Page 118 of Silent Schemes

The city lights are starting to fade as the sun threatens the horizon, painting everything in that uncertain gray that could be ending or beginning.

This is goodbye—my last look at the place that was almost home, that could have been something different if I'd been someone different.

If I hadn't been raised by Theodore Cross to value bullets over bonds.

If Varrick hadn't been born a bastard king with empire in his blood.

If, if, if.

The two most useless letters in the English language.

The city spreads below us like a circuit board, all lights and connections, power flowing through predetermined channels.

Somewhere down there, Varrick is claiming his crown from the ashes of what we burned.

My cousin was severely injured in a shootout late last night—I heard it on the news yesterday while buying supplies at a truck stop. "Gang-related shooting leaves seventeen dead, and four injured, including suspected crime boss Bastian Cross." The reporter's voice had been breathless with the scandal of it, the violence that had painted Vancouver's underworld red.

I should feel something about him being hurt, maybe.

Relief, that this monster is finally being hurt for once.

Instead, I feel hollow, like someone scooped out my insides and left only the shell.

Maybe that's what my father always wanted—a hollow daughter he could fill with whatever suited his purposes.

"We should go," Maya says, her first words in three days.

Her voice is hoarse from disuse, thin as paper. "Before someone sees us."

"Five more minutes," I say, hand unconsciously going to my stomach where our child grows, still secret, still safe.

Five weeks now, maybe six.

The nausea has mostly passed, replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion that has nothing to do with pregnancy and everything to do with the weight of what I've done.

That's when Ifeelhim.

It's not a sound or a movement, just a shift in the air pressure, a change in the molecular structure of the world.

My body knows he's there before my mind processes it, every nerve ending suddenly alive and screaming.

I know he's there before he speaks, before he steps from the shadows between the Douglas firs that line the viewpoint.

Of course he found me.

I've been careful but not invisible.

The stolen car, the fake IDs, the safe house—all of it leaves traces if you know how to look.

And Varrick always knows how to look.

Part of me—the part that's still capable of hope, that still dreams of different endings—wanted him to find me.

Needed this closure, this final goodbye, even if it kills us both.

"You're predictable," Varrick says, emerging from darkness like he was born from it.

He's wearing all black—tactical pants, fitted shirt, leather jacket that conceals at least three weapons.