The rest. I gestured at the flames. They burn with your name. I walked out as the fire from the generator shed crawled up the siding of the cabin. Snow fell harder now, blanketing the forest in silent white. Behind me, the Empire of Victor Wolf finally cracked under its own weight. The only sound left was the wind and the faint whimper of fire eating wood.
I walked through the trees without looking back. The storm carried the smoke into the night. And somewhere beyond the hills, my son slept safe, waiting for a father with blood on his hands to find peace someday. But peace had a price, and dawn hadn’t yet come. Snow stung my face as I stepped into the clearing.
The cabin behind me was fully swallowed in orange flame. a collapsing monument to Victor’s Empire. The heat pressed against my back, and somewhere inside that inferno, I could still hear them, groaning, screaming, breaking, the echoes of wolves dying in their den. But one escaped, “Ian!” I saw his footprints leading into the woods, erratic and wide apart, the trail of a man running blind through fear and cold.
