Chapter 8: The Confrontation
The door ricocheted off the wall as I stepped into the room, my shoulders squared and my eyes locked dead on Elena. She stood beside a scarred metal desk, a silver cigarette case half-open in her manicured hand. Her dark raincoat was unbuttoned, revealing a sharp, tailored gray suit beneath it. For a fraction of a second, surprise flickered in her cold blue eyes, but she masked it almost instantly with a thin, mocking smile.
"Well, Daniel," she said, her voice dripping with an icy composure that could freeze water. "You always did know how to make an entrance. Though I expected you to bring more than just your bare hands."
A heavy-set man standing near the broken window stepped forward, his hand dropping toward a heavy revolver tucked inside his belt. I didn't give him the chance to clear leather. I closed the gap between us in a flash, ducking inside his reach, driving the heel of my palm hard up beneath his chin. His head snapped back with a wet thud, and he collapsed heavily against the filing cabinet before sliding bonelessly onto the dusty floorboards.
Elena didn't flinch. She snapped her cigarette case shut with a sharp click and tossed it onto the metal desk.
"You think knocking out a hired hand settles five years of debt?" she asked, stepping slowly around the corner of the desk. "You took the ledger, Daniel. You took the names, the bank routing numbers, the entire foundation of everything we built. You think you can just play daddy in a sleepy western town and pretend it never happened?"
"I didn't take your money, Elena," I said, my voice dropping an octave, steady and threatening. "I took my life back. And if you ever touch my son again, you won't have to worry about a ledger, because there won't be enough left of you to audit."
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She stared at me, searching my face for the hesitation that used to be there, the restraint that kept me from going too far when we worked the northern routes together. She found nothing. Just cold, hard resolve.
"The ledger isn't here," Elena said quietly, her bravado faltering just a fraction as she stepped back. "If you want the complete list of everyone tied to this operation—including the men currently wearing badges in your little town—you're going to have to look higher up."
