Page 56

The way she’d fucked me raw, desperate, like she could outrun death itself.
Could I leave it all behind—the blood, the ghosts, the life that’d carved me into this?
For her?
The question burned, twisting in my gut as I drove, the road blurring under a sky gone bruise-gray, heavy with rain that wouldn’t fall.
I wasn’t halfway to Dominion Hall when my phone buzzed, snapping me out of the spiral.
Atlas.
I hit speaker, voice rough from the thoughts I couldn’t shake. “Yeah?”
“Got a name,” he said, low, clipped, no preamble. “Pastor’s killer.”
My pulse kicked up, cold and steady, the old rhythm—hunt, track, kill—sliding into place. “How’d you get it?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
I smirked, grim. Fair enough. “Who?”
“Edward Holstein.” He rattled off an address—a shithole corner of Charleston, where the city forgot to care. “Sending it now.”
“How sure?” I asked, already eyeing the road ahead, calculating turns.
“Ninety percent.”
“Good enough,” I said, and hung up.
Didn’t think twice—peeled a U-turn, tires screaming against wet asphalt, and gunned it toward Holstein’s.
The joy was gone, buried under the weight of what I did best.
Some bastard had put that pain in her eyes, taken her dad, and I’d make him pay—slow, bloody, the way I’d been trained to make it hurt.
The drive was quick, Charleston’s edges fading into a blur.
Holstein’s neighborhood was a dead-end kind—squat houses, chain-link rusting into the dirt, yards choked with weeds and junked cars.
This place didn’t talk to cops, didn’t snitch, just let the shadows run their own game.
I did a slow drive-by, taking it in—his place was a wreck, overgrown grass swallowing the porch, mailbox spilling letters like it hadn’t been touched in years.
Windows dark, shutters sagging, paint peeling in strips, the kind of disrepair that screamed no one gave a shit.
Parked a few blocks away, grabbed my lockpick kit from the glovebox, and hoofed it back on foot, sticking to the alleys, boots quiet on cracked pavement.
The air was thick, humid, carrying the stink of rotting garbage and something sharper—weed, maybe, or worse.
Back door was locked, but the mechanism was cheap, rusted through.
I slid the picks in, felt the pins give way, and popped it open in seconds, slipping inside without a sound.
The house hit me like a wall—hoarder’s haven, shit stacked floor to ceiling, newspapers, boxes, trash bags spilling clothes, cans, broken toys.
Smelled like mold and stale smoke, the kind of rot that settles into your lungs if you stay too long.
A narrow path snaked through the clutter, barely wide enough for my shoulders, and I moved slow, pistol low and ready, ears sharp for any creak or shuffle.