"And you're a trafficker hiding in a hole." I said it before I'd planned to. The words came from the same place the anger had been building since I'd seen the pool, the fountain, the manufactured garden. "You branded people. You sold their labor. You used my ranch as a station in your pipeline. And when we tried to stop you, you sent men to frame us for your crimes."
Her eyes found me. Dark. Sharp. Assessing me the way she'd probably assessed a thousand obstacles in her career—measuring the threat, calculating the response.
"The rancher who asked too many questions." Her lip curled. "You have no idea what you've walked into."
"I know exactly what I walked into. I walked into a house my money helped build."
Gravedigger watched the exchange with an expression I couldn't fully read. His gun stayed aimed at our group, but his eyes—those small, dark, intelligent eyes—moved between Whitfield and us with something that wasn't hostility. Something closer to calculation. Like a man watching two fires and deciding which one to stand further from.
"I'm going to simplify this." His voice rumbled through the room. "I'm here for my money. I'm not here for whatever war you people have been fighting. The Iron Wolves are done—I disbanded them. Whatever Spur and his mercenaries were doing for her"—the gun twitched toward Whitfield—"that was her arrangement, not mine."
"Spur's dead." Diego's face came out flat.
Something shifted in Gravedigger's face. Surprise, maybe. Or the recalibration of a man who'd just lost a piece from a board he was still playing. "Interesting. Was it you?"
"It was me."
Gravedigger looked at Diego for a long moment. His gaze went from the Desert Eagle, steady in his hands, to the throwing knife on his belt. The lean, dark, dangerous man who'd killed his replacement and was standing in a room with the gun to prove it.
"Huh." The word carried weight without explanation.
"So here's where we are, Victor." Hawk's voice cut through. Measured. Presidential. "Whitfield is done. Her network is exposed. Her evidence is with a federal prosecutor. The Wolvescompound in Billings is rubble. You say you're out of the game. If that's true, then you and I don't have a problem today."
"Today." Gravedigger caught the word. Smiled with it. The smile was worse than the gun.
"Today," Hawk confirmed.
Whitfield had been listening. Her eyes moving between Gravedigger and Hawk, the calculation visible—who could she leverage, what card was left to play. She straightened from the desk. Lifted her chin.
"Victor." Her voice shifted. Harder. Transactional. "Double what I owe you. I'll send it from the Cayman accounts tonight. In exchange, you remove these pests from my property."
Gravedigger's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Double?"
"You heard me. Double the outstanding balance. Every cent. All I need is for you to do what I've been paying you to do for years." She paused. "Consider it a final transaction."
The room held its breath. Gravedigger's gun hand hadn't moved. His eyes were on Whitfield. Reading her the way I imagined he'd read a hundred people who'd tried to buy their way out.
"Fair enough," he rumbled. "Double."
My stomach dropped. Diego's grip on the Desert Eagle tightened.
Whitfield let out a breath. "The resources I have to spend to keep my tools functional… what a waste."
The satisfaction started to reach her face—the first shade of triumph rebuilding the composure, the relief of a woman who believed money could still fix what was broken.
"Okay then." She released the desk. She stepped forward, away from it, toward our group. Toward Diego on the lead. "You." The word dripped with contempt. "You think you've won something. You think dismantling my operation makes you a hero. You're a thug on a motorcycle with delusions of?—"
The gun went off.
The sound blast that echoed in the enclosed room was catastrophic. A physical force that slammed against my eardrums and whited out every other sensation for a split of a second. The muzzle flash lit the office like a camera strobe—one frame of everything frozen in terrible clarity.
The bullet entered the back of Whitfield's skull and exited through her forehead.
The round carried bone and brain and everything Sandra Whitfield had been across the three feet of air between her face and Diego, the spray hitting his shirt and his neck and the floor beyond him in a pattern that would never come out of the marble. Her body didn't stagger. It dropped. Straight down, the legs folding, the torso following, the dark hair fanning across the white floor as she hit facedown with a sound that was wet and heavy.
The room locked. Every gun aimed and steady. Every body rigid. The two men against the walls looked at their boss—not at us, at him—with the expressions of men who'd just watched their employer make a decision they hadn't been consulted on and were waiting to find out what it meant for them.
Gravedigger's revolver was extended toward the space where Whitfield had been standing. Smoke curled from the barrel. His face carried no rage. No satisfaction. Something colder. The expression of a man settling an account that had nothing to do with money.
