He should have stopped it there.
He hadn’t.
So they’d driven on—Alan at the wheel, Igor beside him, Volkov and a dying boy in the back with York—deeper into the dark.
And then York got a hand free.
Alan never saw the cross. Didn’t understand, until later, piecing it together through the haze of a concussion, that the kid’s cheap nail-cross had been the thing that unmade them all. One second Igor was twisting over the seat, and the next he was clawing at his own throat, blood sheeting between his fingers, thrashing, grabbing—for the wheel, for help, for anything—and the SUV bucked toward the guardrail.
Alan shoved him off. Too hard. The wheel went with him.
Headlights, then. A semi swinging wide around the bend, grille filling the windshield like the face of God.
York lunged from the back and grabbed the wheel and wrenched, and the world came apart—the screech of metal on metal, the SUV spinning, the guardrail folding like foil. And in the spin, with everything tearing loose around him, Alan had done the one thing he’d come to do: driven his blade into York’s side, felt it bite, felt the hot give of it. Then the drop. The trees coming up. Impact, and darkness, and nothing.
When Alan came to, he was twenty feet up the slope, no memory of how he’d gotten there, dry pine needles biting into his cheek and the heat of a burning car washing over him from below.
Dust. Gasoline. The sick-sweet copper of blood—his own, York’s, impossible to separate.
Alan crawled up the embankment, every movement sending fire through his ribs. Dry pine needles and loose scree shifted under his hands, his knees. Below, the wreckage of the SUV lay crumpled against a Douglas fir, one headlight still burning, casting a sickly yellow cone through the settling dust.
He didn’t look back. Couldn’t.
Three of them still in the car. Igor, dead before the fall. Volkov, who’d never made a sound. And the kid—the kid in the football jersey, who’d done nothing but walk down the wrong trail at the wrong hour. Enough bodies to muddy the water. Enough that when the fire was done, no one would be able to say for certain who had walked away from this road and who hadn’t.
Maybe that was the only mercy left in it. The kid would burn with Alan’s men, and the world would never sort one from another.
One more thing Alan would carry.
He reached the road and collapsed onto the cooling asphalt, chest heaving. His side was on fire. Blood ran off his fingers and pooled in the gravel at the shoulder.
He could stay down. Let the night take him. Let this be the ending.
Headlights cut through the dusk. Not emergency lights—no siren, no urgency. Just a single black sedan, rolling up the empty highway at the unhurried pace of a man who’d known exactly where to find this.
Of course he had. Crowley never let an asset out of his sight on a job that mattered. Somewhere back down the road he’d been parked on a pull-off, watching the SUV’s taillights, waiting to see whether Alan went through with it—or whether he’d need cleaning up too.
The sedan eased onto the shoulder. The door opened, and Tom Crowley stepped out, unhurried, like a man arriving for a dinner reservation.
He didn’t offer a hand. Just stood there, looking down at Alan like he was examining a disappointing investment.
“Is it done?”
Alan pushed himself to his knees. The world tilted. “I don’t—I don’t know. He was alive when we went over.”
Crowley’s mouth tightened. “Loose ends?”
“In the car.” Alan spat blood onto the pavement. He thought of the jersey, the name stitched across the back. “There was a local. Wrong place, wrong time.” He shook his head. Grit clung to his cheek; he didn’t wipe it away. “We lost both our men and a kid who had nothing to do with any of this. Just to cover your tracks.”
“We did what was necessary.” Crowley tilted his head. “Or are you having second thoughts?”
Something broke in Alan’s chest. Not his ribs—those were already cracked. Something deeper. Something that had been fracturing since Sophia’s body, since further back, to the first moment he’d agreed to work for this man.
“Second thoughts?” He laughed—a raw, ugly sound. “I’m done. Do you hear me? Done.” He struggled to his feet, swaying. “I know what you’re really doing, Crowley. This isn’t about protecting America. This isn’t about stopping White or Jackson or any of your patriot lies.”
Crowley’s expression didn’t change.
“This is revenge.” Alan jabbed a finger at him, blood dripping from his sleeve. “York married your daughter. York was there when she died. And you’ve been using me to destroy him—not because he’s a threat but because you want him to suffer.”
