Chapter 9 #4
Of course he had. York Newgate had survived the Bratva killing his first wife and child. Had survived years of hunting ghosts through Moscow’s shadows. Had survived Alan shoving a knife into his side as their car went over a cliff.
The memory hit him like a fist—
The Okanogan highway, dusk bleeding out behind the mountains. The SUV’s tires humming over patched asphalt. Igor up front beside him, Volkov in the back with the prisoner, because you didn’t drive York Newgate anywhere without a man at his shoulder.
York sat in the middle seat, cuffed, running his mouth the way he always did, like a man who hadn’t worked out yet that he was being driven to the end of his life.
Taking the shortcut back to DC? As if Alan would dignify it.
As if Alan hadn’t lain awake the night before, turning the assignment over and over, looking for the seam in it that would let him say no.
There hadn’t been one. There never was, with Crowley.
The kid had come out of nowhere. A college kid in a football jersey, ambling off a trailhead, asking for help like the world was still a place where strangers helped each other.
Igor had him on the hood before Alan could think.
And then the kid fought back—of course he did, he was young and stupid and brave—and Igor put him down with one blow, and there was blood on the gravel, and a body they couldn’t leave behind.
That was the moment, Alan thought now. That was where it turned. Not the gun, not the cuffs, not the plan to put York over the edge—he’d made his peace with York a long time ago. But the kid. The innocent. The one Crowley’s math had never accounted for and never would.
He should have stopped it there.
He hadn’t.
So they’d driven on—Alan at the wheel, Igor beside him, Volkov and a dying boy in the back with York—deeper into the dark.
And then York got a hand free.
Alan never saw the cross. Didn’t understand, until later, piecing it together through the haze of a concussion, that the kid’s cheap nail-cross had been the thing that unmade them all.
One second Igor was twisting over the seat, and the next he was clawing at his own throat, blood sheeting between his fingers, thrashing, grabbing—for the wheel, for help, for anything—and the SUV bucked toward the guardrail.
Alan shoved him off. Too hard. The wheel went with him.
Headlights, then. A semi swinging wide around the bend, grille filling the windshield like the face of God.
York lunged from the back and grabbed the wheel and wrenched, and the world came apart—the screech of metal on metal, the SUV spinning, the guardrail folding like foil.
And in the spin, with everything tearing loose around him, Alan had done the one thing he’d come to do: driven his blade into York’s side, felt it bite, felt the hot give of it.
Then the drop. The trees coming up. Impact, and darkness, and nothing.
When Alan came to, he was twenty feet up the slope, no memory of how he’d gotten there, dry pine needles biting into his cheek and the heat of a burning car washing over him from below.
Dust. Gasoline. The sick-sweet copper of blood—his own, York’s, impossible to separate.
Alan crawled up the embankment, every movement sending fire through his ribs. Dry pine needles and loose scree shifted under his hands, his knees. Below, the wreckage of the SUV lay crumpled against a Douglas fir, one headlight still burning, casting a sickly yellow cone through the settling dust.
He didn’t look back. Couldn’t.
Three of them still in the car. Igor, dead before the fall.
Volkov, who’d never made a sound. And the kid—the kid in the football jersey, who’d done nothing but walk down the wrong trail at the wrong hour.
Enough bodies to muddy the water. Enough that when the fire was done, no one would be able to say for certain who had walked away from this road and who hadn’t.
Maybe that was the only mercy left in it. The kid would burn with Alan’s men, and the world would never sort one from another.
One more thing Alan would carry.
He reached the road and collapsed onto the cooling asphalt, chest heaving. His side was on fire. Blood ran off his fingers and pooled in the gravel at the shoulder.
He could stay down. Let the night take him. Let this be the ending.
Headlights cut through the dusk. Not emergency lights—no siren, no urgency. Just a single black sedan, rolling up the empty highway at the unhurried pace of a man who’d known exactly where to find this.
Of course he had. Crowley never let an asset out of his sight on a job that mattered. Somewhere back down the road he’d been parked on a pull-off, watching the SUV’s taillights, waiting to see whether Alan went through with it—or whether he’d need cleaning up too.
The sedan eased onto the shoulder. The door opened, and Tom Crowley stepped out, unhurried, like a man arriving for a dinner reservation.
He didn’t offer a hand. Just stood there, looking down at Alan like he was examining a disappointing investment.
“Is it done?”
Alan pushed himself to his knees. The world tilted. “I don’t—I don’t know. He was alive when we went over.”
Crowley’s mouth tightened. “Loose ends?”
“In the car.” Alan spat blood onto the pavement.
He thought of the jersey, the name stitched across the back.
“There was a local. Wrong place, wrong time.” He shook his head.
Grit clung to his cheek; he didn’t wipe it away.
“We lost both our men and a kid who had nothing to do with any of this. Just to cover your tracks.”
“We did what was necessary.” Crowley tilted his head. “Or are you having second thoughts?”
Something broke in Alan’s chest. Not his ribs—those were already cracked. Something deeper. Something that had been fracturing since Sophia’s body, since further back, to the first moment he’d agreed to work for this man.
“Second thoughts?” He laughed—a raw, ugly sound. “I’m done. Do you hear me? Done.” He struggled to his feet, swaying. “I know what you’re really doing, Crowley. This isn’t about protecting America. This isn’t about stopping White or Jackson or any of your patriot lies.”
Crowley’s expression didn’t change.
“This is revenge.” Alan jabbed a finger at him, blood dripping from his sleeve. “York married your daughter. York was there when she died. And you’ve been using me to destroy him—not because he’s a threat but because you want him to suffer.”
“Interesting theory.”
“It’s not a theory!” Alan’s voice cracked. “I’ve watched you, Crowley. I’ve seen how you look when his name comes up. This whole operation—the conspiracy, the Bratva connections, all of it—it’s just scaffolding for your personal vendetta.”
Crowley was silent a beat longer than usual. Down the slope, the car burned, the only sound the tick and pop of cooling, buckling metal.
“And what were you using me for?” Crowley’s voice was soft now. Almost gentle. “When you agreed to help me, when you took the assignment, was it patriotism? Duty?” A cold smile. “Or was it revenge against the people who killed your wife?”
Alan’s mouth opened. Closed.
“We’re the same, you and I.” Crowley stepped closer, close enough that Alan could smell his cologne over the gasoline.
“Men who’ve lost everything. Men who’ve been hollowed out by grief until there’s nothing left but the hunger for someone to pay.
” His pale eyes held Alan’s. “The only difference is that I’m honest about it. ”
Alan wanted to argue. Wanted to find the words that would make Crowley wrong.
He couldn’t.
“You were watching.” Alan’s voice dropped. “Parked back there in the dark the whole time, waiting to see if I’d go through with it. That’s how much you trusted me.”
“I trust outcomes,” Crowley said. “Not men.”
“Here’s what happens next.” Crowley’s voice hardened. “You disappear. Go somewhere warm—I don’t care where. Heal. Wait.” He reached into his coat, produced a burner phone. “When this rings, you answer. And when I tell you where to be, you show up. No arguments. No second thoughts.”
“And if I don’t?”
Crowley’s smile was a knife. “Budapest is lovely this time of year. I understand that Timea’s mother still reads Dickens to the family on Christmas Eve.”
The threat landed like a blow. Alan’s legs nearly buckled.
“Take the phone.” Crowley pressed it into his bloody hand. “Wait for the call.”
Then he turned, walked back to his sedan, and drove away. The taillights shrank into the gathering dark, leaving Alan alone on the side of a highway with the dead in a ravine below and the last of his humanity bleeding out onto the asphalt.
“Sir? Excuse me—sir?”
Alan blinked. A woman in diamonds was staring at him, gesturing at his tray. The champagne flutes had stopped trembling. His hands were steady again.
“Of course, ma’am.” He offered the tray with a practiced smile. “My apologies.”
She took a glass, already looking past him. He was invisible again. Just another waiter.
He glanced back toward the east entrance. York was gone—swallowed by the crowd, or he’d moved to another room. It didn’t matter. Alan’s mission tonight had nothing to do with York Newgate.
The phone had rung three weeks ago. Not Crowley, a Russian voice. Italy, the man had said. There’s a team there—Ham Jones’s people. One of them has information we need.
Ham Jones, who turned out to be the husband of an operative gone rogue. Now Signe Jones, thought dead. Signe Jones, who possessed the NOC list the Bratva wanted.
So yeah, Alan had gone. Had taken hostages in an Italian grandmother’s apartment.
Had held a gun to an old woman’s head while her family watched.
And when the extraction had gone sideways, when Ham’s reinforcements had arrived, Alan had slipped out the back and disappeared into the Italian night.
Another mission. Another piece of himself carved away.
Two days ago, the phone had rung again. Again, a different voice, not Crowley’s. The inaugural ball. Eyes on Jackson. Deliver the key card to the contact in the kitchen at 10:15.
Alan checked his watch. 10:08.