Page 7 of Fallen Empire

I saw the blood that matted her hair, soaking into her skin. I saw the way her body hit the ground. The way her eyes found mine—wild, pleading, full of truth—before they lost their light.

That was the last time I sawher.

And now, that was all I could see.

I ran a hand down my face, gripping the back of my neck like pressure alone could hold me together. But it didn’t. Nothing could.

Not without her.

Because if Savannah Sinclair had to die for this…

Then everything she owned was going with her.

My jaw clenched. I ran a hand down my face again, gripping the back of my neck like I could hold myself together by force.

She was gone.

She wasgone.

The woman who unraveled me. Who stood in front of a bullet and smiled like she’d found peace in dying for something real.

I closed my eyes. Saw her face. Blood in her hair. A whisper on her lips.

“I’ll always love you.”

She never heard the words leave my mouth. She was gone before I could say them.

My eyes opened again, stinging.

A fresh headline stared up at me.

Not a newspaper I recognized—foreign, maybe. Different paper. Thinner. Dull ink.

But something caught my eye. Red.

A streak of red ink across the photo of the Sinclair estate. Not printed. Drawn.

I knew this wasn’t over. Where there was one Bruce Starling, there was more.

There—across the bottom of the page, scratched in thick, red marker:

“You took something from me. Now I’ll take everything from you.

The war has only just begun.”

I tossed back the last of the watered-down whiskey I was holding before slamming the glass into the wall across from me.

It hit with a sound that split the silence wide open—sharp, shattering, violent. Like a gunshot in a church. Fractured glass exploded outward in a fan of glittering debris, catching the low light from the fire like a thousand tiny screams frozen midair.

Amber liquid streaked down the wall in slow, jagged trails, dripping into the grooves of the wood paneling like blood sliding off skin.

Blood.

For a second, I just watched it.

The truth was, I never minded fighting battles that weren’t mine. Hell, most of my life had been built on carrying other people’s burdens.

But this?