Page 52 of Bram

His head snapped back, blood running from his nose. He spat it onto his shirt, then looked up at me like nothing had changed.

“Well?” he said. “Do it.”

I raised the knife.

Before the knife could drop, I heard her.

“Bram.”

Not a scream. Not even a shout. Just my name, carried across the blacktop, sharper than any blade. I turned, vision smeared with sweat and blood and saw her standing there at the lot’s edge. She wore her old DA suit jacket over jeans, shirt torn open at the collar, hair wild, like she’d been driving all night and then just kept running on foot. The gun was already in her hands, arms locked out, grip perfect, aimed dead center at my heart.

I saw the tremor in her jaw but not her arms. The gun didn’t move. I said, “Julie.”

The Colonel’s laugh was dry and metallic, like a can kicked down the gutter. “Of course,” he said, head tipped back in the gravel, eyes searching the cloudless sky. “That’s my girl.”

I stayed where I was, kneeling, knife still in my fist, knee on his chest. The smart move was to back away and let her have the shot. The smart move was to disarm myself and make a show of it. But I’d never been smart where she was concerned. And she’d always known that, even when it made her furious enough to hate me.

She advanced, slow and careful, boots scraping the lot. I watched the line of the gun. Never wavered. Not once.

“You going to shoot me?” I asked her.

Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “If you kill him, I’ll kill you.”

The sun had come up high enough to throw a shadow behind me, long and crooked on the broken asphalt. It made the blood look black. My own or the Colonel’s, I couldn’t tell anymore.

He tried to buck me off, last surge of dying muscle, but I pressed him down and felt his ribs crack again. He made a sound that was almost a gasp, then started to laugh again, softer this time.

“You know what I told her, son?” he said, not looking at me. “Told her all her life, there’s no such thing as mercy. Just weakness dressed up for Sunday. She was the only one who listened.”

Julie shifted left, half a step, adjusting her line of sight. “Shut up.”

He smiled at her, blood all over his teeth. “What did I ever do but make you strong?”

She didn’t answer. The barrel stayed trained on me. It was personal, and it was practical.

A wind came through, scattering grit. A dog barked somewhere past the fence line, and then it was quiet again. The kind of silence that said the world was paying attention.

“Last chance, Bram,” Julie said.

I thought about it. About what I owed her, what I owed the men we’d buried because of the Colonel, the scar she’d wear forever if he kept breathing one more minute. I let the knife fall to the dirt, blade up. Opened both hands and leaned back, slow, thinking once again I’d let Millie down.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s yours.”

She nodded. Not relief, just confirmation. She stalked forward, steps slow but even, gun pivoting down to the Colonel’s head. He stared up at her with the calm of a man who thought he’d already won. Maybe he had, in some universe where bloodlines meant more than the blood itself.

“You want to say it?” she asked him. Her voice was flat and heavy. “Say you’re sorry? Say you regret anything at all?”

He sucked in a ragged breath and started to speak, but she cut him off.

“You beat my mother until she couldn’t stand. You told me you’d kill her if I didn’t follow orders, every single time, like I was a dog. You threatened Emma, you made her watch—”

He tried to talk over her. “Julie—”

“You built me out of fear and then called it love. You put a badge in my hand so you’d own the law and the law would own me. Every year you told me I owed you, every year you made it true.”

The next words came short, clipped, one after the other.

“You murdered Bram’s wife. You left them to die in that house and then blamed it on the world being hard.”