Page 36 of The Final Contract (The Black Ledger Billionaires #5)

A fter that night in the hospital, Seraphina quit nursing.

Said she couldn’t do it anymore—couldn’t look at a patient without seeing Stasia.

Couldn’t face another code where all she saw was her sister’s face going slack.

She tossed the rose he left behind in the trash, not realizing how significant it would become in her life.

The nurse had sworn he’d only turned his back for a second, prepping sedation, and the bastard was gone. Staff searched; security swept every floor. No sign of him.

And then the drunk—the one with nothing more than a busted arm, the one who killed a woman with his selfishness—turned up dead the next morning. No trauma, no struggle. Everyone thought the hospital missed something, botched the case. There was an investigation, but nothing stuck.

Now it makes sense. Caleb Ward could’ve slipped into his room, found the man who killed his fiancée, and smothered him with a pillow while he slept. Simple. Quiet. Final.

But the story didn’t end there.

Jaxon dug deeper, pulling records nobody else thought to cross-check.

Turns out Caleb was picked up hours later, wandering the streets, covered in blood, half out of his mind.

EMS logged him as a John Doe and took him to another hospital across town.

He got treatment there—but a traumatic brain injury like his doesn’t heal easy, and it’s clear he never got himself much care after.

So, he unraveled. And in that broken place, Seraphina became Sarah.

The one who died on the table while Seraphina pressed the life out of her chest, begging her back. In his head, they fused.

It took him six months to track her down and get a job at the Ledger. And from there, he sank into her shadow—watching, waiting.

The notes came first. The flowers followed, close to the one-year mark of Sarah’s death. Jaxon checked—it lined up exactly. And now we’re staring down the five-year anniversary.

Makes sense why he’s escalating.

Why he wrote TIME’S UP on the wall.

The anniversary is tomorrow.

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.

Cormac hasn’t forgotten.

He’s not after Caleb. Not even after Seraphina.

He’s after me. After Lucian.

But he’ll use her blood to gut me. And he’ll use the Ledger to burn Lucian’s empire to the ground.

The knife in Caleb’s chest isn’t a victory.

It’s a message.

And if he knows I’m coming here, that means I’m already too late.