Crawford didn’t know that.
He had never remembered it.
Zacharie killed him anyway.
That night, a chilling sensation settled in her chest. Not satisfaction, nor relief, but certainty. Her sister was lost forever, reduced to numbers, records, and silence.
The murders continued.
Sheriffs. Doctors. Foremen. Men whose crimes went unpunished because the victims were considered property. Each death was precise. Personal. Unforgettable.
In Black communities, his name whispered like a prayer and a warning. Some searched for him. Others begged him to remember them.
He did it.
The bounty was rising. The Texas Rangers were hunting him. Hunting parties were failing one after another. He moved like smoke, nourished by the earth and protected by silence.
By the summer of 1875, only one name remained.
Colonel Henry Witmore.
Witmore awaited him in the ruins of his plantation, surrounded by mercenaries and terror. He drank, swore, and promised violence. He built walls where fields once stretched.
On September 15th, Zacharie came.
He eliminated the guards methodically. A gunshot. A body. Darkness. Fire. Panic. By midnight, the fortress was nothing but a cemetery.
The gunmen fled.
Witmore was dragged into the yard and left for dead.
He begged.
Zacharie stood over him and felt seventeen years of pain concentrated into a simple pull of the trigger.
He did not fire.
“We don’t die,” said Zachariah. “We remember.”
He walked away as the manor burned.
Witmore lived — broken, delirious, haunted — until her death, alone, years later, screaming about a man in black.
After that night, the murders stopped.
Zachariah Creed has disappeared.
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