“If you don’t have the stomach for it…” Lyle pointed across the river. “You can head back anytime.”

Have the stomach for it. Those words filled Max’s head with a hundred uninvited memories, visions of Mikhail begging for his life. The irony! Killing was the easy part, Max knew firsthand. It was the aftermath that hollowed a man out. “You can’t do this, Lyle.”

Lyle dropped his eyes to the ground, looking far beyond the stones at his feet. “I wake up in the middle of the night, so broken I can’t breathe. I get so mad… I want to bust up anything in my reach. It took all my strength not to walk into that bar where Reed worked and beat him to death. He killed my little girl—I felt it in my heart. And now I know.”

Lyle choked back something dark and heavy. “She was beautiful and sweet… and now I’ll never hear her voice again. I’ll never get to kiss her on her birthday or hear her laugh at my bad jokes. I was supposed to protect her. I’m her father… and I’ll never…” His big hands trembled and his voice cracked. “You have no idea… the pain…”

Lyle reached into his backpack and pulled out the whiskey bottle. It was almost empty now. He twisted the lid off and took a big drink. Then he looked up at Max, his eyes narrowing to a squint. “When someone kills your daughter, then you can have a say. Until then, stay the hell out of my business.”

Had Max looked that crazed when he set off to hunt Mikhail? Niki had described him as having tunnel vision in those last days. Is that how the search for Pip had become a mission to kill the men who took him? Judge, jury, and executioner. Max knew that path well, and he couldn’t let Lyle charge down it without knowing what lay ahead.

“Six years ago, I lost my wife.” Max spoke without thinking, opening a box he thought he never would. “She was a social worker at a hospital. One day, she overheard something she wasn’t supposed to, and a man named Mikhail Vetrov killed her for it—ran her over in a parking garage. For a long time I thought she was the victim of an accident—a hit and run. Then one day I learned the truth. I found out about Mikhail. So I hunted him down, onto a frozen lake. When I caught him, I tied him up and made him watch as I cut a hole in the ice just big enough to feed him through.”

Max’s voice sounded threadbare, but the words expanded in his throat, thriving on the air, warming him like some healing elixir. “When he finally confessed, I dragged him to that hole and fed him to the lake.”

“Jesus,” Lyle whispered.

“Every time I look in the mirror, I see a murderer looking back at me. You wanted to know why I gave up my badge? Well, now you do. I went to the woods to take what I had coming. I went there to find a way to look at myself again. I used to think that I was a good man, but I crossed a line on that frozen lake, and now I can never go back.”