Chapter 395: Strike First and Silence Them

The gunshot made my heart stop.

My legs nearly gave out beneath me. A bullet had torn through the man’s right arm the one holding the gun and standing as close as I was, I couldn’t avoid the blood that hit my face. He hadn’t expected Jeffrey to pull the trigger that fast or that cleanly. The gun slipped from his fingers, and whatever focus he’d had on me vanished as his attention snapped fully to Jeffrey.

Which left me directly in front of a man who had probably climbed out of more dangerous situations than I could imagine.

His fist came at me massive, fast, aimed at my face and one absurd thought cut through the panic: Am I about to look like a cartoon character? That’s when it really hit me how useless a few days of self-defense classes were when the person swinging at you had spent years doing things that left calluses on their knuckles.

Then a figure came through the door like a storm.

Theo caught the man’s arm mid-swing, pivoted, and drove him hard into the floor with a throw that left no room for argument. He didn’t pause his fist came down once, twice, steady and deliberate, like he was working through a task rather than a fight. The sound of each hit was dull and rhythmic.

I exhaled. “Theo. You never disappoint.”

Lewis appeared right behind him and pulled me into his arms in one smooth motion. His thumb moved across my cheek, brushing away the blood. “Scared?”

“A little,” I said honestly.

Scared wasn’t quite the right word, though. The more I stood there watching Theo work, the more the fear shifted into something sharper. This had been a setup. A trap, deliberately laid, and not a single person had thought to mention it to me before I walked straight into the middle of it.

Jeffrey hadn’t aimed for the man’s heart. He’d wanted him alive. And Lewis and Theo had appeared at exactly the right moment which meant they’d known, or at least suspected, that something like this was coming. I had been the only one in the room operating completely blind.

Lewis calmly pulled a wet wipe from his pocket and cleaned his hands. When he looked up and saw my expression, he understood immediately. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d come to the Hales today. I assumed you’d still be with the others for a while.”

It was a reasonable explanation. It still annoyed me. But I couldn’t hold onto it, not really. “Fine. You’re forgiven.”

He reached up and ruffled my hair gently. “My Elena caught on to him before anyone else did. That’s not nothing.”

“You’re lucky she did,” I muttered.

He pinched my cheek lightly. “Yeah. You did good.”

Meanwhile, Theo was still going, methodical and unhurried, while Lewis stood there making eyes at me. Hugo had moved to Jeffrey’s side with a glass of water, and the two of them watched the scene from a comfortable distance like it was something mildly interesting on television.

Once Theo had the man fully incapacitated, he reached down, picked up the fruit knife I’d dropped earlier, pressed the man’s hands together, and drove the blade straight through both of them, pinning them like a skewer through meat. I watched it happen and felt nothing but a quiet appreciation for his efficiency. That surprised me a little not what he’d done, but how calm I’d been watching it. There was a time that would have made me look away. Now I just noted it and moved on.

The man didn’t make a sound. Whatever he was, he was trained deep.

Jeffrey stepped forward and tapped his cane against the man’s head. “Take him somewhere and get what he knows.”

Theo pulled a small black box from his jacket, secured it to the man’s wrist, and dragged him out of the room without ceremony. I stared after them.

“What was that box?” I asked.

“Chip detonation blocker,” Lewis said simply.

Jeffrey looked down at the blood soaking into the carpet and frowned. “Clean this up. Quickly.” He glanced at me. “We don’t want Riley frightened.”

I thought about pointing out that my tolerance for exactly this kind of situation had grown considerably over the past year, but I let it go. Hugo nodded and got to work replacing the carpet immediately.

I crouched down beside Jeffrey’s chair. “Dad. You and Carl set a trap and didn’t tell me a single thing about it?”

Jeffrey smiled, and it was the kind of smile that had memory in it. “I never imagined the little girl who used to go pale at the sight of a caterpillar would become someone like this.”

He wasn’t wrong about who I used to be. I had been sheltered, carefully kept, protected from everything that had edges. The worst night of my previous life had been the night Silas killed me, and I’d never seen it coming. But since coming back, I had watched people die. I had stood at the edge of things that couldn’t be undone. The Blackwells’ revenge had been soaked in blood from beginning to end. Of course I had changed. How could I not have?

I was faster now, more careful, always reading the room twice before I relaxed in it. By ordinary standards, maybe that was a lot of growth. But compared to the people I was up against people who had spent decades planning, who had built entire operations on patience and brutality I was still learning how to walk.

“I noticed the calluses,” I said, keeping my voice even. “The placement was wrong for a surgeon. Someone who grips a gun regularly builds up that kind of wear on the knuckles, the thumb, the heel of the hand. His skin was too dark for someone who worked indoors. His posture was wrong. Everything about him said he wasn’t a doctor.” I paused. “So I used the knife to try to create an opening. I underestimated how fast he was. If you hadn’t fired when you did, it could have gone badly.”

Jeffrey looked at me with open pride. “You’ve grown up. Don’t be hard on yourself. You did well.”

I leaned forward. “Did you and Carl suspect he was coming?”

“Over the past few days, I picked up enough information to see what they were planning,” Jeffrey said. “He’s getting desperate. They’ve been at this for too long and it’s not going the way they intended, so he’s taking risks starting with me, then working through the Hales one by one.” His expression darkened, settling into something that had nothing warm left in it. “They assumed I’d written Lewis off. He spent most of his time abroad. I poured my attention into Adam and his side of things. To them, Lewis was a cripple they didn’t need to worry about. Sheila failed at her task, so Wisteria took over working on Julian, trying to secure a legitimate claim on the Hale inheritance from the inside. Now Silas is dead, Julian is ill, and I’ve transferred everything to Lewis. They want me gone before I can formalize a will. If the twins can step forward in the chaos, they can fight for the inheritance through legal channels. Even if they can’t take it all, they’d walk away with most of it.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said flatly. “What kind of people do this? What kind of people are they?”

They had built an operation around organ trafficking, manipulation, murder, and decades of calculated patience and all of it so they could take more than they already had. By now they had to be well into their seventies. Still grasping. Still scheming.

Jeffrey shook his head slowly. “People like that are never satisfied. It doesn’t matter how much they accumulate. They always want what someone else built.”

I turned to Lewis. “Does that make you their next target?”

“Most likely,” he said. “The heir is known now, and so is the history. That makes me the obvious next step.”

“But the plan is exposed,” Jeffrey added. “And they’ve lost the element of surprise. Everything that worked before worked because we didn’t see it coming. Now they’ll hesitate. Once we find out where they’re operating from, we move on all of them at once.”

I went still.

The Blackwells. They were already digging into the organization following the same thread I had been pulling on. But they didn’t know what I now knew. They didn’t know the Commander and his wife were at the center of it. And to people like that, the Blackwells had just become a liability. They weren’t useful anymore. Worse they were a loose end that could talk.

“Carl.” I straightened. “The Blackwells are in danger. They don’t know the threat is inside the organization. To the Commander and his wife, they’ve already served their purpose. And if there’s any chance the Blackwells could lead someone back to them ” I looked at him directly. “They’ll move first. They’ll silence them before anyone gets the chance to make that connection.”

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