Asher laughs from the catwalk above us, the sound echoing off the metal walls. “Are you finished saying goodbye, Ki? Because I’m getting bored.”
Kiera steps forward into the open, voice ringing clear and cold through the warehouse. “Let them go, Asher. This is between you and me.”
Asher’s smile dims. He pushes off the railing and leans forward, studying her like a specimen under glass. “You still don’t understand why she died, do you?” His voice drips with mock sympathy. “She was supposed to sign when you were eight. Just a signature on the Cicada files, and you would have been owned. Instead, she chose to die…and left you to grow up so beautifully vulnerable.”
Kiera’s weapon dips, just a fraction, her voice cracking. “What?”
“It was never about what the files contained, sunshine,” Asher says, almost gently. “It was about consent. A legal guardian’s signature is required to…let’s say, activate certain protections. Or override them.”
Kiera goes very still. The memory crashes into her like icy water flooding her lungs. Her father hadn’t just been asking for a random signature that night. He’d been demanding her mother sign away rights to Kiera herself—trading her own daughter like a piece of property.”
“You’re lying,” Kiera seethes, the words slicing through the air like a blade.
“Am I?” Asher spreads his hands, almost benevolent. “Then ask your father why he’s kept you so close all these years. Why he never let you out of his sight until you turned eighteen. Why he gave you to me.” His smile sharpens. “He’s been waiting for you to come of age so you could sign them yourself. Retroactively validate the transfer your mother refused.”
Kiera’s grip tightens on her weapon, but her expression flickers—confusion, sharp and real, bleeding through the rage. She’s spent sixteen years searching for the truth about those files. And Asher is twisting the knife with information she never had.
“I don’t care what they are,” Kiera says, her voice steady even as her hands tremble. “I won’t sign them. Not for Wade. Not for you. Not for anyone.”
Asher’s expression hardens. “Then you’ll end up just like Evelyn.” His voice is cold, dangling her mom’s name like a toy. “Obsolete.”
“Cam,” Sterling says, low and urgent. “Now.”
I run. My ribs are on fire, vision tunneling, but I sprint for the west wall where the conduit runs up from the floor. Behind me, Kiera and Sterling open fire. Controlled, suppressing bursts that force Asher’s men back from the railing. Lila runs with me, bare feet silent on the concrete, that plank of wood clutched over her shoulder like a bat.
A man steps from behind a support column, pistol already raised. I don’t have time to aim. I just point and pull the trigger. The Glock kicks hard. The man ducks. The shot goes wide, but it’s enough. Lila swings the two-by-four with a scream that’s half fury, half terror. It connects with his wrist. Bone crunches. The gun clatters across the concrete. “Go!” she screams at me. I slam into the panel, prying it open with bloody fingers. Dozens of wires stare back at me. The jammer’s schematic flashes in my memory: the half-second glance I stole from Asher’s laptop before he closed it. Bypass the oscillator. Bridge the feedback loop. My hands work faster than my fear, stripping wires, twisting them together with shaking, blood-slick fingers.
“Asher!” Kiera’s voice rings out again, drawing his attention to her. “My mother died to keep me from whatever is in those files! I’m not going to dishonor that by signing them for you!”
“You don’t get to rewrite this story, Kiera!” Asher shouts, his voice dripping with contempt. “You were never the author. You were always the fucking collateral!”
I bridge the connection. The jammer screams—a high-pitched electronic shriek that makes everyone flinch. The lights flicker. The red emergency strobes stutter and die. Total darkness swallows the warehouse for three full seconds. Three seconds in an eternity.
Sterling moves like he’s been waiting for this his whole life. I hear grunts, bodies slamming into metal, the wet thud of fists meeting flesh. Kiera fights in close quarters, silent and lethal. I grab Lila’s hand and pull her toward the exit. Forty yards to the east wall. A loading dock door stands partially open, moonlight slicing through like a promise. “Asher’s running!” Sterling’s voice cuts through the dark. “Cam, the door!”
I see him. Asher scrambles down a service ladder, dropping the last ten feet and landing hard.He’s not smiling anymore. He’s clutching a tablet to his chest, and he’s sprinting toward a side entrance. I raise the Glock. My hands are steady for the first time all night. I pull the trigger. The shot catches him in the shoulder. He spins, crashing into a stack of pallets. The tablet skitters across the concrete, spinning to a stop against a rusted support beam. He scrambles for it, but Kiera is there. Appearing out of the darkness like a vengeful goddess. She kicks the tablet away, then plants her boot on his throat and presses down. “What was she protecting me from?” she demands. “Tell me!”
Asher wheezes, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t you wish you knew? You were the asset, Kiera. Property. You always were.” He laughs, a wet, choking sound. “And now that you’re twenty-four…you can sign them yourself. Finish what she started…or undo it.”
Sterling appears beside her, weapon trained steadily on Asher’s head. “Cam. Lila. Truck. Now.”
I grab Lila’s hand and pull her toward the exit. I hesitate at the door, looking back. Kiera stares down over Asher, her face void of expression—no rage, no tears, just a terrifying, empty calm. Asher sees it too. His smile finally cracks. “You don’t have the stomach for it,” he rasps. “You’re just like her. Weak.”
“No,” Kiera says quietly, her voice void of any emotion. “I’m not.” She pulls the trigger twice.Pop. Pop.Asher’s head snaps back against theconcrete, red blooming across his forehead and between his eyes. The laughter dies in his throat. His hand falls away from the tablet. Fingers twitching once, then going still. Kiera stands over him for a long moment, smoke curling lazily from the barrel of her weapon. She bends down, picks up the tablet, and tucks it into her jacket without looking at it.
“Kiera,” Sterling says, his voice low and careful, like he’s approaching a wounded animal that might still bite.
She turns away from the body, stepping over the pooling blood without flinching. “He didn’t get to keep breathing,” she says, her voice steady as stone. “Not after what he took from me.”
“Okay.” Sterling nods, holstering his weapon. “Then let’s go.”
The cold night air hits my lungs like a knife. I half-carry Lila to the truck. We pile in. Kiera and Sterling follow seconds later. Sterling slides into the driver’s seat. Kiera climbs in the back with us. She doesn’t look back at the warehouse. She holds the tablet in her lap, hands clean but eyes stained with something darker than soot. Asher lies dead on the warehouse floor behind us, flames already licking at the pallets near his body, consuming the evidence of what she’s done. There will be no texts later. No loose ends with Asher. Kiera stares at the device in her hand. The cracked screen glows with files marked ‘Cicada’. “Drive,” she says. Sterling floors it.
The warehouse recedes in the rearview, becoming an inferno that paints the night sky orange. The tablet sits between us like a tombstone. Kiera doesn’t look at it again. She looks out the window, into the dark, jaw tight, the weight of understanding finally settling in her eyes. She was never just a witness to her mom’s death. She was the prize her father killed for. And she just eliminated the man who thought he could cash in on that debt. The city lights appear on the horizon—bright, welcoming, and safe. But none of us relax. Wade is still out there. And now Kiera has blood on her hands that won’t wash off with water. She pulls her sleeve down over her knuckles,hiding the splatter, and closes her eyes.Some sins stay with us…even when they're not ours.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The blood under my fingernails won’t scrub out. I’ve been picking at it for twenty miles, watching the city lights blur into streaks of sodium yellow and neon red through the rain-streaked window, but the half-moon crescents remain stubbornly brown. It’s not my blood. That’s the problem. Sterling drives with both hands on the wheel, knuckles white, eyes flicking to the rearview every few seconds. Cam and Lila are slumped together in the backseat, Cam’s arm in a makeshift sling, Lila’s head on his shoulder. They’re quiet. Too quiet. The kind of silence that comes after you’ve watched someone cross a threshold they can’t uncross. I killed a man tonight, not in the heat of battle, not in the scramble for survival. I executed him while he looked me in the eyes. And the worst part—the part that makes my stomach clench like a fist—is that I don’t feel sorry. I feelfree. Like I’ve finally stopped waiting for permission to be the monster this world made me. “Where are we going?” My voice sounds like gravel in a blender.
