CHAPTER 18: The Choice
Cole hesitated, his hand shaking. “If I do… he’ll kill me.”
“No one will hurt you,” I said. “Not if you choose to stop this.”
Slowly, two more men set their guns on the ground. Cole stared at them, then at Victor, and finally let his arm fall to his side. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Then we teach you,” Victor said simply.
As we walked them out, police were waiting—but Victor spoke quietly to the lead officer, and they took them in for questioning only, not immediate arrest. “They’re victims too,” he told me later. “Of Julian, of fear, of a world that never gave them a fair shot.”
That night, we sat on the porch again. The air felt lighter, but I knew it wasn’t over.
“Every time we pull one weed out,” Victor said, “another one grows where we didn’t look. But that doesn’t mean we stop tending the garden.”
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