His confidence was ridiculous. It made the hair on the back of my neck lift—the kind of arrogance that forgets what happens when the hunted learn to fight back.
“Get him,” Carter snarled from my left. Every syllable was a splinter of ice. He moved like a shadow peeled from stone, closing on Redwood with the rest of us fanning out to cut escape.
Redwood’s smile thinned. He took a step backward, andthe room detonated into motion. A man behind Redwood lunged for a hidden panel; Gideon’s boot met his jaw. Cyclone folded another attacker like origami. I fired again, once, twice, until the immediate threat went limp at our feet.
Redwood didn’t raise a weapon. He watched us with those pale, amused eyes, as if this were a sideshow and we were quaint entertainers.
“Carter,” he said, turning his head slowly. “You are…persistent.”
“Call it stubbornness,” Carter answered, voice flat. He had Harriet’s old stance now—i.e., the one that said he would not give ground. His rifle was steady. My heart felt like it might burst from the weight of wanting him to be safe and wanting him to understand how much of me depended on him being like this—alive and terrible.
Redwood laughed then—no sound of amusement, just release. “You should kill me,” he said to me, suddenly intimate. “You should let the world be finished. It would be so tidy.”
I wanted to. I wanted to watch his face go slack, to feel the hot satisfaction of one life answered by another. My finger tightened on the trigger by instinct, the old animal reasoning louder than law.
“You don’t get to be the judge,” Carter said, and it cracked like a whip.
Redwood’s gaze slid to Carter. “How noble.” He took a step back, and then another, looking as if he were counting the seconds until something happened he found entertaining.
That’s when the console behind him lit up—screens that had been black flooded with images: faces I knew in a blur, footage of girls led down hallways, a map with pins, dates, payments flowing like streams. Coordinates blinked red. Ifelt sick—my stomach folding into itself—and then rage rose like heat.
“You bastard,” I breathed. The wall of monitors had been his cathedral. He’d watched and catalogued and profited. He’d archived pain the way some people collected stamps.
Redwood lifted his hands placatingly. “You’ll hand me over to people who will make a show of me,” he said. “Or perhaps they’ll cut me open for information. Neither is justice. Justice is rarer than you think, Ms. Harper.”
“Justice is what we make it.” My voice didn’t shake. Maybe terror had stripped me clean; maybe I’d been hollowed out to make room for purpose. I stepped forward, the rage carrying me as if I were on rails. Carter’s hand tightened on my shoulder like a tether.
There was movement—quick, desperate. A guard darted from the shadows with a knife. I reacted before I thought, dropping my shoulder and driving my rifle butt into his face. He went down, teeth cracking on metal. Carter slammed into Redwood with a momentum that buckled him, and for a heart-stopping second, Redwood’s face hit the cement, and I saw the human beneath the veneer: a face with a momentary flash of fear, a pulse that would be easy to kill.
Carter had him pinned against the console, cuffing one hand to the other with precise, furious fingers. “You’re done,” Carter said into Redwood’s ear—not a statement, the way you might tell someone the weather, but a verdict made heavy with history.
Redwood’s eyes locked on mine. For a drunken second I thought I saw something that might be remorse—tiny, like a reflection—but then he straightened his mouth into that same flat smile.
“You will not erase me,” he whispered.
“You don’t get to choose that.” I found the words before I found their softness. I wanted to shove them down histhroat, to make him swallow every lie he’d ever told. Instead I leaned close enough to see the papers he’d used—names, dates—and I let the cameras take me in. I wanted every face on those screens to have a witness when he was moved to the courthouse, when he was processed, and when his crimes were transformed into ink, footage, and testimony.
The team moved like a well-oiled machine. River and Faron swept the rest of the room; Cyclone kicked open a side door to check the archive; Gideon barked orders in a voice that still caught on the scar.
Somewhere down the hall, a radio chirped that backup was en route. The sound should have been balm; instead it felt like the beginning of paperwork. Justice moved slowly in offices and courts; revenge could move in a heartbeat. I’d almost been a heartbeat away from it.
Carter slid the cuffs home and stood, breathing hard. He looked at me then, and something raw and unadorned passed between us—relief, fury, exhaustion, and that private, dangerous warmth that lived in the space beside him.
“You okay?” he asked, voice small for the first time in hours.
I wanted to laugh, to sob, to crawl into the hollow of his chest and stay. “I will be,” I managed. “When he's in a cell that doesn’t have cameras.”
Redwood, on his knees and still smarting, spat blood into the dust. “You think you’ve won,” he said, and even his voice had shrunk. “There are others.”
“We’ll find them,” Carter said. He sounded like he didn’t mean to make a promise—and yet that’s the kind of vow he kept. “We always do.”
They moved him out, the team surrounding him like the shoulders of a living wall. The room was full of the low chatter of radios and the rattle of boots, the clink of restraints. My hands trembled as I wiped blood and grit frommy rifle, and a thought floated up unexpectedly and simply: we had done it. We had taken the monster out of his lair.
But the monitors still glowed with faces. The files were still there. The work had only begun.
I let myself breathe, long and shuddering. Carter’s hand found my wrist and squeezed—gentle, grounding. Gideon clapped him on the back with a grunt that felt like an apology and a celebration at once.
Outside, sirens began to wail closer. For the first time in a long time, I let the weight of everything I’d carried begin to loosen, fraction by fraction.
