No windows broken.
No door smashed down.
He walked the flagstone path and stepped up onto the porch. The floorboards creaked.
He pulled open the screen door, pushed open the solid wood door.
It was dark and cold inside, and Adam Hassler sat in the rocking chair beside the dormant woodstove, looking like a wasted version of the man Ethan remembered.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” Ethan’s voice came out like a low growl.
Hassler looked over, his cheekbones and orbital rims pronounced from starvation.
He answered, “Believe me, I was just as surprised to see you.”
Suddenly, they were on the floor, Ethan struggling to get his hands around Hassler’s neck so he could squeeze the f**king life right out of him. He’d assumed that Hassler’s emaciated state would make overpowering him simple, but the man’s wiry strength was resilient.
Hassler torqued his hips and flipped Ethan onto his back.
Ethan swung, his fist glancing off Hassler’s shoulder.
Hassler returned with a hard, stunning blow.
Ethan’s world went pyrotechnic.
He tasted blood, felt it sliding down his face as his nose burned.
Hassler said, “You never knew what you had.”
He threw another punch, but Ethan caught his arm at the elbow and jerked it the wrong way.
Hassler cried out as the ligaments stretched.
Ethan shoved him into the toppled rocking chair and scrambled up, looking for a weapon, something hard and heavy.
Hassler regained his feet, advanced in a boxer’s stance.
Too dark in the living room for Ethan to see the punches coming.
Hassler connected a jab, then a hard right hook that might have turned Ethan’s lights out if Hassler wasn’t in such a weakened state.
Still, it snapped Ethan’s neck and spun him ninety degrees as Hassler delivered a devastating kidney shot.
Ethan screamed out, stumbling back into the foyer as Hassler kept coming, calm and controlled.
“It’s a mismatch,” Hassler said. “I’m just better than you. Always was.”
Ethan’s fingers wrapped around the iron coatrack.
“I even loved your wife better than you could,” Hassler said.
Ethan sent the hard, metal base arcing through the air.
Hassler ducked.
It punched a hole through the drywall.
Hassler charged, but Ethan caught him with an elbow to the jaw and the man’s knees buckled. Ethan landed his first direct hit to Hassler’s face, his cheekbone crunching under the blow, and it felt so goddamned good that Ethan hit him again. And again. And again. Hassler growing weaker, Ethan stronger, and with each punch the need to do more damage grew exponentially. The fear inside of him breaking out in a whirlwind of violence.
Fear of what this man could do.
Fear of what Hassler could take away from him.
Fear of losing Theresa.
Ethan let go of Hassler’s neck and the man moaned on the floor.Ripping the coatrack out of the wall, he clutched the metal in his hands and raised the heavy base over Hassler’s head.
I’m gonna kill him.
Hassler looked up at him, his face a bloody mess, one eye already swollen shut and the other filling with the realization of what was coming.
He said, “Do it.”
“You sent me here to die,” Ethan said. “Was it for the money? Or so you could have my wife?”
“She deserves so much better than you.”
“Did Theresa know that you orchestrated all of this so you could be with her?”
“I told her I came here looking for you and that I was involved in a car wreck. She was happy with me, Ethan. Truly happy.”
For a long moment, Ethan stood over Hassler on the brink of caving in the man’s skull.
Wanting to do it.
Not wanting to be the man who would.
He threw the coatrack across the living room and collapsed on the hardwood next to Hassler, his kidney throbbing.
“We’re here because of you,” Ethan said. “My wife, my son—”
“We’re here because two thousand years ago you f**ked Kate Hewson and destroyed your wife. If Kate had never transferred to Boise, she never would have come to Wayward Pines. Pilcher never would have abducted her and Bill Evans.”
“And you never would have sold me out.”
“Just to be clear, you’d be dead right now if I hadn’t—”
“No, we’d have lived out our lives in Seattle.”
“You call what you and Theresa had a life? She was miserable. You were in love with another woman. You want to sit there and tell me what I did was wrong?”
“You seriously just said that?”
“There’s no right or wrong anymore, Ethan. There’s only survival. I learned that in my three and a half years wandering around that hell beyond the fence. So don’t look at me hoping to catch a glimpse of regret.”
“It’s kill or be killed now? That’s where we’re at?”
“We were always there.”
“So why didn’t you kill me?”
Hassler smiled, blood between his teeth.
“When you walked back to the superstructure from Kate’s house last night? I was there. In the woods. It was dark, and it was just you and me. I had my bowie knife, the same one I killed abbies with in hand-to-talon combat you couldn’t even fathom. You don’t know how close I came.”
Ethan felt something cold inch down his spine.
“What stopped you?” he asked.
Hassler wiped blood out of his eyes.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I think it’s because I’m not as hard as I’d like to be. See, in my head, I know there’s no right or wrong, but my heart hasn’t made that connection. My twenty-first-century hardwiring is too deep. Too institutional. My conscience intrudes.”
Ethan stared at his old boss through the mounting darkness in the living room.
“Where does this leave us?” Ethan asked.
“The best moments of my life I lived right here. With Theresa. With your son.”
Hassler groaned as he hoisted himself up into a sitting position against the wall.
Even in the low light, Ethan could see the man’s jaw beginning to swell, Hassler’s words now coming lopsided, garbled.
“I’ll walk away,” Hassler said. “Forever. One condition.”