53. Sage
FIFTY-THREE
SAGE
brOCK:
Your men can’t watch you forever, pet. I only need one minute alone with you.
Aweek ago, I would have deleted it, swallowed the threat, and let it feed the part of me that loves the feel of my blade sinking into flesh.
This time, six phones buzz at once.
MILO:
Logged. Route’s bouncing again. I’ll pull it apart when we’re home.
Holden catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “Plan stays.”
To the guys’ credit, nobody acts like a bomb has gone off. Nobody tries to wrap me in bubble wrap or tells me I’m sitting this one out.
Knox holds out a black skull mask.
It smells like rubber and someone else’s breath.
In the seven days since Holden opened the new file beside my pancakes, I’ve sat through every briefing, memorized the surveillance footage, and argued over everything from exit routes to whether two suicide notes are one too many.
Tonight, I get to find out whether I can follow the plan or if that thing that loves to kill will take over when there’s blood in front of me.
I turn the mask over in my hands. It’s the same as theirs—matte black skull, hollow eyes, smooth and featureless except for the jaw, which is angled in a way that makes the wearer look like death’s patient cousin.
I’ve seen these masks before. Under the jetty, the night everything started.
Five skulls emerging from the dark while Brock choked on a rope.
Now I’m the one putting it on.
“Fits tight,” I say, adjusting the elastic. “How do you breathe in these?”
“Shallow,” Knox says. “Through the nose.”
“Helpful.”
Holden is driving us in a “borrowed” SUV. Micah and Eli are with Milo in a different vehicle, waiting for the go signal. Everyone enters together. If the plan holds, everyone exits together. One house, two targets, two teams splitting at the hallway.
Holden checks his watch. “They started drinking around noon. Knox laced the bourbon with Dave’s own sleeping medication. The notes Milo crafted say they thought selling the house and starting again somewhere new would help them move on from what they did to Dave’s wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Knox corrects.
“Exactly,” Holden continues. “They go on to say they realized they couldn’t keep living with the lie, so they took the pills with alcohol because they deserved to be punished.”
“That means whatever toxicology finds supports that story,” I confirm.
“Correct.”
“Are we sure they’re drinking from the laced bottle?” I ask.
“There was only one there during the open house this morning. Milo switched it out while he was pretending to be a buyer.” Holden doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “You remember the layout?”
“Three bedrooms, one hallway. Dave is the first door on the left. Andrew is at the end on the right. There’s a bathroom between them.
” I recite it the way I memorized it—from the folder, the whiteboard, and three hours spent around the kitchen table with pancake crumbs and murder logistics.
“We enter through the back door. Knox confirmed it doesn’t lock properly because the latch has been broken since they moved in.
The neighbors on the left are away for Labor Day weekend.
The house on the right is an empty rental. Street’s dead.”
“And if something goes wrong?”
“You and Knox stay with me and take the back door. Eli, Micah, and Milo use the side door. We regroup at the cars. Drive normally.”
Holden nods.
Knox is already pulling on his gloves. Black nitrile. He takes a smaller pair from another box and hands them to me.
“Are these kid-sized?”
“Extra-small. Needed ones that’d fit.”
“Because my hands are tiny?”
“Everyone’s hands are bigger than yours, Fury.”
Holden kills the interior light. “Masks on,” he says, and sends one word to the group chat.
HOLDEN:
Ready.
Thirty seconds later, the second vehicle rolls past us with its headlights off and parks at the end of the block.
Milo:
Ready.
Three figures climb out. Masks already on. They move through the shadows toward the back of the house like smoke—Eli in front, Micah behind, Milo bringing up the rear with the kit bag slung over his shoulder.
I pull the skull over my face. The world contracts to two eyeholes and the sound of my own breathing. I am no longer Sage Adams. I am something that moves in the dark and doesn’t flinch.
We meet at the back door. Six skulls in a weed-choked garden, standing in a row like a fucked-up nativity scene. Nobody speaks. Knox tests the door. The broken latch gives with a soft click and we’re inside.
The kitchen is dark. It smells like stale beer beneath chemical citrus—the evidence of two men who shoved their mess into cupboards before strangers walked through the open house.
Holden signals. The hallway opens ahead. Three doors, one bathroom, two targets sleeping off a dosed bottle of bourbon while Dave’s ex-wife’s account of what they did burns through my brain.
This is where we split.
Eli puts his hand on my shoulder. Squeezes once through the glove. Then he nods at Micah and Milo, and the three of them peel off toward the end of the hall.
We take the closer one.
The door is open. Dave is on his bed, face up, passed out. His breathing is shallow and mechanical. The room smells like bourbon and body spray and the staleness of a man who hasn’t opened a window in days.
Dave and Andrew raped Dave’s ex-wife in this house when she came back for the last of her things.
Her name is Carrie. She teaches second grade two towns over, and she came back that day for a box of her grandmother’s dishes.
She reported them, but a rookie cop mishandled the rape kit and broke the chain of custody.
Without the DNA, the district attorney declined to prosecute.
Dave called that proof she lied. Andrew laughed beside him on the courthouse steps.
Tonight, she’ll get the confession—the justice—she’s owed. And Dave and Andrew are going to get the sentence they deserve.
We move to the bed. Knox checks Dave’s pulse. Lifts an eyelid. He’s deep under, not waking up. He steps back, moving to the door.
Holden sets the forged note on the nightstand. Then he positions Dave’s arms so they’re wrists up, palms open.
Down the hall, Eli’s team is just as silent. Two operations running parallel, separated by thirty feet of hallway and a bathroom, synchronized by the trust that comes from doing this together for years.
When the staging is set, Holden straightens. He reaches into the kit and pulls out a knife.
My knife.
My breath catches. I knew the wrists were mine—we agreed on that during the briefing. I didn’t know Milo had recovered my blade from Stine’s motel room.
“You found it.”
“Milo did.” Holden holds it out, handle first. “Thought you should do this with your own blade.”
My fingers shake once as they close around the handle, then steady.
“Both wrists,” he says quietly. “Lengthways, not across. Follow the tendon line. You want it to look like he knew what he was doing.”
I step to the bed. Dave is still under, his breathing slow, face slack, completely unaware that three people in skull masks are standing over him. He looks young. He looks like someone’s son, someone’s neighbor, someone’s friend. He looks like the kind of guy who’d hold a door open for you.
Then I remember the photograph of his ex-wife’s face in the hospital. One eye swollen shut. Finger-shaped bruises around both wrists. Dave and Andrew smiling outside court.
I take his right arm. His skin is warm and his pulse throbs faintly under my gloved fingers. I position the blade at the soft inside of the wrist, where the veins run blue beneath the surface.
My hand doesn’t shake.
I press down. The skin resists, then gives, and the blood that follows is dark and immediate. Not arterial spray. Slower, thicker, welling up around the blade and spilling down his forearm in a steady pour.
I draw the knife along the vein. Slow. Controlled. The skin opens beneath the blade with that same terrible, precise give.
Dave jerks.
His left hand snaps across his body and locks around my wrist.
His eyes crack open. There’s nothing focused in them, only drugged confusion, but his mouth moves around a wet, slurred sound.
The thing inside me surges awake.
My grip turns. The blade is already there. One hard drive and I could bury it in his throat—
“Stop, wildcat.”
Holden’s voice cuts through me.
I stop.
Knox moves. One hand pins Dave’s shoulder while the other peels his fingers from my wrist and controls his arm against the mattress. He uses his weight carefully, applying only enough pressure to hold him without leaving marks.
Dave fights it for less than a second. Then the drugs drag him back under.
Holden puts his arm across my chest and watches Dave breathe. When he goes slack, the arm lowers and Holden meets my eyes through the mask. “Finish it.”
Knox lets go. I move to the left wrist. My pulse is hammering now, but my hand is steady.
Same line. Same control.
The blood runs and I hold his arm steady, aware of Knox close behind me and Holden beside me, watching with the focused attention of a man who needs to know I can do this—not just the violence, but the discipline.
The patience. The willingness to be methodical when everything inside me says faster, harder, more.
When I’m done, I step back. Both wrists are open.
Blood darkens the sheet beneath his forearms, runs down his fingers, and drips onto the carpet.
His breathing has settled back into the same shallow rhythm.
He won’t surface again before the blood loss takes him.
He’ll just stop. Quietly, in his own bed, with a confession on his nightstand and the blood leaving his body in a way that looks chosen.
Holden checks the staging. Adjusts the note. He takes my knife, seals it in a clear evidence bag, and passes it to Knox. “We’ll clean it and get it back to you.”
Then he pulls Dave’s own kitchen knife from the kit—another thing Milo lifted during the open house. He wraps Dave’s right hand around the handle to transfer his fingerprints, draws the blade through the blood beneath his wrist, and lets it fall beside his open palm.
After that, he checks the floor and the room, making sure we’re leaving nothing behind.
A soft double-tap on the wall. Eli’s signal. Done.
We file out into the hallway. Six skulls reconverging in the dark of a dead house, two fewer heartbeats than when we entered. Eli gives a single nod. Micah’s eyes find mine through the mask. I can’t see his face but I feel the question.
You okay?
I nod.
Milo gives me a thumbs-up, which is the most Milo thing possible at a double murder scene. We move back through the kitchen, out the broken door, and into the night.
We climb into the vehicles and shut the doors before the masks come off. Holden starts the engine. Knox takes the passenger seat.
The quiet that settles over me isn’t empty. It’s not the numb, dissociative silence I’ve been living in for months. This is the quiet of alignment. Of doing the thing I was built for, with people who understand why it matters, in a way that honors the discipline of it.
Knox reaches back between the seats. His hand finds my knee. Squeezes. Doesn’t let go.
“You good?”
“Yeah. Freaked me out a little. But that was still easier than Stine.”
“That’s what planning is supposed to do,” Holden says.
“He woke up.”
“And we were ready. Knox contained him. You stopped. We corrected without leaving anything that breaks the scene.” His eyes find mine in the rearview. “Planning doesn’t stop things going sideways, wildcat. It stops one problem from becoming chaos.”
He waits a beat longer.
“How do you feel?”
I don’t even have to think about it.
“Like a Hangman,” I say.
He nods. And I see him smile.
My phone buzzes. Eli, from Milo’s truck behind us.
ELI:
Proud of you, little savage.
I think about the knife in the bag. The blood on the blade. Knox’s hand on my knee.
Me:
Thank you.
I hit send just as the group chat gets a message from Milo.
Milo:
Group session to celebrate? I think we all earned it
I smile to myself and send back a simple thumbs-up that’s met with another emoji-filled text that I’m not even sure how to decipher.
Instead, I put down my phone and lean forward between the seats. “Holden.”
“Mm.”
“Thanks for bringing my knife.”
His eyes find mine in the mirror and hold for a beat.
“Of course, wildcat. Anything for you.”
I sit back. Close my eyes. Let the hum of the road, Knox’s hand, and the memory of what we achieved tonight carry me home.
Tomorrow the news will break. Two men found dead. A joint suicide pact. Matching confessions on the nightstands. Their families will issue statements, and the media will drag their names through every detail of the story they thought they’d buried.
There’ll be an investigation, but the notes, the toxicology, and the knives will all point in the same direction.
Two more rapists are dead.
Too many more still breathe.
It won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough.