradually in the mirror—wide hood, familiar silhouette, the particular set of the lights I had seen in surveillance footage from the Voss ranch more times than I cared to count.
Colt Voss’s truck.
The fear that had been sitting cold under my ribs finally cracked upward and spread.
My hands tightened on the wheel hard enough that the leather creaked.
The border was still fifty-nine miles away.
The airstrip beyond it suddenly felt theoretical.
The clean-up crew was not coming. The allies had turned. The files were still broadcasting.
And the reckoning I had spent twenty years designing around other people had found the open highway behind me with its high beams on and its engine already at full pull.
I pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The headlights in the mirror stayed exactly where they were—closing, patient, inevitable