Chapter 4 - The Betrayal UnmaskedTristan’s hand drifted toward his jacket pocket, but he didn't pull out the phone. Instead, a dark, dangerous smile slowly spread across his face—the terrified panic melting away into something cold and unrecognizable.
"You really think it was that easy, brother?" Tristan laughed, a dry, hollow sound. "You think I spent ten years in your shadow, taking your orders, cleaning up your blood, without building my own insurance policy?"
With a flick of his wrist, Tristan raised his pistol—not at Holly, but straight at Weston’s chest.
"Tristan," Weston warned, his eyes narrowing into slits. "You don't want to cross this line."
"I crossed it three years ago when you put that woman in the car instead of me!" Tristan shouted, his voice cracking with years of suppressed resentment and fury. "You thought you were invincible, Weston. You thought the empire belonged to you by divine right. But you were weak. You got soft because of a wife and a child. Somebody had to make sure the Hargrove name survived—even if it meant pruning the dead weight."
Holly watched the exchange with detached amusement, leaning casually against the bookshelf as if she were watching a late-night movie.
"Family drama," she murmured, pulling a small silver chewing gum packet from her pocket and sliding a piece into her mouth. "Always so predictable."
"Shut up!" Tristan snapped at her, keeping his gun locked on Weston. "As for you, Ms. Bennett... you should have stayed in Seattle. You thought you could come here and play avenging angel for your dead brother? Project Chimera was a joint venture, and your brother sold us out first. We just returned the favor."
Holly’s casual demeanor vanished instantly.
The gum stopped moving in her mouth. The arctic calm in her eyes shattered, replaced by a blinding, murderous rage that made Weston instinctively step back. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
"You killed David," Holly whispered, her voice trembling not with fear, but with a terrifying, suppressed fury.
"He knew too much about the detonators," Tristan sneered. "Just like you're about to—"
Bang!
A deafening gunshot echoed through the library, but the bullet didn't come from Tristan’s gun.
The heavy glass window behind Tristan exploded inward in a shower of diamond-like shards. A high-caliber round pierced the night air, striking Tristan’s pistol right out of his hand with brutal precision, sending the weapon spinning across the floor in a cloud of shattered plastic and steel.
May you like
Tristan shrieked, clutching his bleeding, mangled fingers.
From the dark tree line outside the estate, three hundred yards away across the lake, a laser sight blinked red against the smoke.
