Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
RYKER
The air on the surface doesn’t taste like freedom. It tastes like the end of the world.
I stand on the narrow, slick deck of the submersible, the silver of my mask drinking in the orange glow of Oakhaven’s funeral pyre.
Behind me, the harbour water is black and churning, reflecting the jagged teeth of the skyline as it begins to crumble.
The Cathedral is gone—nothing but a skeleton of glowing ribs and falling stone.
I can feel Hallow behind me. She’s leaning against Jex, her body mapped in the blood of the man we left in the dark below. She looks like a wraith birthed from the soot, her eyes wide and reflecting the beautiful, chaotic heat of the city’s collapse.
“It’s louder than I thought it would be,” she whispers, her voice barely carrying over the roar of the fires.
“That’s the sound of a vacuum, Hallow,” I say, not turning around. I watch a secondary explosion ripple through the Financial District—the Choir’s work is surgical, beautiful. “When you remove the head of a beast, the body thrashes before it dies. We’re just listening to the nerves snap.”
I turn to look at them. Jex has his arms wrapped around her, his chin resting on the crown of her head. He looks satisfied—the primal hunger in his eyes replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. He’s a soldier who finally found a war worth winning.
“The extraction team is at the North Pier,” Jex growls, his gaze shifting to the burning docks. “But we have a problem. The Council’s private guard didn’t retreat to the bunkers. They’ve barricaded the bridge. They’re looking for a body to pin this on.”
I feel a slow, predatory smile spread behind my mask. “Good. I’d hate for this to be easy. A throne isn’t worth sitting on if you didn’t have to wade through a river of shit to get to it.”
I walk toward them, my boots clanging on the metal deck. I reach out, my gloved hand cupping Hallow’s jaw. The blood on her skin has dried into a dark, cracking mask of its own. She looks perfect—a ruined god for a ruined age.
“You ready to show them the girl they sold?” I ask her, my thumb dragging across her lower lip. “You ready to show them that the girl on the gurney grew teeth?”
Hallow doesn’t flinch. She leans into my hand, her eyes burning with a kinetic, terrifying light. “I don’t want to show them, Ryker. I want to make them feel it. I want to hear them make the same sounds Dad made in the dark.”
“That’s my girl,” I murmur.
I pull a heavy, black serrated blade from the sheath at my thigh and press the hilt into her hand. Her fingers close around it with a natural, deadly grace.
“The bridge is the last gate,” I say, looking at Jex. “Once we cross it, Oakhaven belongs to the Choir. No more clinics. No more sales. Just us.”
The sub lurches as it docks against the pier, the wood groaning under the weight of the metal.
I lead the way onto the salt-crusted wood, the heat from the city hitting us like a physical blow.
The sky is raining ash, soft and grey like snow, coating my shoulders and Hallow’s hair in a shroud of the dead.
In the distance, the sirens are screaming, but they sound like music. The Choir is waiting in the shadows of the warehouses, their masks gleaming in the firelight, their rifles levelled at the bridge where the last of the “pure” world is waiting to die.
“Let’s go,” I snap, the adrenaline finally catching fire in my blood. “I want to see the look on their faces when they realise the monsters didn’t just escape. We came back to rule.”
Jex pulls his sidearm, the slide racking with a heavy, final clack. Hallow balances the blade in her hand, her silhouette framed by the burning Cathedral.
The city is screaming. And for the first time in my life, I’m the one holding the knife.
The bridge is a choked throat of wrought iron and burning vehicles, a barricade of “civilisation” trying to hold back the tide of the abyss.
The Council’s private guard—the pampered dogs in tactical silk—are huddled behind their armoured SUVs, their spotlights cutting through the falling ash in frantic, sweeping arcs.
I lead the way, my silhouette a jagged shadow against the orange inferno of the docks.
Jex is a half-step behind me, a wall of muscle and suppressed rage, his eyes scanning the Ridgeline for snipers.
And Hallow… Hallow walks between us like a ghost of the fire itself.
She’s wrapped in the black coat, the serrated blade I gave her held tight against her thigh, her bare feet silent on the soot-covered asphalt.
“Target at ten o’clock!” a voice screams from the barricade. “Open fire!”
The air erupts. The staccato rhythm of assault rifles tears the silence of the harbour to shreds.
I dive behind a rusted shipping container, pulling Hallow with me. Jex drops into a low crouch, his own rifle barking back—a heavy, rhythmic thunder that silences the first line of shooters. The sparks from the bullets hitting our cover spray over us like burning stars.
“They’re terrified,” Hallow whispers. She isn’t cowering. She’s leaning against the cold corrugated steel, her head tilted, listening to the screams of the men on the bridge. “I can smell it. It’s the same smell as the clinic. The smell of things that know they’re about to be opened up.”
“Stay low,” I command, checking my magazine. “Jex, left flank. Take the officers. I want the men in the centre alive for a minute. I want them to see her.”
Jex nods, a feral grin breaking across his gore-streaked face. He vanishes into the smoke and the shadows of the pier like a predator into tall grass.
I turn to Hallow. I grab the front of her coat, pulling her flush against my chest. The heat from her skin is the only thing warmer than the fire around us.
I reach up and unlatch my mask, letting the heavy silver plate fall and clang onto the ground.
I want the cold Oakhaven air on my face.
I want to breathe the ash of my enemies.
“Look at me,” I rasp, my fingers digging into her hair. “This is the moment they realise the debt is due. You aren’t Hallow the victim anymore. You’re the reckoning. Go through the smoke. Let them see the girl they thought they broke.”
She looks at me, and for a second, the girl I knew—the one who used to hide in the shadows of the nursery—is gone. In her place is a hollowed-out god of vengeance. She leans in, pressing her blood-stained lips to mine in a kiss that tastes like salt and metal, then pulls away.
“Watch me, Ryker,” she breathes.
She steps out from behind the container.
She doesn’t run. She doesn’t hide. She walks into the centre of the bridge, her white skin glowing like a beacon through the haze of grey ash. The guards freeze. The spotlights lock onto her—a lone, blood-painted girl in a man’s heavy coat, holding a serrated blade that catches the firelight.
“Cease fire!” an officer bellows, his voice cracking with confusion. “Is that… is that the Governor’s daughter?”
Hallow stops ten feet from the first line of armoured cars. She raises the blade, the tip pointing directly at the man’s throat. The silence that follows is heavier than the explosions rocking the city.
“My father is in the water,” she shouts, her voice carrying over the roar of the flames with a terrifying, crystalline clarity. “And Oakhaven is in the dirt. I’m just here to collect the interest.”
From the shadows of the bridge rafters, Jex’s rifle speaks again. Three guards drop, their blood spraying across the pristine white hoods of their SUVs.
“Now!” I scream, vaulting over the container.
The Choir rises from the dark like a nightmare. A dozen silver masks emerge from the smoke, blades drawn, the sound of their unified war cry drowning out the sirens. We hit the barricade like a hammer, a blur of black tactical gear and flashing steel.
It isn’t a battle. It’s a harvest.
I reach the first line, my blade shearing through the throat of a guard before he can even raise his sidearm. I feel the hot spray of his life across my face, and I laugh—a raw, broken sound that matches the chaos.
Beside me, Hallow is a dervish of jagged metal.
She moves with a sickening, fluid grace, her blade finding the gaps in their armour, the soft parts of their necks, the palms of the hands they raise to beg for mercy.
She’s silent, a ghost in the blood-mist, her eyes fixed on the centre of the bridge where the last of the Council’s high-ranking officers are trying to flee.
Jex joins us, his boots heavy on the pavement, his rifle discarded for a combat knife. He grabs a guard by the hair, forcing him to his knees right in front of Hallow.
“This one was on the board,” Jex growls, his voice thick with adrenaline. “He signed the ‘maintenance’ fees for the clinic.”
Hallow stops. She looks down at the man—a man I recognise. He’s the Treasurer. He used to buy me sweets when I was six years old, right before he’d hand my father the envelopes of cash that paid for my first “session” with the surgeons.
He’s weeping, his hands trembling as he looks up at her. “Hallow… please… I have a family…”
Hallow leans down, her face inches from his, the ash settling on her eyelashes like grey snow.
“So did I,” she whispers.
She doesn’t make it quick. She drives the serrated blade into his shoulder, twisting it slowly as he shrieks, before she leans in to whisper one last thing in his ear.
“Tell the devil the Choir is coming for the rest of his kingdom.”
She yanks the blade free, and the man collapses into the soot. We stand at the peak of the bridge, the city laid out before us like a map of burning veins. The barricade is broken. The way is open.
Oakhaven is ours.
The air at the crest of the bridge is thin, choked with the incinerated remains of Oakhaven’s history. Below us, the harbour churns, the black water swallowing the sub where our father sits in his silver-lined tomb. The city ahead of us is a sprawling ribcage of fire, and we are the marrow.
Jex steps up beside Hallow, his chest heaving, his knuckles split and weeping red. He looks at the Treasurer’s body, then up at the burning skyline. He reaches out and wipes a streak of fresh blood from Hallow’s cheek, his thumb lingering on her skin with a possessive, heavy pressure.
“The Governor’s mansion is the last light on the hill,” Jex rasps, his eyes reflecting the orange carnage. “The rest of the Council is barricaded in the ballroom. They think the walls are thick enough to keep the ghosts out.”
I step toward them, my boots crunching on the glass of a shattered headlight. I look at my siblings—my co-conspirators, my only truth in a world of manufactured lies. We are a trinity of wreckage, standing on the threshold of the life we were promised and the life we took for ourselves.
“Let them stay in the ballroom,” I say, my voice a low, jagged thrum. “I want them to hear us coming. I want the sound of our boots on the marble to be the last thing they ever understand.”
Hallow turns to me, her eyes dark and bottomless.
The heavy tactical coat is slipping off one of her shoulders, revealing the map of bruises and blood we left on her in the dark.
She looks like a queen of the apocalypse, a girl who died a thousand times in a clinic and finally decided to haunt the living.
“I want to dance in that ballroom, Ryker,” she breathes, a ghost of a smile touching her blood-stained lips. “I want to see their faces when they realise the girl they paid to break is the one who’s going to close their eyes.”
Jex growls, a low, territorial sound, and pulls her closer to his side. “Then we don’t wait for the fire to die down. We go through it.”
He whistles—a sharp, piercing note that cuts through the roar of the flames.
From the shadows of the bridge, three black SUVs, their windshields reinforced with steel mesh, roar forward.
The Choir—our army of the broken and the discarded—pours out of the shadows, their silver masks flickering like stars in the smog.
We pile into the lead vehicle. The interior smells of leather and gun oil, a sanctuary of cold steel in the middle of the inferno. Jex sits in the middle, Hallow between us, her hand resting on Jex’s thigh while I take her other hand, my fingers interlacing with hers.
The driver guns the engine, and we tear across the bridge, racing toward the hill where the elite of Oakhaven are waiting for a saviour who isn’t coming.
As we climb the winding roads, the houses of the wealthy pass us by like burning lanterns. I look out the window and see the chaos—the people who ignored the screams from the docks now screaming in their own gardens. It’s a beautiful, symmetrical justice.
“Nearly there,” Jex murmurs, his hand sliding up to the back of Hallow’s neck, his thumb massaging the base of her skull.
The gates of the mansion loom ahead, wrought iron and gold leaf, a monument to the blood money that built this city. The SUV doesn’t slow down. We hit the gates at sixty miles an hour, the metal shrieking and buckling as we burst through into the pristine, manicured gardens.
The tires scream on the gravel as we slide to a halt in front of the grand entrance. The marble columns are lit by the flickering glow of the city burning below.
I open the door and step out into the heat. I look up at the towering oak doors, my heart beating a rhythmic, violent war drum in my chest.
“Welcome to the end, brothers,” Hallow says, stepping out beside me, the serrated blade glinting in the firelight.
“No,” Jex says, racking the slide on his sidearm as he joins us. “Welcome to the beginning.”