Page 98 of The Final Contract

But I’m not waiting for tomorrow. I’m not luring him out or playing defense while he circles.

This ends today.

When I left Seraphina with Lucian, I could read the look on her face. The words hanging off the top of her tongue that she was battling to hold back.

Don’t make me promise not to kill him,I told her.Because I won’t.

She doesn’t deserve a life of shadows. Doesn’t deserve to wonder when he’ll come again.

She deserves peace.

And I’m going to make sure she fucking gets it.

I park down the block, engine cut, lights off. Caleb’s apartment squats in the middle of a row of tired brick buildings, the kind of place you only notice when the rot starts to show. Perfect cover for a ghost.

I don’t walk straight in. I circle. Once, twice. Every alley, every doorway, every flickering light bulb above a cracked stoop. I wait, watching the windows. Fifteen minutes. Nothing stirs.

Everything is too quiet.

I move. Up the stairwell, testing each board before my weight hits it. His door is cheap, lock cheaper. I slip it in seconds.

The smell slams me in the face the second the door cracks open.

Sweet. Heavy. Wrong.

Rot.

The kind that settles into the walls and doesn’t leave.

My grip tightens on the knife at my hip, but I already know I won’t need it.

He’s dead.

Caleb Ward sits slumped in a chair, jaw loose, eyepatch still strapped across his ruined face. His body has started to sag, skin pulling away, the stink of it thick enough to choke on.

But it isn’t the decay that holds me frozen.

It’s the knife in his chest.

My knife—or close enough. Same steel, same curve of the hilt, same balance I’ve carried for years. Except for the letter inlaid in the handle.

Not a K.

A C.

Cormac.

My brother.

The world tilts, bile stinging my throat. Caleb’s been dead for days. Which means everything since—the roses, the writing, the games—wasn’t him. It was Cormac.

He wanted me to find this. To know.

This isn’t about Caleb Ward. It never was.

It’s about me.

And about the war we started when Seraphina was taken. The day blood spilled in the street and didn’t stop until my cousin hit the ground with Lucian’s bullet in his skull. I fired the first shot. Lucian ended it.