Keller seemed to read his thoughts. “Your friends are busy. Shaw’s been a thorn in my side for months—I made sure they’d be distracted dealing with her.” He took a step closer, the gunsteady in his hand. “It’s just us now, Wyatt. You, me, and a choice.”
“What choice?”
Keller reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled something out. Metal glinted in the moonlight.
A coin.
He tossed it, and it landed on the concrete floor between them with a soft clink. Wyatt stared at it—a broken chain, a single link shaped like an eye. The symbol Bridget had seen. The symbol that had haunted her for eight years.
“Your father wants you back,” Keller said. “Not dead. Back. You’re his son, his legacy. He’s willing to forgive everything—the running, the hiding, the badge you wear. All of it. Forgotten.”
Wyatt couldn’t look away from the coin. It seemed to pulse in the dim light, drawing his gaze like a wound.
“Pick it up,” Keller said. “Pick it up, and this ends. You walk out of here. Your mother stays safe. Your friends never know what really happened tonight. You go back to your life, and when your father needs something, you provide it. Simple. Clean.”
“And if I don’t?”
Keller’s smile faded. “Then you die here. And tomorrow, your mother has an accident. And the day after that, Detective Harris gets a little too close to traffic. And your friend Kevin—well, he’s been asking dangerous questions. People who ask dangerous questions tend to find dangerous answers.”
The threats landed like blows. Wyatt’s hands curled into fists on the cold concrete.
“You’re a cop,” Keller continued. “You know how this works. You know the system is broken, compromised, rotted from the inside. Your father isn’t the disease—he’s the cure. Order out of chaos. Protection for the people smart enough to accept it.”
“Protection.” Wyatt spat the word. “Is that what you call it? Murder? Intimidation? Destroying lives?”
“I call it survival.” Keller’s voice hardened. “The world is brutal, Wyatt. The only question is whether you’re the one holding the leash or the one wearing the collar. Your father taught me that. He can teach you too.”
Wyatt looked at the coin again.
His whole life, he’d been running from this. From his father’s shadow, from the legacy of violence and corruption that had shaped him before he was old enough to understand what it meant. He’d built a new identity, a new life. He’d worn a badge and tried to be one of the good ones.
And now here he was, on his knees in an abandoned mill, with a gun pointed at his head and a choice that wasn’t really a choice at all.
Pick up the coin, and become what his father always wanted.
Refuse, and watch everyone he loved die.
His hand moved toward the coin.
Stopped.
Moved again.
The metal was cold against his fingertips.
He picked it up.
Keller exhaled—satisfaction, maybe, or relief. “Smart choice. Your father will be?—”
The door exploded inward.
Lucy came through first, a blur of fur and fury, her snarl echoing off the concrete walls. Shadow was right behind her, and then Sam, Jo, Shaw—weapons drawn, voices overlapping.
“FBI! Don’t move!”
“Drop the weapon, Keller!”
“Hands where I can see them!”