Page 71 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

He swallows hard. “I didn’t—” His voice cracks. “I only did what they told me. They said you’d keep her safe if I kept you busy.”

Pathetic. Honest. Both.

I step closer until the pistol dips on its own. He flinches, but he doesn’t run. He’s too worn out even for that.

“You think they’d have saved you?” I ask.

His jaw works. He can’t answer. He already knows.

I take the pistol from his limp hand and set it on the floor between us. “Vale is dead. Volker is dead. If you want to live, you leave this city and never speak her name again. If you don’t, I’ll find you.”

His nod is frantic, desperate. The kind men give when they’ve already chosen exile.

I leave him there, shaking in the dust, and walk on.

The loading dock is empty when I slip through the side door. Good. Fear works fast when it spreads without orders. Vale’s men. Volker’s men. They scatter the same way: with panic in their lungs.

I take the alley back to the SUV. The engine wakes clean. No tails. No curious eyes.

The hard drive sits on the seat beside me. Its weight feels wrong, heavier than the metal it’s made of. The trophies in my pocket are worse. A bracelet, a ring, a hair tie still bent from use. I can almost hear the girls they belonged to. Not their voices—just the silence of them.

I drive with the window down, air clawing through, trying to strip me clean. It doesn’t. Nothing ever does.

By the time I hit the viaduct, the phone vibrates again. Lydia.

Her text: You’re being followed .

I glance at the mirror. Black sedan, two cars back.. Patient. Wrong kind of patient.

I don’t swerve. I don’t change speed. I let it grow comfortable. Then, three blocks later, I hook left into a service lane that hugs the river. Dead end. That’s the point.

The sedan follows. Predictable.

I kill the engine, step out, and let the pale morning swallow me. Gravel shifts under my boots. The river moves, slow and thick, carrying a greasy shimmer in the first light.

The sedan idles twenty feet away. The driver door opens. A man steps out. He doesn’t hurry, doesn’t shout. He just stands there with the kind of posture I already know.

Caleb.

His shoulders are broader than memory, his stance still military neat, but his face—his face is the same smug cage Mara once lived inside. He tilts his head like we’re old friends.

The air carries that raw bite of early morning air. Caleb climbs out of the sedan like he owns the lot, jacket crooked, face carrying a faint shadow of bruises.

His smirk is all teeth, but his eyes flicker when they find mine. He hasn’t forgotten about our last encounter—his eyes flash with it, even as he tries to stand taller.

“You,” he says, voice scraping with the false bravado of someone who’s already lost once. “I wondered when you’d show up again.”

I don’t bother circling. I keep my weight forward, steady. “I already ended you once. Let you crawl away with bones still working. That was the only grace you’ll ever get.”

He smirks, but there’s a crack in it. “Grace? You beat me half-dead and then walked. That wasn’t grace—that was hesitation. You didn’t have it in you to finish the job.”

“I had it,” I answer, plain. “What I didn’t have was reason. I thought you might take the chance, disappear, stay out of her life. You proved me wrong.”

His laugh rings sharp in the cold. “So that’s what it was. You telling yourself stories. I don’t disappear, Voss. I don’t walk away. She’s mine. Always has been. You should’ve crushed me when you had the chance, because now—”

The words hang, and I see it: his eyes burning with that same obsessive hunger that made Mara flinch at his shadow. It’s not about me. It never was. It’s about her. Always her.

I step closer, the gravel crunching under my heel. “You’ve mistaken a reprieve for weakness. That was your mistake. I let you live, Caleb. I don’t repeat myself.”

His jaw flexes, fists twitching. “Then try again. But this time, don’t lie to yourself. You wanted me dead back then. You want me dead now. Nothing’s changed—except I’m not running this time.”

The passenger door of the sedan cracks open. Another man leans out, nervous, armed, trying to look steady. I mark the angle, the weight of his hand on the grip. Not a threat yet. Not compared to Caleb.

Caleb doesn’t look back at him—he keeps his eyes on me, waiting for the second chance he thinks I’ll give him again.

He doesn’t understand. There is no second chance.

Caleb takes a few steps closer. His boots crunch. “Where is she?”

“You’ll never know,” I answer.

His jaw ticks. He reaches behind his back and draws a pistol. Compact. Worn from use. His arm steady, like a man who’s pointed it a thousand times.

“Then I’ll make you tell me.”

I almost smile. Almost.

Because this is the part he doesn’t understand: I don’t break under threat. I bend men until they break.

And right now, it’s time he joins the rest.

His pistol levels at my chest, but the weight of it means nothing. It’s a tool in the hand of a man who’s already lost. His eyes give him away—too hungry, too personal. Men who burn like that don’t last long.

“You think you scare me?” I say, stepping into the line of the barrel until I could touch it if I wanted. “You don’t even scratch the edge of fear. You’re just another broken animal who thinks noise makes him dangerous.”

He steadies his stance, draws in air through his nose. “You think you own her now. You don’t. You don’t know what she was like before me. She’ll never be yours.”

“She was never yours,” I correct. “You only caged her. That’s not ownership. That’s cowardice.”

Something flickers in his face—rage, the kind that turns men sloppy. He jerks the pistol higher, finger tight against the trigger. That’s when I move.

My hand slams his wrist aside, the muzzle snapping wide. The shot tears through air, deafening, but not where it should be. I jam my shoulder into his chest and drive him back into the hood of the sedan. The steel booms under the impact. His weapon clatters across the gravel.

The passenger lunges out now, panic spilling into motion.

He shouts Caleb’s name, brings his own gun up.

My hand finds the marker crack in the ground—a chunk of loose stone—and I send it into his temple.

The man staggers, weapon slipping, his knees folding before he can fire.

He stays down, groaning into grit. Not my priority.

Caleb throws a wild punch. It catches the side of my jaw, splits skin. I taste copper, sharp and hot. It’s nothing. I catch his second swing, twist his arm until the tendons scream, and slam him back against the hood.

“You always thought pain was power,” I tell him. “Let me educate you.”

I bury my knee in his gut. His breath shoots out in a wheeze. His eyes bulge, spit flying as he tries to curse. He claws at my shirt, nails dragging useless lines that won’t even scar.

“Say her name again,” I order.

He bares his teeth, feral. “Mara—”

The back of my hand cracks across his mouth, blood spraying the hood in a thin arc. He snarls through it, half-laughing, half-choking.

“She’ll never forgive you,” he rasps. “When she finds out what you really are—what you do when she’s not watching—she’ll see you’re no better than me.”

My hand clamps his throat, iron tight. His words scrape into silence. His pulse hammers against my palm, fast, frantic, then stuttering as I lean in, my mouth close enough that he sees nothing but my eyes.

“I am worse than you,” I whisper. “That’s why she’s safe with me.”

His face darkens, veins swelling in his temple. He claws weakly at my wrist. His pistol lies ten feet away, useless now. His passenger whimpers on the ground, too dazed to rise.

And Caleb—Caleb finally feels the truth. Not in my words. In the grip that tightens by degrees, cutting off every breath he thinks he deserves.

His legs kick once against the bumper. His gaze flashes something almost like panic. Not because he fears death. Because he finally understands it won’t be quick.

His boots scrape useless lines in the gravel as I squeeze. The sound of him choking is raw, animal, not human anymore. The hood groans under his weight, every rattle of the steel a reminder of how thin his resistance has become.

I don’t give him the luxury of words. I don’t loosen my grip for bargaining, or for one last insult. He’s had years of talking, years of making her small with every sentence. He doesn’t get another.

His fingernails bite into my wrist, weaker with every second. His face mottles red, then purple, veins standing out like rope. His eyes roll, first wide with fury, then narrowing, then going glassy as the air deserts him.

I lean closer, close enough that my words can sink into what’s left of his mind. “You don’t haunt her anymore. You don’t touch her anymore. You don’t even exist anymore. You end here.”

The fight leaves him all at once, like someone cut a cord. His hands fall. His body slackens against the hood, head lolling to the side. The last sound is a rasp that isn’t even breath—it’s just the body failing to accept it’s finished.

I hold until there’s no pulse under my fingers. Until there’s nothing left but weight.

Then I let go. He slides off the hood and collapses into the dirt like the trash he always was.

The passenger is watching, wide-eyed, frozen in half-rise. Blood leaks from the cut at his temple, gun still half-clutched in his hand. He knows better than to raise it.

“You saw nothing,” I tell him. My voice cuts through the morning air, steady as iron. “You never met him. You don’t know me. If you speak his name again, I’ll know. And I’ll come for you.”

He nods, frantic, eyes locked on the corpse at my feet. His gun clatters to the ground. He scrambles backward, palms slipping in gravel, before finally bolting without looking back.

I look down at Caleb one last time. His face is slack, mouth twisted open, all that obsession burned out with the last beat of his heart. For the first time, he’s quiet.

I crouch, strip the pistol from his belt, and pocket it. Not as a trophy. As a reminder. I’ll decide what to do with it later.

The sun edges higher, bleeding pale gold over the river. The light touches his body, and I almost laugh at the irony. He looks like a man at rest. But I know better. He was never at rest. He only knew how to claw.

Now he’s nothing.

My chest feels like a chamber emptied, hollow but clean. This was always where it had to end—with my hands, not chance.

And when I go back to her, I’ll tell Mara the truth. That her past is finished. That the man who chained her for years lies in the dirt with no more breath to give.

She’ll know relief. She’ll know guilt. She’ll know both can live in her at once.

And she’ll know I did it because no one else ever could.