Mack covered the last ten meters at a dead sprint. He arrived with his weapon up and his voice carrying the authority of a man who had ended confrontations on four continents. “Don’t move.”
Eric froze. His chest was heaving, his face contorted with rage and fear. He looked up at Mack.
Mack sucked in air and stared back. Two men connected by the same dead Marine, the same lie, the same grief channeled in different directions.
“David Morrison was my friend, too,” Mack told him. “He was my spotter for six months. He ate peanut butter straight from the jar and could identify birds by their calls. And he died because Blake lied.” He glanced at Blake, still pinning Eric in the snow. “Tell him.”
Blake was breathing hard. He was silent for a long moment, glancing back toward the screaming sirens growing closer.
Blake’s voice was raw. “Mack didn’t get David killed. I did. I broke position, I drew fire, and David died covering my mistake.”
Eric stopped struggling. “What? But you said…”
Blake rolled off him and forced him to his feet. “I lied, okay?”
Mack secured the rifle and stepped back. Through the trees, he could see the convoy coming up the access road—Garrett’s black SUV in the lead, CB’s vehicle behind it, and the unmistakable silhouettes of federal vehicles bringing up the rear. “Time to finish this.”
They came down the ridge together. Mack first, weapon holstered. Blake behind him, hands visible. Eric, between them, limping slightly, his face carefully blank.
Garrett jumped out of his vehicle, weapon drawn, eyes sweeping the truck on the tarmac, the plane, the hangar, the three men emerging from the tree line. “Hawk. Report!”
Mack staggered, straightened. “Target neutralized. Eric Edwards, alive, rifle secured. Blake Bennett cooperated in the takedown.”
Claire was out of the federal vehicle, Hendricks racing to catch up. They moved toward Blake and Eric with the practiced coordination of agents executing an arrest. Both men were handcuffed and read their rights.
Blake went quietly. He looked at Mack once as they put him in the federal vehicle. Mack held his gaze. No nod. No gesture of forgiveness.
Forgiveness was a conversation for another day—maybe a day that would come, maybe one that wouldn’t.
Blake looked away first, his pitiful gaze going to Alyssa. She stood unmoving, watching him as he was guided into the backseat of the police cruiser. A tear slipped down her cheek as the door closed.
Claire approached Mack, her gaze taking in the blood on his temple, the way he held his right arm against his body, the thousand-yard stare that came with a concussion and adrenaline crash. “You need a hospital,” she said.
“I need five minutes.”
She studied him, glanced at Alyssa, then nodded and stepped aside.
Garrett walked beside him for a few yards, probably to acess whether he could make it. Alyssa stood beside Blake’s truck, exactly where he’d told her to stay. Her arms were wrapped around herself, her hair loose around her shoulders, her red-rimmed eyes fixed on him across sixty feet of open ground.
“Go,” Garrett said and peeled off.
Mack walked past the Cessna. His legs were unsteady. His vision was doing the thing again—splitting, doubling, refusing to cooperate. He didn’t care.
She started walking toward him, then ran—and she hit him hard enough that he staggered a step, her arms around his neck, her face buried against his shoulder. Her whole body shook with the force of everything she’d been holding in.
He wrapped his arms around her. His body screamed, every insult his body had absorbed in the last hour protesting at once. He held on anyway. Held her the way he’d held her on the dock at Flathead Lake, the way he’d held her in the safehouse, the way he would hold her for every day he had left, however many that turned out to be.
“I’m here,” he said. “It’s over.”
She pulled back and searched his face. She touched his jaw with trembling fingers. “You came for me,” she said as if it were a miracle. As if there had been any other possible outcome.
“Always.”
She kissed him. She kissed him, and he kissed her back. For one perfect moment, the world was exactly the right size—just big enough for the two of them and the future they’d fought through hell to earn.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Wherever that is for us.”
Home. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”