Capítulo 6: The Ghost of Ethan Knight

The hideout was a windowless room in a Brooklyn warehouse, lined with monitors and a tactical cot. Scarlett had wiped the blood from her face and changed into dry clothes.

The Knight empire’s financial underbelly flickered across her screens. She was already siphoning offshore accounts, freezing shell companies.

Then the screen glitched. "Game isn’t over." Her fingers stilled.

Asher. Or someone else.

She ran a backtrace—bouncing through string servers, dead ends. Then the lights flickered.

Not a hack. The physical breaker.

She drew the Sig from her hip and killed the monitors with a keystroke, plunging the room into red emergency glow. The door didn’t creak.

It simply swung inward, and a figure stepped through. Ethan.

But not the polished heir. Half his face was a map of pink keloid scars, the left eye bloodshot but functional.

His suit was gone, replaced by a tactical jacket, and he moved with a careful limp. "Don’t," he said, his voice a rasp.

"I’m not here to finish what we started. I’m here because Asher has the rest of the C4, and he’s about to bury us both." Scarlett kept the Sig level.

"You triggered a church bomb to kill me. Forgive my skepticism." "And you were going to let me burn with it.

We’re even." Ethan lifted his hands, fingers spread. "The countdown was a bluff.

I never armed the main cell. I wanted Victoria’s men to run, and I needed you to jump.

There’s a ledge under the east window—I saw you go for it. But the blast was real enough to bury Marcus and Chloe.

Asher walked out before the dust settled." "He’s alive." Not a question. "And he’s been clearing out the old accounts faster than you can freeze them.

My face is proof he wants me dead too. After the explosion, he sent a cleanup crew to the river.

I survived by playing dead under a slab of marble for six hours. My own twin." The word dripped acid.

Scarlett processed. The "Game isn’t over" could be Asher taunting her, or bait.

She needed to verify. "How do I know you didn’t stage this to get me out of my safe zone?" Ethan reached into his jacket—slow, deliberate—and tossed a burner phone onto the stainless steel table.

"Trace it. I pulled Asher’s location from his own comms.

A private island off the Maine coast. Blackwood Cay.

He consolidated what’s left of Victoria’s offshore network there. If we don’t move within twelve hours, he’ll vanish again." She didn’t touch the phone.

"You want me to climb into an aircraft with a man who tried to blow me up yesterday." "I want you to remember that Asher shot Marcus in front of you. He’ll kill anyone who knows the truth about the Knight inheritance—including the last Rockefeller.

You’re a loose end." Ethan’s scarred lip twisted. "So am I.

It’s simple math. Two problems, one solution.

We fly in, take him before he mobilizes, and then we sort out our own death warrants." Silence. The red light painted them in hellish tones.

Scarlett thought about the Knights, the systematic slaughter of her family, the games within games. Trust was suicide.

But Ethan’s information—if verifiable—was the only thread. And Asher alive meant the vengeance wasn’t complete.

She holstered the Sig. "If this is a trap, I’ll put a bullet through your other eye." Ethan almost smiled.

"I’d expect nothing less." They left the warehouse with Scarlett at point, a duffel of hardware slung over her shoulder. The black SUV waited outside, engine running.

Ethan drove, one hand gloved to hide fresh burns, the other steering through pre-dawn Brooklyn toward a small executive airstrip in New Jersey. Scarlett ran the burner’s data on a tablet; the island coordinates matched satellite imagery showing a low-slung villa, private docks, and heat signatures.

Asher wasn’t hiding the location—he wanted to be found. The trap she expected.

At the airstrip, a slick Gulfstream G650 sat under floodlights, stairs down. No crew visible.

Ethan paused at the base of the steps. "I pre-cleared the flight plan.

No tower, no radar signature if we keep low. We’ll be over the island in two hours." Scarlett walked past him, the wind snapping her jacket.

"You’ve already got a pilot?" "I am the pilot." He ascended with the limping gait, and she followed. The cabin was high-end but stripped of luxury—the leather seats replaced with bolt-down benches, the galley packed with munitions cases.

The cockpit door stood open, avionics glowing. Ethan settled into the left seat, flipping switches with the efficiency of someone who’d flown the Gulfstream a hundred times.

Scarlett strapped into the co-pilot’s position, not by invitation, but because she refused to have him behind her. "Strap in," he said.

The engines whined, and the jet taxied onto the dark runway. As the wheels lifted, Scarlett caught his profile in the corner of her vision.

The scar tissue pulled the left corner of his mouth into a permanent grimace. He sensed her watching.

"You want to say something." "Only that if Asher has set up a kill zone on that island, you’re the one he wants dead. I’m just the prize." Ethan’s hands tightened on the yoke.

"Asher hates me because I was born seven minutes earlier. That’s the whole reason.

Our mother always saw me as the tool, but Asher was the spare. He was supposed to die in that car crash twenty years ago.

But he survived, and he’s been watching, waiting for his moment. Now he has Victoria’s black book and enough explosive to make the church look like a sparkler." He leveled the jet at ten thousand feet, the ocean a black mirror below.

"You and I are the only ones who’ve ever outplayed him. So yes, I need your brain.

And you need someone who knows how he thinks." Scarlett said nothing. A tense cockpit silence settled, filled only by the low hum of engines and the intermittent crackle of the encrypted radio.

In the reflection of the windshield, she saw Ethan’s hand slide to a compartment beside his seat—not subtly. She tensed, fingers inching toward her sidearm.

He pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles and set them on the console. "Standard approach gear.

The villa’s dark in the infrared spectrum. He’s expecting us to walk in blind." She let her hand rest.

"What’s his weakness?" "Ego." Ethan’s reply was immediate. "He’ll monologue.

He’ll want to see the look on my face when I realize he’s won. That gives us minutes." "Or he’ll just gas the whole compound." "He would, if he didn’t want to watch.

But he does." The jet dipped as it began its descent over the Gulf of Maine. Scarlett studied the island on the radar—a speck of rock surrounded by cold water, no cover.

A perfect trap. A perfect chance to end this.

Ethan’s voice dropped. "One more thing.

When we land, there’s a fail-safe. If I go silent for more than ten minutes, the Gulfstream’s auto-destruct triggers.

I’ve wired a pound of Semtex to the fuel tanks. If Asher kills me, the whole island learns about it." Scarlett turned to face him.

"You’d blow us both." "Better than letting him win." The scarred half of his face caught the cockpit lights, and for a moment, she saw not the rival, but a mirror. The jet skimmed lower.

Through the windshield, Blackwood Cay emerged—a dark silhouette with a single lit window in the villa’s topmost tower. Waiting for them.

Then the radio cracked alive with a voice she knew. Asher’s, smooth and mocking.

"Welcome to the island, brother. And you brought the Rockefeller.

How romantic. Land on the northern strip—unless you’d prefer a water landing.

The rocks are unforgiving, and I’d hate to lose my audience." Ethan’s jaw locked. Scarlett’s hand found the co-pilot’s cyclic, just in case.

The game was on.

The Wedding Scam: I Conned The Entire Dynasty

The Wedding Scam: I Conned The Entire Dynasty