Chapter Nineteen: "He Didn't Raise His Voice and That Was the Problem"

RYKE POV --- The last time Ryke Mallen had seen his father, he'd been twenty-four years old, standing in a boardroom that smelled like money and expectation, and he'd set his copy of the Castell contract on the polished table, very deliberately, and walked out. He had not looked back. He had told himself, in the years since, that this meant he was done. That Ashveil was proof of something — of what a man could build when he stopped building for someone else. That the compound, the crew, the rough honest weight of this town was the answer to every question his father had ever asked him. He had not accounted for his father simply deciding to follow. --- Holt Mallen crossed the compound yard with the unhurried certainty of a man who had never in his life entered a space that wasn't alr