Father watched as I shook hands with Todd Lawson, his expression neutral but the tension rolling off of him in waves. I wondered if Lawson could feel it as much as I could.

He knew something was wrong. I guess I couldn’t hide things from my father as well as I could from these lunatics. No one at the ranch had even noticed I was gone. And the alarm never went up for Tucker. He often came and went without telling anyone anything, so it wasn’t unusual for him to leave the ranch without anyone knowing. But it would go up soon enough, and chaos would become king.

I just hoped it held off until after this meeting.

“I’m glad the two of you could come over tonight,” Lawson said. “We’re very close to the Fall Festival, so I thought it would be important to go over the days’ events with the two of you.”

“I brought the ledgers for us to go over,” my father told him. “We managed to stay within our budget, increasing it only ten percent over last year.”

Lawson waved his hand. “The budget is no longer a big concern. What worries me tonight is the rumor that you plan on making a speech?”

My father flashed a worried glance in my direction. “I was hoping to ask the congregation to welcome my son back into the fold properly. That’s all.”

Lawson’s smile was broad and bright. “Well, we can’t deny you that, now can we?”

Lawson gestured for us to follow him through his house toward a room at the very back. We passed through the kitchen where his wife stood at the sink, but she wasn’t washing the dishes that were piled in the greasy water. Her shoulders were shaking, sobs clearly burning through her like exhaust through a car engine. I wanted to offer her some comfort, but Lawson acted as though he didn’t even know she was standing there.

Cold.

We stepped into what turned out to be Lawson’s study. It was a large room, with dark paneling on the walls, and books covering nearly every inch of available shelf space. A man stood at the back of the room, looking out through the sliding glass doors that led to a little porch in the back yard.

“Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Andrew Young.”

Every nerve in my body suddenly stood up and screamed, my heart beating so hard that I thought it might burst out of my chest. I was praying that the camera on my shirt was getting every bit of this, praying that this would be enough to connect him to everything, and we could end this nightmare tonight.

The man turned. He was an older gentleman, a few years older than my father. His hair was graying, and there were bags under his eyes that spoke of a lot of sleepless nights. I searched his features for similarities to Alli’s, but couldn’t quite make the connection. Maybe it was the darkness that seemed to seep from his very soul.

My father stepped forward and shook hands with the man. I wanted to scream for him not to touch him, but I couldn’t. And then it was my turn.

“Matthew,” he said in a smooth, silky voice. “I understand that you have been the one teaching the Guardians how to use their assault rifles.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then we owe you a debt of gratitude.”

I dipped my head, not sure how to respond to that.

“We have great things planned for this town.” Young turned away again, facing the sliding glass doors. “Ever since Todd told me about the trouble you were having in the south side, I found myself imagining what we could do to make this place a good place for people like the two of you to live in. A home where everyone has the same beliefs, and everyone is kind and respectful to one another.”

“Andrew believes that it is possible to create a true utopia on earth.”

“I believe that God always intended for us to return to the Garden of Eden. He just expected us to build it ourselves.”

Todd’s face glowed. “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re making a world where there is no crime, no hatred, no prejudice, because we will all believe the same thing, all live the same way. It will be glorious!”

His excitement made bile rise in my throat.

“It will be glorious,” Young said.

And then he turned and fired a gun, hitting Lawson square in the chest. Lawson’s hands came up and pressed themselves against the wound, his eyes wide with shock.

“Why?”

Young shook his head. “You always thought it was about your damn church. Do you realize that your church is just as pathetic as the Church of Scientology? An imagined religion built on some greedy guy’s need to be famous? Did you really think I would agree to live in a world run by people like you?” he snarled at Lawson. “You had your own daughter slated for execution, for crying out loud!”

Lawson slowly sank to his knees, looking for all the world like a man praying. I stepped back slowly, cautiously, so as not to attract Young’s attention, putting my body in front of my father’s.

“It has nothing to do with religion, does it?”

Young focused on me. “Tucker told me that he didn’t think you’d reconverted. He was convinced that you were still working with Stone and his people.” He snorted. “Security operatives! How my daughter could make so many horrible choices in her life, I will never understand!”

“Then why are you really here?”

He focused on me, his expression calm despite the murder he’d just committed. “I’m here because my daughter is here. I’m here because I’m tired of being Mr. Congresswoman. I’m here because all you idiots are so gullible that you would fall for a sales pitch to buy the Golden Gate Bridge if I should present it in the right light.” He shook his head, his eyes flicking toward Lawson. “I’m here because he was always so fanatical. So easy to manipulate.”

“You’ve bought out all the land around town. You had the church buy a circle of land inside town. Why?”

He tilted his head slightly. “Stone works faster than I gave him credit for.” He shook his head. “That stupid banker and his ledgers. I knew he was going to be trouble.”

“What is the end game here?”

Young laughed. “What makes you think there is an end game? What if chaos was the only purpose?” He came toward me, his gun hanging carelessly from his fingertips. “What if my only desire was to make my daughter’s life so difficult that she would give up and finally come home? What if all I really wanted was to see how far you people would go, how many of you would turn against each other? What if all I wanted was to perform an experiment on all of you and see how it would come together?”

“And what if I thought you were full of shit?”

“Matthew!” my father hissed. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the word I’d used, or because he was frightened of the tone I’d taken. Whichever, it made Young laugh.

“You people are so amusing! It’s like watching rats in a maze. Predictable, but surprising all at the same time.”

“Why don’t you tell me? You can’t possibly allow us to walk out of here, so why not? What do you have to lose?”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Because I want to know why I’m going to die.”

My father clutched my arm, a whimper escaping his lips. Young glanced at him, clearly unimpressed by his fear. But he seemed to find my bravado interesting.

“You want to know the truth?” He studied my face for a long moment. “I was having fun with these people. I liked manipulating them, seeing how far they’d go. And I did want them to harass my daughter, to give her reason to reach out to me. And she did. Her husband”—he said the word with distinct derision—“brought her to see me. The first time in twenty years I set eyes on her when she was aware of it, when she was open to talking to me. And it was the most beautiful thing I’d experienced in a very long time. Made all this worth it.”

“But that’s not why you bought up those properties.”

“No. That was purely business.” He lifted the hand with the gun in it and rubbed the side of his head. “My wife is on the Congressional committee working with our new president in arranging the construction of a wall between the United States and Mexico. Arizona sits against the border of Mexico, and Ellaville just happens to be at the geographical center of this borderline between Mexico and the United States that the president wants to wall up. And when he does that, the construction companies will need large parcels of land to store their equipment, their supplies, and their workers. The person who owns the most appropriate pieces of land for that purpose will become a very rich man overnight.”

“Then it was all for money.”

Young shrugged. “The land was. The rest was just for entertainment value. A smoke screen, if you will. It kept you and your friends at Stone Security pretty busy.”

Hatred seared through me as I stared at him. My family had gone through hell because of the Guardians. A man had died. I was consumed with guilt over my part in everything that had happened. Lawson and Tucker were dead. Smythe and Sanders were in jail. Briggs Thomas and that man he’d brought here from Israel were dead. People had lost their homes, families put out on the street on a banker’s whim. And that banker had lost his family, his job, and then his life.

It was all just for entertainment?

“You can’t just play with people’s lives like that!”

“Can’t I?”

“What do you think your daughter will think when she discovers you were behind all of this?”

“She won’t. The only people who know I’m behind it are standing right in front of me. And you won’t be very soon.”

“What about Mrs. Lawson?”

He laughed, literally laughed, like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “She’s in such a state over her daughter’s suicide that she probably won’t even notice her husband’s absence.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was breaking inside, the anger was so powerful, so shattering. Despite military training that told me to be cautious in everything I did, despite my father’s hand still curled up in the back of my shirt, I couldn’t just stand there and listen to this drivel anymore.

I lurched forward, grabbing the wrist of his arm that held the gun. He saw me coming and slid his finger onto the trigger the moment I got hold of him. He pulled it, the sound deafening me for a moment. I landed a punch to his jaw, forcing him backward. He hit Lawson’s desk and fell back, his spine bending at an awkward angle. He cried out, the gun falling from his grip. I fell with him, landing on his chest and hip, my weight further crushing his body against the desk.

I hit him a few more times, not even bothering to count how many times. He was unconscious when I finally felt hands pulling me back.

“It’s done now, son.”

I turned. My father was with me, his hands moving from my arms to my face, caressing me like he hadn’t done since I was a small child. Behind him, Mrs. Lawson stood in the doorway, her expression almost neutral as she took in the scene in front of her. Even the sight of her husband, dead on the floor, wasn’t enough to elicit any emotion.

“It’s done,” my father repeated. “It’s all over.”

I nodded as sobs tore through me. I hadn’t cried like that since my dog died when I was in the eighth grade. Unlike that night, my father held me in his arms and whispered words of comfort in my ear.

“I’m sorry, Father.”

He laughed a choking laugh that ended with a sob. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You saved us.”

It wasn’t five minutes later when Jack Stone and Patrick Shaughnessy and Crispin Sullivan burst through the study door. Mrs. Lawson still stood there, her shock impenetrable. I later heard they had to put her in a mental health facility for a couple of years after that night. The police arrived on Stone’s heels, the questions they asked repeating themselves over and over all through the night, first at Lawson’s house, then at the local sheriff’s station. It was a nightmare that felt like it was never going to end.

But then it did end, and she was there, rushing into my arms, her hands searching me for injuries.

I wasn’t hurt. By some miracle, the bullet from Young’s gun had missed me completely even though it had seemed to be pointed right at my chest. Two close calls in one day. What were the chances of that?

Someone else might say that divine intervention had been involved. I was content to accept that it was just bad aim on the part of the shooters, and leave it at that.