Unwanted Blood (Harper) novel Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Ryder’s POV

3:00 am. Sky still black.

I checked the gear one last time on the tailgate: binoculars, encrypted radio, compact first-aid kit. Everything accounted for.

Colton was in the passenger seat, scrolling through the route on his phone, the blue light reflecting off his face. Adrian sat in the back. Quiet. The hand-drawn floor plan was spread across his knees, weighted down by one hand. The other hand rested against his bandaged arm. He hadn’ t said a word since we left the house.

The city fell away behind us. Streetlights thinned, then stopped.

“Third intersection,” Adrian said from the back seat. His voice was calm, not like a person leading two armed men toward his father’s bolthole. “Turn right. The dirt road starts just before the streetlights end.”

I turned. The sedan dropped onto gravel, tyres crunching loud in the quiet.

We drove for another ten minutes in silence. Then Adrian leaned forward. “Stop here.”

I pulled over. The treeline was twenty metres ahead-a wall of coastal pine and fir, dense enough

to swallow headlights. Beyond it, invisible in the dark, was the facility’s back wall.

“Through the trees,” Adrian said. “There’s an iron gate. You have to get it open within two minutes, or you’ll be discovered.”

I nodded, turned and looked at him through the rearview mirror.

“You stay here,” I said. “If we’re not back in forty minutes, you drive. Don’t wait us.

He held my gaze for a second. Then he nodded.

We went in on foot.

”

The forest floor was damp-needle-covered, uneven, the kind of terrain that punishes anyone not watching their footing. Colton moved fast and light. I stayed half a step behind, scanning the tree line ahead.

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11:43

Chapter 79

288 Vouchers

The iron gate was exactly where Adrian said it would be. Set into a low stone wall, pitted with rust, the padlock hanging loose on a chain that had surrendered to salt air years ago.

Colton didn’t need two minutes. He had it open in 40 seconds.

We slipped through.

The facility’s back wall was thirty metres ahead, concrete, windowless. We hugged it and moved along the edge, our boots pressing into the wet grass between the wall and the tree line. The air smelled like salt and diesel.

Above us, a second-floor window leaked light.

I stopped and pressed my back against the wall. Colton crouched beside me and raised the binoculars.

He adjusted the focus. Held them steady. Seconds passed.

Then he lowered them and looked at me. He didn’t need to speak. He raised two fingers and pointed up.

I took the binoculars and looked.

The window was maybe twenty metres away and one floor up. Through the gap in the curtains, I could see a dim room, a bed pushed against the far wall. And there is figure between the bed and the window.

He was seated, motionless. A blanket across his legs.

Dylan Westbrook.

No doubt. The profile was unmistakable even at this distance. The sharp line of the nose. The way his head tilted slightly forward-the posture of a man whose neck muscles were too weak to hold it upright for long.

I lowered the binoculars and looked at Colton. He gave me a tight nod.

Confirmed.

I should have felt relief. Instead, something in my gut twisted.

I looked back up at the window. The curtains were half-drawn, just enough to let a silhouette show through. The light in the room was positioned so that anyone looking from the treeline would see exactly what we’d just seen.

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11:43

Chapter 79

288 Vouchers

Dylan was paranoid Cautious. The kind of man who’d spent decades making sure nothing about him was visible to anyone who didn’t have a reason to see it

He wasn’t going to leave himself exposed in a half-lit window at two in the morning.

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