I turn another page and feel something in my chest twist when I see the next section.
Forum screenshots. Encrypted message threads. Usernames that I recognize immediately.
Luke’s name sits in the conversation logs. Nick’s name appears in multiple threads.
I read through the messages and feel the full weight of what I'm looking at settle into place piece by piece. Luke and Nick had been in The Collective together. They trade ideas with other members about killing methods and targets. They talk about violence the way some people talk about hobbies or art. They debate techniques. They plan meetings. They treat murder like a competition.
Luke didn’t fall into this by accident.
My father had been preparing him for it his entire life.
Every violent lesson. Every twisted expectation. Every moment my father tortured us suddenly makes sense.
And Luke chose this.
That realization sits in my chest.
Every time Luke said people were watching Brooke, I thought he was trying to get under my skin. He was telling the truth. And he had been reporting back.
The Collective has been watching Brooke through him the entire time.
The muscles in my jaw tighten until the pressure starts to ache.
Luke didn’t try to kill me because I locked him in the basement. He tried to kill me because The Collective told him to.
Because somewhere inside this organization my name had already been marked.
Beau flips through another set of papers. I stop when I recognize someone in a photo. A man we know from the hotel.
Connor. The dumb one. The one who split off from our group during the massacre. The one we assumed died.
He is smiling in the photo with a VossTech badge clipped to his shirt.
I exhale once. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
A sinking realization hits. “He wasn’t trapped with us. He was planted.”
I grab the binder and march toward the front door.
Travis scrambles up from the side of the house when he sees me. “What—what did you find? Why do you look like that? Why is the binder so—oh God, did you find something bad?”
I shove the page with Connor’s photo into his hands.
Travis stares. His face goes from confused to horrified to offended. “You mean to tell me that Connor—lazy, asshole, always-stealing-my-energy-drinks Connor—was a plant? He’s not dead? He works for VossTech? And he was part of this murder cult shit?”
“Yup,” I say.
Travis rubs his face hard. “Great. Amazing. Perfect. Now I get to deal with work problems and murder problems at the same time. Fucking Fantastic.”
I walk past him. “We are heading to Silicon Valley.”
Travis groans.
Beau pats him on the shoulder. “I’d drive quickly if I were you.”
Travis whimpers.
And I walk toward the car with the binder under my arm, my pulse thundering.
