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Part 7: The Final Play

I backed away, pressing my spine against the steel door. “If you kill me, Griffin Cole will send the files to the FBI.”

“Mr. Cole is currently unconscious in the trunk of my car,” Graves chuckled. “There are no heroes coming, Brynn. It ends tonight.”

“Drop the weapon, Roland!”

Graves spun around.

Dane stood at the end of the hallway, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound in his shoulder, holding Mercer’s stolen pistol aimed directly at Graves’s chest.

“You really thought you could play me forever, Roland?” Dane spat, coughing up blood. “I’m done being your puppet.”

“You’re nothing but a street rat I dressed in a suit, Dane,” Graves mocked, though he didn’t lower his gun. “You pull that trigger, my men will shred you.”

“Brynn, run!” Dane roared.

Dane opened fire. The hallway erupted into a deafening, chaotic shootout. I didn’t wait. I scrambled down the emergency fire escape stairs, my heart pounding in my throat.

I burst out the back doors of the sanatorium into the freezing, rain-soaked forest. I ran blindly through the pines, desperate to reach the access road.

I heard footsteps crunching heavily in the mud behind me.

I tripped over an exposed root, sprawling into the dirt. I rolled over, bracing myself for the impact of a bullet.

It was Graves. He was bleeding from a graze on his cheek, his eyes wide with psychotic fury.

“You ruined a fifty-million-dollar operation!” Graves screamed, aiming his gun directly at my head.

“No!”

A frail, haunting voice broke the silence of the woods.

Arthur Locke, who had somehow wandered out of Griffin’s van in his confusion, stumbled out from the tree line. In a final, desperate moment of absolute clarity, the dementia-riddled father threw his fragile body directly in front of me just as Graves pulled the trigger.

The gunshot echoed through the trees.

Arthur slumped backward, collapsing into my arms, blood blooming across his chest.

“Dad!” I screamed, catching his weight, sobbing hysterically.

Graves smirked, aiming his gun again to finish the job.

But the piercing wail of a dozen police sirens suddenly shattered the night. Blue and red lights flooded the forest.

Griffin hadn’t just crashed his van into the gate. He had triggered a dead-man’s switch on his laptop, sending a massive, encrypted data dump to the State Bureau of Investigation—bypassing Graves’s corrupt local precinct entirely.

State Troopers swarmed the woods, tackling Graves to the mud and stripping him of his weapon.

I sat in the dirt, rocking Arthur’s lifeless body, weeping as the flashing lights washed over us. He had slipped me the ledger to save my life. And in the end, he paid for my survival with his own.

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