Page 78 of Shadow Burn

Katherine screamed. “Jasper!”

“Stay down!” he yelled

Cinder drove his knee up, catching Jasper in the thigh. Jasper grunted but didn’t release him. The two men crashed against the gate, metal rattling hard enough to shake the frame.

Katherine saw the gun angle toward Jasper. She pushed up.

Her head swam. Her wrist burned, useless and hot. The stun gun flashlight lay a few feet away, rainwater pooling around it from the open bottom gap beneath the gate.

She crawled for it.

Cinder twisted. Jasper’s wounded arm slipped for half a second. Katherine grabbed the flashlight.

Jasper threw his weight sideways, dragging Cinder with him. Katherine shoved the flashlight through the bars and jammed it against Cinder’s thigh, thumb hitting the stun switch again.

The charge snapped.

Cinder’s leg buckled. Jasper wrenched the gun from his hand and drove him face-first into the gravel, dropping one knee between Cinder’s shoulder blades.

“Garrett!” Jasper shouted.

Footsteps thundered behind Katherine. She heard the voices of Mack. Sebastian. Maybe Garrett. The world tilted again, and she lowered her forehead to the cold ground.

The camera above the service gate flickered. Green light. The system was coming back. Too late to record the confession. Maybe not too late to record the aftermath.

Jasper tugged Cinder’s hands behind his back. “Who are you?”

Cinder laughed into the gravel, breathless and ugly. “You think this ends with me?”

“No,” Jasper said. “But you’ll wish it did.”

Katherine tried to speak, but her mouth felt full of cotton. “Cin…der,” she forced out.

Jasper looked through the gate at her, and the rage in his face cracked open into fear. “Katherine.”

“I kept it,” she whispered.

He was on his feet in an instant, leaving Cinder to Garrett and Mack. Detective Mallory arrived next. Sebastian came through the interior door behind her and dropped to one knee next to her. Jasper was already at the gate controls, punching in a manual override. The lock released with a heavy clank.

She was aware of him kneeling beside her, of his hand cupping her face, of his voice saying her name. She wanted to tell him she was sorry. That she’d had no choice. That the flame mark mattered. That Vance hadn’t been dirty, not the way they thought. He’d been trapped.

She lifted the archival sleeve with her good hand.

Jasper’s gaze dropped to it.

“The watermark,” she said, forcing the words through the fog. “Flame outline. Handler-retention original. Vance signed it. Upton authorized it. I decoded it. Cinder was active through Caldwell doing wet work. Upton forced Vance to handle him.”

“Jesus,” Sebastian murmured.

Jasper brushed damp hair back from her face. “Stop talking.”

“I need you to know.”

“I know enough for now.”

“No.” She gripped his shirt with her good hand, refusing to let the darkness at the edges of her vision take her before she gave him the piece that mattered. “He said Upton understood necessity. Vance didn’t choose.”

Jasper’s eyes hardened.