Chapter 22 POV: Emily It’s been three hours since Spokane. Three hours since I pulled the trigger on a child. They say she survived. I saw her eyes roll back. I heard the way her body hit the floor. And now they want me to debrief. Like I’m still whole. Like I’m still someone who understands the difference between mercy and murder. I splash cold water on my face in the van’s bathroom, watching it drip off my chin into the steel sink. The mirror fogs a little from the heat of my breath. I hate it. I want to smash it, just in case. Just in case she’s still watching. But I don't. Because I know she'd enjoy that. The fear. The unraveling. Jason knocks once. “Emily?” I open the door. His face is pale, arm still in a sling, but his eyes are steady. God, I missed his steadiness. “Reyes wants us,” he says. “Anothe

CHAPTER 25 Jason Pov I shouldn’t have come back here. The Spokane house hadn’t aged—it had withered. The paint peeled like burned skin, the windows wore the grime of ten forgotten winters, and the grass had long given up trying to be anything but dirt. I parked two blocks away, like that would make a difference. Like the past wouldn’t recognize me. The front door opened easier than I expected. The lock was broken, or maybe the house was just done resisting. Inside, the silence wasn’t silence. It listened. I stood in the foyer where I’d first found them. My parents. The memory came like water breaking a dam—sharp, chaotic, too fast to breathe in. The carpet had been soaked back then. I remembered the squish of blood under my sneakers. The cold metal of my dad’s watch still ticking on his wrist. The signature drawn beside their bodies—

CHAPTER 26 Jason POV They covered every mirror in the house by morning. Black sheets, duct tape, even cardboard on the tiny shaving glass in the medicine cabinet. But I still felt them. Watching. Breathing. I hadn’t slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw me again—but not me. That version of me standing in my childhood hallway, grinning with dried blood across his collar like it was some kind of badge. Worse? I didn’t know if it was a hallucination… or a memory trying to claw its way back. 08:11 a.m. – Safehouse War Room Ayla slammed her laptop shut. “That’s six bodies now. Six signatures. All marked within forty-eight hours.” Emily didn’t flinch. She just stared at the blank TV screen like it might decide to talk. I paced. “None of them had mirrors near the

Chapter 28 Jason Pov 4:01 AM – The Warehouse, Undisclosed Coordinates The air stank of rotting paper and something worse—like burnt copper and old blood. I held my breath as Ayla slammed her flashlight across the rusted lockbox in the corner of the darkened warehouse. The chain fell with a metallic thud, echoing off the broken beams above us. Rain tapped at the rusted roof like impatient fingers. “Ready?” she asked. I didn’t answer. My hand was already on the lid. We opened it together. Inside, laid neatly like it had been preserved, was a single cassette tape. No markings. No label. Just one word scratched into the plastic in jagged, desperate strokes: Witness. Ayla stared at it. “You sure you want to do this here?” “I need to know what’s on it before someone else dies.” She looked like s