I look around. Gaps on the bookshelves. Dust outlines where boxes have been. Open safe, hollow and scraped clean.
“John pulled almost everything.”
Beau glances over. “Which means?”
“He knew we were coming.”
He has prepared for this moment. We tear through the room anyway. Two filing cabinets are empty. The third is too heavy.
Beau frowns. “That drawer’s wrong.”
“Move.”
He steps aside, and I yank the drawer out so hard it hits the ground. A false bottom pops loose.
Underneath the drawer sits a thick black leather binder with worn edges and creased leather that looks like it has been handled for years. The symbol burned into the center of the cover makes something heavy drop straight into my stomach the second I see it. A ring of horns wrapped around a faceless silhouette.
I know that symbol the moment my eyes land on it.
My father had it tattooed across his chest, right over his heart. I remember seeing it when I was a kid while he stood in the bathroom mirror shaving. When I asked him what it meant, he pulled his shirt back down and told me to mind my own business.
Luke had the same one inked along his ribs.
At the time I figured it was some stupid matching tattoo. Luke never explained it when I asked him about it.
He always avoided the question.
A memory from the basement pushes forward. My father had Luke pinned against the concrete wall by the collar, demanding to know if he had talked. I thought he was about to kill him. I grabbed a knife and drove it into my father’s side. When he came at me, I picked up the tire iron and swung until he didn’t have a fucking face anymore.
At the time I believed I had just stopped my father from killing Luke.
Standing here now with the binder open in my hands, something finally clicks into place.
My father and Luke had been in The Collective together.
I open the binder.
Photographs fill the pages along with printed lists, coded assignments, and organized entries that read like a ledger built to track violence. Victims are cataloged with dates and locations. Rankings are recorded beside names thatmean something inside this organization. Every page shows the same level of cold structure. This is not chaos or random brutality. This is a system.
This is The Collective’s record. Their playbook. Everything they have done, everything they plan, written down.
And John left it here.
Not by accident.
For me.
My mind moves back through every moment I have spent inside John and Mary’s house, and the pattern is suddenly obvious. The way they watched me when they thought I was not paying attention. The way their conversations sometimes stopped the moment I walked into the room.
They knew exactly who I was the entire time. They knew whose son had been standing in their living room. They knew about my father. They knew what my father and Luke were involved in.
They knew what they were planning to do with Brooke.
Every visit. Every conversation. Every time they looked at me across that house suddenly feels different now that I understand the truth. They have never been surprised by my presence. They have been studying me.
They've been waiting.
My jaw tightens harder while the weight of it settles in completely.
