The phone buzzed thirty seconds later. Ethan's reply was two words:
En route.
I looked at Wyatt. He was standing now—hunched, favoring the shoulder, blood on his face, but standing. His eyes wereon the dead men in the van. The expression on his face was one I recognized—the expression of a man who'd just survived something that was supposed to kill him and was already converting the survival into operational data.
"How the hell are we going to explain this?" he said.
I looked at the van. At the bodies. At the Charleston sky through the shattered glass. At my brother, bleeding and alive and standing in the wreckage of a morning that had started with laughter in a kitchen and ended here.
"I don't know," I said.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
We were fucked. The kind of fucked that didn't have a precedent in my experience—not combat fucked, not operational fucked, but the particular, civilian-adjacent fucked of two men standing in broad daylight on an American dirt road with dead bodies that belonged to an organization they couldn't name, put there by a man with an FBI badge who might or might not be what he claimed to be.
Royally fucked.
But alive.
And if the Danes—all of them, Charleston and Montana and Valentine—were what Ethan had promised, what the dinner had shown me, what the stables and the horse and the family and the mission added up to, then maybe fucked wasn't the end of the sentence. Maybe fucked was just the middle.
"The brothers will fix this," I said. Not a hope. A statement. The first time I'd saidthe brothersand meant myself included.
Wyatt nodded.
In the distance, I could hear sirens. Not close yet. But coming.
We needed to move.
I took one last look at the van—the wreckage, the bodies, the blood on the seats, the morning light coming through broken glass.
What the hell had we gotten into?
30
CRAINE
He watched from two blocks south, parked in the shadow of overgrown weeds, engine off, window cracked.
The van caught the curb and went over with the heavy, structural violence of a vehicle losing its argument with physics. Craine didn't flinch. He watched through a compact monocular and waited.
Two minutes later, Grant Dane climbed out. Bloodied. Upright. Wyatt Dane followed.
Both standing. Which meant the others were not.
The plan had been simple—take the Danes to the facility off Savannah Highway, separate them, apply pressure, provoke something actionable. Something that turned a material witness request into an arrest warrant, and an arrest warrant into a lever long enough to pry open the gates of Dominion Hall.
But the Danes had made the call early. Faster than expected. He'd adjust. He was good at that.
The men in the van weren't FBI. On paper they were—names buried deep on Bureau subcontract rosters, third-party security consultants with clearances and backgrounds that heldup exactly as long as nobody important went looking. In reality, they were Victoria's last gift.
Victoria.
She'd told him about her dalliance with Klein. Craine had called it stupid. And Klein was a patsy by Victoria’s own design.
Secretly, he'd wished it had been him—not the sacrifice, the closeness. She'd been the most brilliant strategist he'd ever known. He'd settled for the next best thing: her intelligence. Years of data on criminal operations that had quietly fueled his rise through the Bureau. Deputy Director by forty-two. A career built on a dead woman's homework.
Now, the crowning jewel was in sight. He'd stood on its grounds. Walked its drive. Felt the gates close behind him.
