Alyssa saw him through the window, and the look on her face?—
He’d remember it for the rest of his life. Relief so deep it was almost pain. Love so naked it made his chest crack open. And underneath both, a fierce, burning pride that said, I knew you were coming.
Blake tried to step in front of him. Mack leveled him with one punch.
Blake went down, and Mack opened the door. Alyssa fell into him—arms around his neck, face buried against his shoulder, her body shaking with the force of holding herself together.
“I’m here,” he said, his arm around her. “I’ve got you.”
She pulled back. Her eyes were red-rimmed and blazing. “He threatened to drug me if I didn’t cooperate. To knock me out with Ketamine.”
The words hit like a round to the chest.
Blake staggered to his feet, swaying slightly, his hand on his jaw. Mack looked at Blake over Alyssa’s head, and whatever Blake saw in Mack’s expression made the blood drain from his face.
“I didn’t do it,” Blake said. “I wouldn’t?—”
“You threatened your sister with a sedative.” Mack’s voice was low, steady, and carrying enough cold fury to frost the air between them. “You rammed my vehicle, and could have caused her severe injuries. You kidnapped her.”
He worked his jaw, scowling. “I was trying?—”
“To save yourself. The way you always do.”
Alyssa stepped to Mack’s side. Shoulder to shoulder.
Blake looked at them and his face collapsed. Something structural, foundational. Like watching a building settle as its supports gave way.
“She told me,” Blake said, his voice thin, “that she knows.” He looked at Alyssa, then away, as if the sight of her was too much. “She said she’s scared of me.”
Mack said nothing, pulling Alyssa closer to his side.
Blake’s hands were trembling, the shaking of a man whose internal architecture was failing, whose load-bearing walls were cracking under a weight they were never designed to carry. “I lied.” His voice broke on the word. “About Morrison. About Syria. About the mission.”
He stared at Mack now, no performance left. Just a man standing on a tarmac in the Montana mountains with the wreckage of his choices piled around him like debris. “David died because I broke position. Because I panicked and opened fire, and he moved to cover me.” He stopped. His face contorted—grief or shame or both, tangled together so tightly that even Alyssa’s artist’s eye probably couldn’t have separated them. “I blamed you. I looked you in the eye, and I blamed you.”
Mack had imagined this moment a hundred times. In the dark, alone, in the months after he was back home, when the anger was a living thing that paced the inside of his skull. He’d pictured Blake broken. Pictured himself vindicated—standing tall while the liar knelt and the truth finally rang louder than the lie. He’d rehearsed what he’d say. Sharpened the words into weapons.
He didn’t use any of them now.
Because standing here, looking at Blake Bennett’s ruined face, Mack didn’t feel vindication. Didn’t feel satisfaction or justice or even anger.
He felt tired. A deep, bone-level exhaustion that had nothing to do with the concussion or the run, and everything to do with the simple, devastating weight of being right about something terrible for two years and having it finally confirmed.
Morrison was still dead. Mack’s career was still gone. The two years of silence, of Alyssa believing the lie, of building walls and pretending they were enough—none of that changed because Blake was confessing.
Blake’s eyes shifted. Not to Alyssa. Not to Mack. Past them, over Mack’s shoulder, toward the eastern ridge. The grief vanished, replaced by something Mack recognized instantly because he’d worn it himself—the sharp, electric focus of someone who has just identified a lethal threat. “I just saw a glint off something. Brief, there and gone.”
Mack glanced over his shoulder, and Blake lunged forward into them. Both hands hit Mack’s chest, driving him and Alyssa backward, his body colliding with them and taking all three of them to the ground. “DOWN!”
The crack of the rifle split the world open.
The bullet passed through the space where Mack’s chest had been a half-second before. It punched through the passenger-side window, shattering it.
Mack landed on his back, Alyssa’s arms and legs tangled with his. Blake hit the ground on the other side of her.
The tarmac was cold and hard. The echo of the shot rolled across the airstrip and died against the mountains.
Mack’s training ignited. He dragged Alyssa behind the truck’s rear end. Blake scrambled after them.