Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
JEX
The flatline is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s a high, piercing funeral march that cuts through the bridge’s fog, announcing to every terrified soul outside that the Mayor of this godforsaken city is no longer breathing.
Hallow is slumped against me, the scalpel still clutched between our joined hands. Her forehead is resting against my collarbone, her body shaking with the kind of tremors that happen when the adrenaline leaves and only the cold remains.
“It’s over,” she whispers, the words vibrating against my skin. “Jex, it’s finally quiet.”
“Yeah,” I rasp, my eyes fixed on our father’s sightless, pinned-open stare. “It’s quiet.”
But it isn’t.
Through the shattered driver’s side window, past the wall of silent witnesses and the flashing blue lights of the distant, stalled cruisers, I hear something. It’s not a siren. It’s not a scream.
It’s a ringtone.
The sound is coming from inside the ambulance. Not from the dash, and not from the pockets of my jeans. It’s muffled, rhythmic, and coming from the medical storage cabinet directly behind Hallow’s head.
Hallow stiffens, pulling back. Her eyes, still rimmed with kohl-stained tears, lock onto mine. We both know that cabinet is supposed to be full of sterile gauze and saline.
I reach past her, my fingers slick with his blood, and yank the latch.
The door swings open.
Inside, tucked between rolls of bandages, is a burner phone. Its screen is glowing a sickly, neon blue, illuminating a name on the caller ID that makes the air turn to liquid nitrogen in my lungs.
RYKER.
My heart stops. Ryker isn’t just a name. He’s the ghost even I was afraid to hunt. The man who supposedly died in the same fire that scarred my back five years ago—the one dad told me he had ordered to keep Hallow “safe.”
I pick up the phone. My thumb slides over the screen. I don’t say a word. I just press it to my ear.
“Check the monitor, Jex,” a voice crackles—low, smooth, and chillingly familiar. It’s a voice that sounds like velvet dragged over a grave.
I look at the heart monitor. The flatline is still there, a solid, unwavering horizontal stroke of green light.
“Now check his wrist,” the voice says.
I reach down, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I grab his cold, limp wrist. I press my fingers into the pulse point.
There is a beat. Strong. Steady. Rhythmic.
“What the fuck?” I hiss, my grip tightening until I hear the Mayor’s radius bone groan.
“He’s on a beta-blocker cocktail I designed myself, little brother,” Ryker’s voice purrs through the phone.
“It masks the vitals. It makes the machines see death while the heart keeps pumping. You didn’t kill him, Jex.
You just gave him a front-row seat to the show I’ve been producing since the day you left. ”
I look at our father. His eyes are still pinned open, still vacant, but now I see it—the tiny, microscopic contraction of his pupils. He’s paralysed. He’s awake. And he’s been a puppet this whole time.
“Why?” I growl into the phone, my hand shaking with a new kind of rage.
“Because the ‘Choir’ needed a new lead singer,” Ryker laughs, and the sound is punctuated by a heavy, metallic thud from the roof of the ambulance.
The entire vehicle rocks. Hallow screams as the ceiling above us begins to buckle inward, the reinforced steel peeling back like a tin can under the weight of something—or someone—far stronger than us.
A pair of boots—black, military-grade, and covered in the same marsh mud as mine—kick through the roof.
A man drops into the clinical white light. He’s wearing a mask of hammered silver, but the eyes behind it are unmistakable. They are the same predatory, ice-blue eyes I see every time I look in a mirror.
“Family reunions are always so messy,” Ryker says, tossing a second burner phone onto the gurney.
He looks at Hallow, his gaze crawling over her naked, shivering form with a look of terrifying, brotherly affection.
“Hello, little bird. Did you miss your favourite brother?”
The crowd outside begins to scream, but for the first time tonight, the sound doesn’t come from the PA system. It comes from the bridge itself.
The suspension cables are snapping. One by one. Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Dad isn’t the villain of this story, Jex,” Ryker says, stepping over our father’s paralysed body to face me. “He was just the distraction. Now, let’s talk about who’s actually been holding the leash.”
The world is tilting. Literally.
The bridge groans, a deep, structural scream of tortured metal that vibrates through the soles of my boots.
Outside, the headlights of a hundred cars begin to slide toward the edge as the suspension cables uncoil like dying snakes.
But inside this white, sterile box, the air has turned into a vacuum.
Ryker stands there, the silver mask catching the fluorescent flicker, looking like a god of the abyss. He doesn’t look like a man who burned. He looks like the fire itself.
“You’re dead,” I rasp, my hand moving instinctively to the small of my back for a blade that isn’t there. I’m naked, exposed, and for the first time in my life, I feel the freezing weight of my own vulnerability. “I saw the building go down. I saw the wreckage.”
“You saw what I wanted you to see, Jex. You always were the impulsive one. All muscle, no vision.” Ryker tilts his head, his ice-blue eyes shifting to Hallow.
She’s frozen, her hands still tethered to the ceiling, her body a pale, shivering ghost caught between two monsters.
“And look at our little sister. All grown up and finally showing her teeth. Dad must be so proud.”
He kicks the gurney. Hard.
His head snaps to the side, his pinned-open eyes rolling frantically. The “dead” man is vibrating with a silent, paralysed terror.
“Don’t look at him like that, Ryker,” Hallow whispers, her voice a hollowed-out shell. “He sold us. He sold me.”
“He did exactly what I told him to do,” Ryker purrs, stepping closer to her.
He reaches out, a gloved finger tracing the line of her jaw, moving through the salt and the kohl.
“Who do you think vetted the buyers, Hallow? Who do you think made sure the ‘Choir’ had the best seat in the house? Aris didn’t have the stomach for the real dark.
He just had the name. I had the appetite. ”
The floor of the ambulance lurches. We’re sliding. The vehicle is beginning to drift toward the shattered guardrail, the rear tires spinning on the slick, bloody asphalt of the bridge.
“You orchestrated the funhouse?” My voice is a low, guttural snarl. The rage is coming back, a boiling tide that drowns out the fear. “You put her in that cage?”
“I put her in a crucible,” Ryker corrects, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly soft register.
“Look at her now, Jex. She isn’t the fragile doll dad wanted.
She’s a weapon. She’s ours. And now that the Mayor has served his purpose—now that he’s officially ‘died’ on every television screen in the state—we can finally start the real work. ”
He reaches into his tactical vest and pulls out a detonator. It’s small, matte black, and has a single red LED glowing like a hungry eye.
“The bridge is rigged, little brother. In sixty seconds, this entire span becomes a reef. The city gets a tragedy, the Choir gets a martyr, and we… we disappear into the black.”
“Not without him,” Hallow hisses, her eyes darting to our father. “I want to finish it. I want to feel the life leave him.”
Ryker laughs, a dry, rattling sound. “Oh, Hallow. You still think death is the ultimate punishment? No. He is coming with us. He’s going to spend the rest of his very long, very quiet life in a cage of my design. He’s going to watch us build an empire on his ashes.”
Another cable snaps. BOOM. The sound is like a cannon fire. The ambulance tilts at a forty-five-degree angle. The gurney, with Aris strapped to it, begins to slide toward the open rear doors, toward the hundred-foot drop into the churning black water below.
“Decision time, Jex,” Ryker says, his thumb hovering over the red button. “The bike is still on the bridge. The water is cold. Do you take the girl and run, or do you try to kill the brother who’s already a ghost?”
He throws a bundle of black tactical gear at my feet.
“Dress fast. The fireworks are about to start.”
I look at Hallow. She’s staring at Ryker with a look that isn’t fear anymore. It’s recognition. A dark, twisted reflection of the same madness that’s been screaming in her blood. She isn’t looking at me for rescue. She’s looking at the detonator.
“Give it to me,” she whispers, her hand reaching out from the straps. “Give me the button, Ryker. I want to be the one who burns the bridge.”
The ambulance is teetering on the edge of the abyss, the back tires spinning in mid-air over the black maw of the harbour. The screams of the people on the bridge are fading, replaced by the rhythmic, metallic twang of snapping steel.
“Give it to me,” Hallow repeats, her voice a flat, dead line.
Ryker’s silver mask tilts. He looks at her—really looks at her—and a slow, jagged smirk spreads across the visible part of his jaw. He doesn’t look at me. I’m just a witness now. A bystander in the wreckage of the family he perfected.
“That’s my girl,” Ryker whispers.
He doesn’t give her the detonator. He drops it.
The small black box clatters onto the blood-slicked floorboards, sliding toward Hallow’s bare, trembling feet. She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t look for my approval. She kicks her foot out, pinning the device against the metal floor, her toes hovering over the red LED.
“Hallow, wait!” I roar, lunging for her, but Ryker is faster.
He slams a heavy, tactical boot into my chest, sending me flying back against the telemetry rack.
My head hits the monitor with a sickening crack, and the world goes white.
I’m gasping for air, my naked skin sliding against the cold glass of the medicine cabinet, while the smell of ozone and salt fills my lungs.
“Let her choose, Jex,” Ryker growls, standing over me, his shadow a terrifying weight. “Let her finally be the hand of god.”
Hallow looks out the open back doors. She sees the families huddled by their cars.
She sees the flashing lights of the police who are too late to save anyone.
Then, she looks down at our father. He is weeping, the tears flooding his pinned-open eyes, his mouth moving in a silent, pathetic prayer for a mercy he never gave.
She meets my eyes. For a heartbeat, I see the girl I found in the funhouse—the one who wanted to be held, the one who wanted the light. Then, the light goes out.
“They watched,” she whispers, her voice projected one last time through the cracked PA system. “The whole city watched me break. And they didn’t move a fucking inch.”
She slams her heel down on the button.
The world doesn’t end with a bang. It ends with a blinding, white-hot roar.
The charges Ryker set weren’t just on the cables. They were in the pilings. The bridge doesn’t just fall; it disintegrates. I feel the floor of the ambulance vanish. We’re weightless—a white metal coffin falling through the smoke and the fire.
The last thing I see before the black water swallows us is Hallow’s face. She isn’t screaming. She’s smiling.
And next to her, Ryker is laughing, the silver of his mask reflecting the orange glow of the dying city.
The water hits like concrete. The windshield shatters, a wall of freezing, oily darkness surging into the cab, crushing the air out of my lungs. I’m spinning, tangled in wires and glass, the pressure screaming in my ears.
I reach out blindly, my hand clawing through the dark, searching for the only thing that matters. I find a wrist. Small. Cold. Tethered.
I pull with everything I have, my muscles screaming, the salt-water burning my eyes. I’m not letting go. Not again. Not even if I have to drag her through the gates of hell.
We break the surface fifty yards away from the wreckage. The bridge is gone. Only the two stone towers remain, standing like tombstones in the fog. The harbour is a graveyard of floating debris and burning oil.
I’m treading water, gasping, holding Hallow’s head above the surface. She’s unconscious, her hair a dark web around her face.
Then, twenty feet away, a black shape breaks the water.
Ryker.
He’s holding the gurney. Dad is still strapped to it, coughing and sputtering, the salt-water finally forcing his paralysed lungs to fight. Ryker wipes the water from his silver mask and looks at me.
“Phase one is complete, Jex,” he shouts over the roar of the fires. “The world thinks we’re all dead. Now… we go to work.”
A silent, black submersible—a sleek, predatory shadow—rises from the depths behind him, its hatch opening like a mouth.
“Coming, little brother? Or do you want to try your luck with the search parties?”