Page 1 of Saint’s Revenge

Chapter 1 - Saint

My phone vibrates at 6:04 AM, dragging me out of a restless sleep I barely remember falling into.

Unknown number. Could be anyone. Could be nothing, but I answer it anyway because I've learned the hard way that ignoring a call at dawn never ends well.

"Yeah."

Silence. Then shallow breathing, fast, like someone's been running or is trying very hard not to make a sound.

"Lucas."

My real name. Not Saint. Not the road name I've worn for three years like armor against the person I used to be.

Lucas.

Five years. Five full years since I've heard that voice, and my brain still recognizes it immediately, synapses firing in patterns I thought I'd successfully rewired. My hand tightens around the phone hard enough that the case creaks.

"Riley."

Her exhale is shaky. Relief, maybe. Or fear. Hard to tell over a phone line when I haven't seen her face in half a decade.

"I don't have long," she says, words tumbling out fast and quiet. "I'm in my car. I had to drive out to get enough distance to call you. Lucas, I need to tell you where Daniel is."

Daniel. Not Demon. She still calls him by his real name, and that tells me more than I want to know about the last five years of her life.

"Why?" I keep my voice flat, the tone I used to use with patients who were bleeding out and needed me calm. "Why now?"

"Because it needs to end." She's whispering, and I can hear the tremor underneath it, something raw and broken that makes my chest tighten. "Because I should have done this a long time ago, and I didn't, and that's on me. Because he's not… He's not the person we knew anymore, Lucas. He hasn't been for years, and I've been lying to myself about it, and I can't anymore."

There's a crack in her voice on the last word. Like she's been holding this together by sheer force of will and the edges are finally giving way. My jaw aches. I'm clenching it so hard my teeth might crack. "Where is he?"

"Oakridge. Industrial area. The old Brennan Steel warehouse."

The warehouse.

The place the three of us used to spend summers when we were teenagers, breaking in through the rusted side door and climbing to the roof to smoke cigarettes stolen from my mother's purse. The place that smelled like rust and old grease and felt safer than either of our actual homes.

The place where Daniel killed someone for the first time.

I was there. Watched it happen. Watched my brother cross a line I knew neither of us could come back from and felt something fundamental break between us in real time.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure." Her voice is steadier now, like saying it out loud has given her something solid to hold onto. "He moved us here two weeks ago. Me and the guys who are still loyal. Fifteen of them total, Lucas. That's all that's left. Everyone else is dead or gone or too smart to stay."

Us. She said us. She's living there. She's living in the warehouse with my brother and fifteen Vipers, and she just called to give me their location.

"Riley—"

"He's spiraling," she continues, and now I can hear everything: the exhaustion, the guilt, the weight of years spent watching someone destroy themselves and everyone around them. "He killed three of his own men last month for suggesting they back down. He's not sleeping. He doesn't trust anyone. He's alone up there at the top, Lucas, and he's going to take everyone down with him if someone doesn't stop him."

Something in her voice breaks completely on that last sentence. Not crying. Riley never cried easily, not even when we were kids and things got bad, but something close to it. Something that sounds like grief.

"And you want me to be the one who stops him," I say.

"I want this to end." The words come out ragged. "I want to stop being the person who stood by and let it get this bad. I'm… I'm done, okay? I'm done pretending any of this is salvageable. I'm done pretending he's still in there somewhere. I should have walked away years ago."

Should have. Past tense. Like she knows exactly when she should have left and chose not to.