Chapter 16 - The Brotherhood Pact
Julian coughed, spitting a streak of blood onto the hardwood floor, before fixing me with a fierce, burning stare. "I heard the tablet playing on your way in. They have Tessa and the boys?"
"At the old municipal water plant," I said, hastily reloading a spare magazine into my Glock and sliding it into my tactical vest. "Marcus wants the ledger and the asset keys. He’s going to execute them the second I hand the documents over."
Julian pushed himself off the doorframe, rolling his bruised shoulders with a grimace. "Then we don't give him the documents. We give him a war."
I stared at my long-lost twin, seeing the exact same stubborn, unyielding defiance that had kept our family name afloat for generations. The resentment of the past thirty minutes dissolved into an unbreakable alliance of blood.
"You heard what he said on the video," I replied, grabbing a tactical shotgun and tossing it across the room to him. "He thinks you're dead."
"Let him keep thinking that," Julian smirked, catching the shotgun with practiced ease and checking the chamber. "Element of surprise is the only inheritance we actually got from Lorraine."
We didn't waste time talking strategy. We moved with synchronized precision, loading our gear into the back of Julian’s battered, armored pickup truck—a vehicle built to withstand rough desert terrain without digital telemetry.
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As we tore out of the Paradise Valley driveway and sped toward the industrial outskirts of Phoenix, the first pale rays of dawn began to bleed across the eastern horizon, painting the sky the color of a fresh bruise.
The old municipal water plant was a sprawling labyrinth of rusted iron pipes, massive concrete reservoirs, and towering catwalks rising fifty feet above empty drainage basins—a ghost of Arizona's early twentieth-century infrastructure, and the perfect killing floor for a final reckoning.
