Page 3 of Freedom’s Inferno

I discovered the money was missing days after he was gone. Twenty million unaccounted for, vanished like smoke.

That was when the pieces started clicking into place.

Sweet, grieving Lana Blackwell. The widow with big blue eyes and trembling lips. I’d seen what lived beneath that facade, something sharp and vicious coiled under all that beauty. A snake dressed in silk. I’d learned the hard way, long before Richard ever put a ring on her finger.

Lana killed him. My gut told me so. She killed him and she took the money, but those millions didn’t belong to Dickie. The money didn’t belong to me, either. It belonged to the kind of man one didn’t dare to cross, unless they were looking for the freedom offered by a hole in the ground.

Damian Costa would carve me into pieces if I didn’t return what belonged to him. I needed the money back, and if Lana Blackwell thought she could play innocent and keep it, she was about to find out how wrong she was.

The line moved at a crawl, condolences whispered like a ritual. I studied her composure, the way she accepted each murmured word with grace. Her nails were perfectly manicured, a deep garnet color. The same color as the blood on her hands.

My jaw clenched, eyes narrowing in on her in a way that did nothing to hide the disgust that roiled in my gut. The stiff suit clung to me like a costume, collar biting at my throat. The fabric sat wrong on my skin. I clutched my motorcycle helmet tight under my arm like a security blanket. I’d rather be in my leathers, riding until the road ran out, until I was nowhere.

She looked up and smiled in my direction, and I forced my features to soften.

“Charlie.”

The name cracked something open in my chest. Charlie was my father, not me, and every time I heard it my jaw tightened until my teeth ached.

“Chuck,” I corrected, my own smile curving like a blade at the sight of her lips faltering.

“Chuck. Thank you for coming.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I said, leaning in. “Funny, isn’t it? The three of us together in one place again. Reminds me of college. The dorm, ya know? You and Dickie. Me. Of course, back then I couldn’t have imagined you and I would be the ones left standing. But Dickie did always say you could outlast the worst of things.”

Her smile didn’t budge, but something like doubt flashed in her eyes. “Richard always gave me too much credit.”

“Mmm.” I let my gaze linger, never breaking eye contact.

Her fingers tightened around the funeral program, knuckles white. “Well, he considered you his closest friend. I know he’d appreciate that you’re here. Loyalty was so important to him.”

I smiled, thin and cruel. “And he was lucky to have such a loyal wife. Right to the very end.”

Our eyes locked, a challenge or a dare, and something in her expression fissured. I leaned in close enough that only she could hear, my lips grazing the shell of her ear as I spoke. “Luck runs out, Lana.”

Her breath stuttered. She recovered, but not before showing her hand.

I stepped aside, offering a polite nod as if I’d given her the gentlest comfort, and moved down the line. Part of me savored it: the flicker in her smile, the evidence of a clean hit. Rattling her brought satisfaction, but under the rush of arrogance came something else, sharp and tense; the sense that I’d lit a match, igniting a blaze the size of which I could not predict.

The widow wasn’t going to fold, and as much as I wanted to believe I had her cornered, a darker part of me knew I’d stepped into the cage with her, and I wasn’t sure which of us would walk back out.

Richard didn’t look like Richard. He was a mannequin dressed for the part: his jaw too stiff, his skin drained of every ounce of life. They’d caked the makeup on thick, some ghastly shade of orange that didn’t match anything human. I never understood the concept of an open casket. How anybody thought painting a corpse and sewing the eyelids shut could make everybody pretend the body was anything but meat cooling in a box, was beyond me. Call it respect, call it tradition, but the whole thing amounted to a parody of a person who no longer existed.

The suit they’d chosen was pristine, the tie straight, not a hair out of place, but none of it hid the truth. He was empty. No blood. No color. Just a shell.

My chest tightened as I looked down at him. I couldn’t parse through my emotions. Grief, maybe, or rage—probably all of that at once.

“I wish you were here,” I murmured, the words scraping out like gravel. “You left… such a fucking mess. And I can’t decide if I miss you or if I just don’t want to be alone.” I hadn’t come that close to honesty in years.

I stepped back, the press of unseen eyes crawling up my spine. Mourning him in public stripped me bare in a way I wasn’t expecting. I wanted to outrun the weight of this place and the stares of people who didn’t know me at all.

Richard had drowned, swallowed whole by lies, greed, by whatever he couldn’t outswim. Standing there, I was drowning too. Different tide. Same undertow.

I slipped out of the church before the last hymn could start, lowering the helmet over my head like a shield. Outside, the air was crisp, cold with the bite of early fall, cleaner than the suffocating incense, but not lighter.

Rows of luxury vehicles lined the parking lot, and my bike stood out like a scar—black metal and steel, raw and loud against all that civility. I belonged to it more than I ever had to any person. I swung onto the bike and the world narrowed down to the hum of my own breath. The engine roared to life, and I revved the throttle, hungry for distance. The road opened up, black and endless, and I let it carry me toward the one thing I knew I couldn’t outrun: a woman with fire in her hair, blood on her hands, and no idea about the hell I was ready to unleash for twenty million reasons.

Chapter 2