Without Me Your Prophecy Dies Chapter 2

High in the Bitterroot Range, thirty miles past the last paved logging route, sat a cluster of hand-hewn cedar cabins flanking an old stone hermitage. It was run by a retired Trappist monk named Brother Matthew—an eighty-year-old recluse who smelled of pipe tobacco, pine sap, and profound indifference.

"Looking to take the habit, son?" Matthew asked, leaning against his split-rail fence, his faded blue eyes taking in my city boots.

"Not the habit," I said, sliding a thick manila envelope across the rough cedar table. "Just silence. There’s twelve thousand dollars in cash here. Room, board, and no questions asked for the winter."

Matthew looked at the money, then up at my face, and let out a dry, gravelly chuckle.

"Fair enough. Nobody runs this far north unless they’re running from the feds or their own blood. South cabin by the creek. Chop your own wood, haul your own water, and don't make a sound after sundown."

"Deal."

The cabin was primitive: an iron woodstove, a narrow cot with a wool blanket, a pine table, and a single kerosene lamp.

Yet the moment the timber latch fell into place, it felt more secure than the sixty-room fortress in Lake Forest.

Here, no one was slipping sedatives into my scotch.

I dumped my pack, sat on the edge of the cot, and pulled out a cheap burner phone I had purchased at a truck stop outside Spokane. I powered it on to check the forwarded server logs from my old legal address.

The screen lit up like a Christmas tree.

Over three hundred missed calls and urgent notifications.

Thomas: "You ungrateful whelp! You get your ass back to this house before I freeze every account in your name!"

Margaret: "Adam, my baby, Mommy is so sorry, please just tell us where you are!"

Martha: "Adam, you are breaking your grandmother’s heart. Think of the family name!"

Dozens of texts from board members, second cousins, and trust administrators.

And then there were forty-eight messages from Elliott.

I scrolled through the timestamps.

"Adam, pick up. This isn't funny."

"Where are you? Did you leave the state?"

"Adam, tell me what you want. I’ll give you half my shares. Just come home."

"Adam, something is happening. The portfolio is bleeding."

"Adam, please. I’m begging you."

The final message had arrived twenty minutes earlier.

"Adam, the visions stopped."

I stared at the glowing LCD screen and let out a long, quiet laugh that shook my shoulders.

"Stopped?"

Of course they stopped.

Because you can't run a con game when your mark walks out of the theater.

In my first life, I had dutifully spent eighteen years in that frozen Canadian boarding school, returned like a chastised dog, and absorbed every indignity they heaped upon me. The family’s luck held because I was there to shoulder the collateral damage. Whenever the market turned against them, Elliott simply blamed my "bad aura" and tightened the screws on my life.

Now, I had flipped the board.

And without a designated victim to absorb the blowback, reality was crashing through their front door.

I typed three words: "Enjoy the fire."

I pulled the battery from the burner, dropped it into my pack, and slept for twelve straight hours.

The next morning, the primeval silence of the forest was shattered by the grinding roar of heavy V8 engines climbing the switchbacks.

I stepped out onto the porch with a tin mug of chicory coffee.

Four black Cadillac Escalades had parked haphazardly across Matthew’s turn-around circle, churning the pine needles into mud.

Thomas, Margaret, Martha in a portable electric chair, Elliott, and four senior directors tumbled out of the vehicles like survivors from a plane crash.

They looked unhinged. Margaret’s silk blouse was wrinkled; Thomas’s necktie was crooked; and Elliott looked like a ghost that had been dragged through a briar patch.

Brother Matthew stood on his front stoop, holding a split-rail staff, looking thoroughly annoyed.

"This is consecrated sanctuary land," the old man growled. "Turn those damn trucks around."

"Father!" Margaret lunged toward him, nearly losing her footing in the clay. "My son! Adam Carlisle! We know he’s here!"

Matthew didn't even blink. "The young man doesn't want to see you."

"Get out of my way, old man," Thomas barked, striding forward with his overcoat flapping open. "I am Thomas Carlisle. I own Carlisle Logistics and Continental Shipping. I’ll buy this whole mountain and turn it into a gravel pit if you don't produce my son in five seconds!"

"Is that right?" Matthew said, leaning on his staff. "Must be terrible to have that much money and not an ounce of sense."

Thomas choked on his own fury.

"Who told you to come here?" I asked, stepping off the cabin porch into the clearing.

Every face turned toward me.

Margaret let out a strangled cry and rushed forward, her designer boots sinking into the muck. "Adam! Oh God, Adam!"

"Stop right there," I said, my voice cutting through the damp air like an axe through birch. "One more step and I’m having the county sheriff run you off for criminal trespass."

Margaret froze, trembling, clutching her throat. "Adam, look at what you’re doing to us! Look at your father!"

"I am looking at him," I said. "He looks like a man whose bluff just got called."

"You get in that vehicle right now!" Thomas snarled, his neck veins bulging against his collar. "The board is in an emergency session! The market opened down eight percent! We have institutional lenders pulling lines of credit as we speak!"

"Sounds like a corporate governance issue," I said mildly. "Take it up with your CEO."

Before Thomas could roar again, Elliott broke away from the group. He stumbled across the grass and threw himself into the mud at my feet, his hands grasping desperately at the cuffs of my denim trousers.

"Adam... Adam, I'm sorry! I take it all back!"

His face was slick with sweat and tears, his eyes wild with terror.

"I won't have any more visions! I swear to God, I won't say another word! Just come back to Lake Forest! Please, Adam, come home!"

I looked down at the golden boy of the Carlisle dynasty groveling in the dirt.

"Why do you care where I sleep, Elliott?" I asked softly.

"Because everything broke!" he shrieked, his voice cracking into a high, hysterical whine. "The moment you walked out the gate, it all came undone! Yesterday afternoon, I told Dad the SEC inquiry into our port acquisitions would be dropped—the Department of Justice issued three grand jury subpoenas this morning! I told him our European logistics partner was signing the merger—they backed out and issued a press release calling our balance sheet fraudulent! Even Grandmother’s arrhythmia flared up and sent her to Northwestern Memorial!"

He was clawing at my knees now, sobbing into the denim.

"Adam, it's not working anymore! If you don't come back, we’re going to be bankrupt by the end of the quarter!"

The clearing went completely still.

Thomas, Margaret, the corporate directors—they stood frozen against the pines, their faces pale, staring at me with a desperate, pathetic hunger.

I slowly crouched down, bringing my eyes level with Elliott’s.

"And why is that, Elliott?" I whispered.

Elliott blinked through his tears, disoriented. "What?"

"Why does my presence in Chicago dictate whether the Department of Justice indicts our company?" I tilted my head, studying him like a specimen under glass. "If you are truly anointed by heaven, your gift belongs to you. What does my geography have to do with your prophecies?"

Elliott’s mouth opened, but only a dry rattle came out.

"Answer me," I said softly. "You told Mom and Dad that God spoke through your lips. Does God change his mind when the older brother moves to Montana?"

Elliott’s skin went grey. He looked down at the mud, shivering.

I stood back up, brushing the dirt from my knuckles.

"You don't have a gift, Elliott," I said to the assembled family. "You never did."

I looked Thomas dead in the eye.

"Your second son is nothing more than a cheap, cowardly con artist."

The silence cracked like a frozen branch.

"Shut your mouth!" Thomas lunged across the grass, his fist balling as he grabbed my wool shirt. "Elliott's foresight built this company! Every major move we made for twenty years came from his guidance! How dare you call your brother a liar?!"

"His guidance?" I sneered, leaning into his face. "You built this company on insider leaks, zero-percent interest rates, and municipal payoffs, Thomas. Elliott just waited until your lawyers had the contracts drafted, then claimed he saw it in a dream. And you were so desperate to believe you were chosen by God that you bought the whole sickening lie."

"Smack."

Thomas’s open palm struck my jaw with the full momentum of his body.

The blow spun my head to the side. The metallic tang of blood bloomed on my tongue.

I didn't flinch. Slowly, deliberately, I turned my face back toward him, wiped the blood from my lip with the back of my hand, and let out a cold, venomous laugh.

"Is that the best you’ve got, Thomas?" I whispered. "You were much braver when you had me strapped to that gurney."