Chapter 120.
Jimmy points at Wyatt like he’s calling the first speaker at a meeting.
“You start,” Jimmy says to Wyatt. “How you got here is just as wild as how I got here.”
“Never a doubt, right?” Wyatt says, bumping fists with him. “I heard a guy say people think you’re crazy until you’re a genius.”
Jimmy smiles. “Some nerd must have said that.”
Wyatt looks at Alek, then Jack, then Zhi—meeting their eyes like he owes them something he can’t dodge anymore.
“It started in Hamburg,” Wyatt tells them. “I left the villa in Tuscany, spur of the moment, running hot on impulse, because I couldn’t live with what I’d helped set in motion. And because there was one person I needed to see before the end.”
He nods toward Hannah.
Wyatt tells them he went to find her—not for strategy, not for optics, not for the game—just to talk. To say what he didn’t say when she walked away.
Hannah’s mouth tightens with emotion, but she doesn’t look away. “I didn’t say goodbye,” she says quietly. “Neither of us did.”
“While I was there,” he says, “Jimmy called me. He told me that he was in Dubai and had managed to sneak his way to a phone. He’d been transported there after he was caught by The Host’s men in London, even got beaten up along the way.”
Jimmy jumps in. “And on that call, Wyatt dropped two nukes on me. One: Who he really is. Two: He wasn’t alone.”
Wyatt continues. “Jimmy said that my father was moving the endgame here. And that if we didn’t act, the last stage would chew up whoever was left and spit them out.”
Jack’s voice is flat. “So you came to stop it.”
Wyatt hesitates. “I came to take control of it. There’s a difference.”
At that moment, the conference room doors swing open. Another unexpected surprise. Two guards escort Ward Hillshire into the room. Not looking anything like a Host.
Alek takes a step forward. “And Tipton?”
Wyatt’s expression hardens.
“My father built those chambers to break people,” Wyatt says. “Tipton broke.”
Alek feels it in her ribs. “He said the word.”
Jack’s jaw clenches. “Then why was he still locked inside?”
Wyatt’s eyes flick toward Ward—like the answer makes him sick. Ward says it instead.
“Because I don’t believe in letting go,” Ward mutters. “I believe in making an example.”
Jimmy’s voice drops, dangerous now. “That part ends today.”
Hannah, quietly, chimes in, “It ends without us becoming them.”
“So here we are,” Wyatt says to his father, “where your winner gets crowned. And where we decide what kind of people we are going forward.”
Wyatt looks around at the view from up here.
“High time for it, don’t you think?” Wyatt says.