Through the shattered driver’s side window, past the wall of silent witnesses and the flashing blue lights of thedistant, stalled cruisers, I hear something. It’s not a siren. It’s not a scream.
It’s a ringtone.
The sound is coming from inside the ambulance. Not from the dash, and not from the pockets of my jeans. It’s muffled, rhythmic, and coming from the medical storage cabinet directly behind Hallow’s head.
Hallow stiffens, pulling back. Her eyes, still rimmed with kohl-stained tears, lock onto mine. We both know that cabinet is supposed to be full of sterile gauze and saline.
I reach past her, my fingers slick with his blood, and yank the latch.
The door swings open.
Inside, tucked between rolls of bandages, is a burner phone. Its screen is glowing a sickly, neon blue, illuminating a name on the caller ID that makes the air turn to liquid nitrogen in my lungs.
RYKER.
My heart stops. Ryker isn’t just a name. He’s the ghost even I was afraid to hunt. The man who supposedly died in the same fire that scarred my back five years ago—the one dad told me he had ordered to keep Hallow “safe.”
I pick up the phone. My thumb slides over the screen. I don’t say a word. I just press it to my ear.
“Check the monitor, Jex,” a voice crackles—low, smooth, and chillingly familiar. It’s a voice that sounds like velvet dragged over a grave.
I look at the heart monitor. The flatline is still there, a solid, unwavering horizontal stroke of green light.
“Now check his wrist,” the voice says.
I reach down, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I grab his cold, limp wrist. I press my fingers into the pulse point.
There is a beat. Strong. Steady. Rhythmic.
“What the fuck?” I hiss, my grip tightening until I hear the Mayor’s radius bone groan.
“He’s on a beta-blocker cocktail I designed myself, little brother,” Ryker’s voice purrs through the phone. “It masks the vitals. It makes the machines see death while the heart keeps pumping. You didn’t kill him, Jex. You just gave him a front-row seat to the show I’ve been producing since the day you left.”
I look at our father. His eyes are still pinned open, still vacant, but now I see it—the tiny, microscopic contraction of his pupils. He’s paralysed. He’s awake. And he’s been a puppet this whole time.
“Why?” I growl into the phone, my hand shaking with a new kind of rage.
“Because the ‘Choir’ needed a new lead singer,” Ryker laughs, and the sound is punctuated by a heavy, metallic thud from the roof of the ambulance.
The entire vehicle rocks. Hallow screams as the ceiling above us begins to buckle inward, the reinforced steel peeling back like a tin can under the weight of something—or someone—far stronger than us.
A pair of boots—black, military-grade, and covered in the same marsh mud as mine—kick through the roof.
A man drops into the clinical white light. He’s wearing a mask of hammered silver, but the eyes behind it are unmistakable. They are the same predatory, ice-blue eyes I see every time I look in a mirror.
“Family reunions are always so messy,” Ryker says, tossing a second burner phone onto the gurney.
He looks at Hallow, his gaze crawling over her naked, shivering form with a look of terrifying, brotherly affection.
“Hello, little bird. Did you miss your favourite brother?”
The crowd outside begins to scream, but for the first time tonight, the sound doesn’t come from the PA system. It comes from the bridge itself.
The suspension cables are snapping. One by one. Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Dad isn’t the villain of this story, Jex,” Ryker says, stepping over our father’s paralysed body to face me. “He was just the distraction. Now, let’s talk about who’s actually been holding the leash.”
The world is tilting. Literally.
