Page 105 of Her Unending Horizon

“That night they brought in a kid named Tyler again. I’d fought him at the livestock barn. He had no business being at the first one, let alone the one at the distillery.”

“What about Tyler?” I prompted Zarek when he paused.

Zarek swallowed. “He was just out of the service, must have gone in at eighteen and out at twenty-two. He was from Alabama. Married. His wife Emily was pregnant.”

It was getting hard to breathe when I realized Zarek was talking about him in the past tense.

“The night at the distillery they paired him with a guy who’d been doing this for a while,” Zarek continued. “Tyler shouldn’t have been back in the ring so soon. He took a bad knockout. Real bad.”

I saw it then—the way Zarek’s hands curled slightly, like he was holding onto something invisible.

“They dragged him out,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me check him. Wouldn’t call for help.”

My chest started to ache. “Zarek…”

“The next night,” he went on, voice rough now, “Fletcher and I got called out on a wreck. Single vehicle. Off Highway 441. Old truck. Alabama plates.”

I sucked in a breath. “No.”

“They brought him up under a sheet, but I peeled it back.” Zarek got lost in his memories for a moment, then he continued. “Nobody would ever know that his injuries were received any other way but the crash unless they were really looking for it. And who would be looking?”

For a moment, no one spoke.

I stared at Zarek, my mind scrambling, trying to make the timeline make sense. “But… they said it was an accident. A wreck.”

“They staged it,” Simon said quietly. “That’s one way for them to dispose of a body. Especially if it would raise questions if the man just went missing.”

My heart started to pound.

“They cleaned him up,” Zarek said. “Changed his clothes. Took his bag. Took his money. Put him somewhere he had no reason to be and let gravity do the rest.”

I shook my head, horror blooming too fast to contain. I turned to look at Zarek. “You said if they took him to a hospital, he would have been all right.”

“Probably.”

“So, what, they just waited for him to die, then staged the accident?”

“Or, they might have sent him over the cliff while he was still alive,” Roan said softly.

“But that’s murder.”

“Yes,” Simon said. “It is.”

The word settled over the table like dust after an explosion.

I looked back at Zarek. At the man who had been walking into cages to understand this thing from the inside.

“And this is just the entry level?” I whispered.

Zarek nodded. “Tyler wasn’t even close to the top.”

My hands curled into fists in my lap.

Somewhere, a woman named Emily was waking up to a phone call that would change her life forever.

And Zarek had been standing close enough to feel the ground shift when it happened.

“Why didn’t you go straight to the sheriff?” I asked quietly.