Bradford's Orders Book Two The Legacy Series

Chapter 27

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Chapter 27

Bradford

The cliffs felt different tonight.

Colder. Meaner. Like they'd been holding their breath all this time, waiting for someone to come home just so they could tear them apart.

I had my phone in one hand, flashlight in the other, my boots hitting the dirt in a rhythm I hadn't felt since I was a kid sprinting through these same rocks chasing my cousins.

Only this time, we weren't playing.

"Derrick and Aiden just hit the north trail," I said, my voice low and clipped. "They'll sweep down toward the first ridgeline."

"Milo and I are holding the lower bend," Blake said over speaker. "If he tries to double back, we'll cut him off."

"Matt and Sawyer are already past the fire road," Easton confirmed. "They'll push up to meet Dillon and Cade."

That left me, Milo, Blake, Easton, Wyatt, and Brady weaving through the cliffside shadows. We were closing in, coordinated, synced like we were running a two-minute drill with the game on the line and everything to lose.

None of us had weapons.

We didn't need them.

The men in this family were forged in fire and grief and grit. We were built for this. And Zane - he just gave us a reason to unleash everything we'd been taught to hold back.

"He's boxed in," Milo muttered beside me, scanning the terrain with his steady, unflinching eyes. "Only way out is over the edge."

"Let's hope he's dumb enough to try," I growled.

We moved fast. No hesitation. Boots crunching gravel, beams of light cutting through smoke and darkness. The cliffs were alive with noise, wind whipping through the brush, the echo of distant sirens, and beneath it all, the ever-present crash of the Pacific Ocean against the rocks below.

The drop from here was brutal.
Jagged boulders jutted out from the cliff face like knives, waiting to slice through bone. One wrong step, and you'd be gone, swallowed by black water and broken stone.

These cliffs didn't forgive mistakes.

Somewhere ahead was the sound of rocks shifting. A slide. Someone was moving.

"Right!" Brady shouted from the slope above. "Someone's moving! Headed west!"

"I see him!" Wyatt's voice carried across the ridge. "Black jacket! I've got him, he's running!"

I cut hard left, following the curve of a narrow trail that wound around a crumbling bluff. My flashlight caught the faint glint of movement in the distance, just a flash of dark fabric between the trees.

"ZANE!" I roared, the name ripping out of my chest.

No answer.

But the crashing got louder. Desperate.

He was running blind.

And that meant we had him.

We knew these cliffs. Every cave, every footpath, every hidden break in the rocks. We'd lived our whole damn lives on them.

I remembered being ten years old, racing across these same ridges with Easton and Brady, too wild to care how steep it was, how the wind ripped off the ocean like a freight train. We were dumb and fast and thought we couldn't die.
Brady had dared me to jump across a narrow split in the rocks once, said only real men made it across on the first try. I cleared it, barely, skidding in the dirt. He'd tried next and slipped, catching the edge by his fingers. Easton and I had hauled him back up by the arms, all three of us laughing like idiots.