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CHAPTER 157
Trooper Daniel Pruitt sat in the back of an ambulance with a foil blanket around his shoulders and a paper cup of coffee he had not touched. His hands would not stop shaking. Every few seconds he looked down at them as if they belonged to someone else, and every time, he saw the gravel turnout again, the four shapes laid out in a neat row, and the slow, terrible understanding that the shapes were breathing. "Take your time," the county detective said gently. "I honestly thought it was a pile of clothes," Pruitt said. "I almost drove past." He swallowed. "One of them moved. His chest. It went up, and it came down, and I thought, that's a man. And then I got closer and I..." He stopped. The detective waited. Behind them, paramedics were lifting the last of the four onto a gurney with the careful, silent economy of people who had stopped trusting their own voices. "There were no hands," Pruitt said at last. "On two of them. And the faces. They
CHAPTER 156
By the time Darius turned to Deacon, the bulb was flickering and an owl had called twice beyond the walls and fallen silent. Deacon knelt in the shadow of his chains, lips moving in something that sounded like prayer. "You had the least to gain," Darius said. "You wanna tell me why it was so easy?" "I don't know," Deacon whispered. "I wish you had a better answer." "I actually don't know! She was just a name." "She paid you and she trusted you. But what did you do? You decided to betray her and feed her to the wolves." Deacon sobbed openly. Darius let him. "I'm going to tell you who she was," he said. "All of you." He told them about the highway shoulder, the laundry cart, the way Natasha did everything she did to make him survive a deadly accident, and the last thing she said to him: "I really hope you don't regret it." His voice shook, and he did not stop it. Jonathan, awake again, wept through the fog of his pain. Colby turned
CHAPTER 155
⚠️ Mature content. This chapter contains graphic torture and mutilation. Reader discretion is advised.----- The first thing Colby Varnell did when the cellar door opened was laugh. It was a dry, cracked sound, and it carried farther than it should have in the cold room. He hung from the wall by his wrists, the chain biting into his skin, and watched the tall figure descend the stone steps. "Well," Colby said. "The kid from the field office. I wondered when you'd show your face." Darius said nothing. He crossed the floor, pulled the cord of the single bulb until it swung in a slow arc, and set a metal case down on the concrete. He had pulled off the balaclava. Without it, the hollows under his eyes looked like bruises, and his jaw was set in a way that made him look older than he was. "Mr. Argent," Jonathan whispered, as if the name might still protect him. "Mr. Argent, please, whatever you think we..." "Quiet." The word wasn't lo
CHAPTER 154
At the Argent estate, the staff moved through the afternoon like people walking on thin ice. Alan stood in the servants' corridor with his back against the wall, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his heartbeat so loud that he was certain it would give him away. Two federal agents had just left the kitchen. One of them had thanked him for his time and handed him a card. "If you remember anything else." He stared at the card. Then he tucked it inside his jacket and walked to the stairs, climbing slowly, a hand on the banister, rehearsing in his head the words the young master had given him the night before. "If anyone asks, I'm in my room. I haven't slept. I told you not to disturb me." He had agreed without asking why. He hadn't wanted to know. At the top of the stairs, the door to Darius's room stood closed, a small card still hanging on the handle. Alan lifted his
CHAPTER 153
By noon, the ambush had stopped belonging to the FBI. A passing motorist had filmed the end of the Calloway service road from the Harlow Bridge, and the footage was on every screen in the country within an hour. It showed a stationary transport van with its doors flung open, six federal Marshals sitting in a row along a boxcar wall like schoolchildren in detention, and a patrol officer cutting zip ties with a pocketknife while Deputy Hailing's voice, hoarse and furious, carried over the audio. "They took all four of them! Put it out on the radio, they took all four!" The anchors called it the most brazen attack on a federal convoy in twenty years. Within ninety minutes, the governor had declared a state of emergency for the metropolitan district, and by two o'clock the city was closing like a fist. Checkpoints went up on every bridge and highway ramp. State troopers stopped trucks, vans, and anything white, and traffic backed
CHAPTER 152
They came down in a line, chains clinking against the metal step, blinking in the gray light. Colby was first, his eyes flicking from the masked men to the bound Marshals to the white van sitting sideways across the ramp. His expression sharpened. "This isn't a rescue," he said. "No bro, it's not," Silent said. "Then what the hell is it? Why the fuck would you ambush the federal Marshal? Death wish?" Nobody answered him. Jonathan, behind him, looked around wildly, the color draining from his face. "Who sent you? Who paid you? I haven't talked, I swear to God, I haven't said a word to anyone—" "Shut the fuck up and move," Blade said, and shoved him toward the van. Deacon was the last to climb down, and he moved so slowly that one of the masked men had to take his arm. His eyes roamed the yard, taking in the boxcars, the gate, the line of Marshals kneeling in the gravel, and then th
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