He had destroyed three men, turned their lives into a living hell. But it changed nothing. Katie didn’t wake up.
The pain didn’t leave. The emptiness inside him only grew larger, filling everything. He felt like the loneliest man alive.
The phone in his pocket vibrated. One of the clean phones he’d been given for secure contact. Unknown number.
Not the number of the man who owed him. His heart, which had felt like a block of ice, skipped once. He stepped into the hallway and answered.
“Yeah.” There was a pause, then a cold, commanding voice came on the line, soaked in quiet anger. The voice of a man used to giving orders.
“Alexander North.” “Who is this?” “My name is Roach.”
“Wade Roach’s father.” There was no grief in the voice. Only steel.
“I know it was you. Don’t ask how. Doesn’t matter now. I have a simple business proposition for you.” Alex said nothing.
He looked through the glass at his daughter, and for the first time since the basement, a chill ran through him. “You took my son from me,” Roach continued. “He was my only blood.”
“You turned him into a drooling, silent shell. Fair enough.”
“In your place, I might have done the same. But here’s the problem. You touched what was mine.”
“And that comes with consequences.” Roach paused. Alex could hear his calm breathing. “I’m not going to hunt you down.”
“I’m not going to kill you. Too easy. I’m going to do this differently.”
“Right now an ambulance is pulling up to the main entrance of the hospital where you’re standing. There are no paramedics inside. There are four of my men.”
“They have one order. Go into ICU, find room seven, and disconnect your daughter from life support.” The ice inside Alex exploded.
The world narrowed to the voice in the phone and the white hospital door. “You won’t,” he rasped. “Already did,” Roach said.
“You have a choice, Alex. You can try to stop them. Die in that hallway like a dog.”
“Or you can do exactly what I say. In five minutes you walk out of that hospital, get in your car, and drive to the address I’m about to send you. Alone.”
“No weapon. No tricks. And maybe I call my men off.”
“Clock’s running, Dad.” The line went dead.
At that same second, a text came through with the address of an abandoned industrial warehouse on the edge of town. Alex looked at his daughter. Then at the clock on the wall.
He had been the hunter. Now he was the prey. And the trap had closed in the one place he could not afford to lose.
Five minutes. Three hundred seconds. Time, which had once felt endless, shrank to a single heartbeat.
The choice Roach offered wasn’t a choice at all. Stay and fight here, in a hospital hallway, and Katie dies. Maybe he could take one man down, maybe two, but they’d still get to her room.
And he would die knowing his last act had gotten his own daughter killed. No. That wasn’t an option. The only chance—thin, foolish, almost invisible—was to go.
Buy her time. Even a few hours. He looked at Katie one last time.
He didn’t kiss her. Didn’t stroke her hair. He just fixed her face in his memory.
That was his goodbye. He turned and walked out at a fast, steady pace. The phone vibrated again in his pocket.
He knew who it was. The man who had helped him find the three. “I’m done,” Alex said before the other man could speak. “Burn it all down. From here on, I’m on my own. Goodbye.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He ended the call, pulled the battery and SIM from the phone, and dropped them in a trash can by the hospital entrance. Every bridge was gone. He was alone.
He got into the car. His hands on the wheel were steady. He entered the address into the GPS and drove.
He didn’t speed. He drove like a law-abiding citizen while his mind, trained by years of surviving bad situations, worked at full tilt. He analyzed.
Roach didn’t want him dead right away. He had said that plainly. He wanted something else.
He had called it a reckoning. So Alex wouldn’t be shot at the door. There would be a conversation. A game.
And in that game he had to find the weak point. Everybody has one, no matter how powerful they think they are. The address led him to the edge of town, into a dead industrial district.
Rusting factory frames, broken windows, railroad tracks swallowed by weeds. A place where screams disappeared into the wind. He stopped at the gate of the warehouse.
The gate stood partly open, like the mouth of a predator. He got out, left the keys in the ignition, took a deep breath of cold air that smelled like metal dust, and walked inside. The space was huge, hollow, dim.
The ceiling disappeared into shadow, chains and rusted beams hanging overhead. In the middle of that concrete cathedral stood a single table covered in green felt. Behind it sat Roach, a short gray-haired man in a perfectly tailored suit, looking as out of place there as a diamond in a junkyard…
