And if they aren’t dead before then?—
The first boot hits the top stair.
I adjust my grip on the brass knuckles. Feel the metal settle against my bones like an old friend arriving for a visit.
Well.
They’ll wish to be.
CHAPTER 15
Sixteen Bodies And A Kitten
~HAWK~
Iclear the back fence in a single motion—hands on the top rail, body over, boots hitting compacted earth on the other side before the momentum of the jump has finished traveling through my frame.
Seconds.
I’m seconds from the back door.
The dull, hollow silence that wraps the building is the kind that has weight—the particular absence of sound that occurs when an environment that should contain noise has been forcibly emptied of it. No voices. No movement. No ambient hum of residential activity from the surrounding units. Just the ringing in my ears—the persistent, high-frequency whine that my auditory system generates after sustained weapons discharge, a tinnitus that operates as the body’s receipt for violence performed and is currently itemizing tonight’s expenditures with meticulous, unwanted clarity.
The silence grows louder with every step I take toward the building.
Whatever backup team was staged at the perimeter—the second wave, positioned at strategic intervals around Victoria’s townhome in the particular formation that sayswe expect thefirst team to fail and are here to finish what they start—are all dead. Every one of them. Fifteen armed operatives distributed across the compound’s rear quadrant, utilizing cover positions behind hedgerow and utility structures and the shadowed recesses between buildings where the lamplight doesn’t reach.
I shot each of them before they noticed I’d arrived.
Not bragging. Stating operational fact. The golden gun with the metallic red script—my father’s weapon, the one inheritance he left that was worth keeping—performed its function with the reliability I expect of it, and my hands performed theirs. Fifteen targets. Fifteen rounds. The math is clean because the math has to be clean when the variable on the other side of the building is the only person who makes the mathematics of my existence produce a positive sum.
Fifteen.
As a second wave.
Which means the first wave was at least that.
My stomach tousles with something that I don’t usually permit access to my conscious awareness—fear. Not the operational variety, not the productive, adrenaline-adjacent alertness that combat generates and that I channel into performance. This is the other kind. The kind that has nothing to do with my own survival and everything to do with the survival of someone I can’t currently see or hear or smell, someone who is inside a building that thirty-plus armed operatives have been sent to breach, someone who is strong?—
My Precious is strong.
I know this.
I’ve watched her dismantle ten. I’ve seen her handle twelve—bruised, bleeding, standing over a floor of broken men with brass knuckles that needed cleaning and a pulse that needed checking but still on her feet, still breathing, still Victoria.
But fifteen is pushing it.
And I don’t know what the first wave numbered.
I reach the back door. It’s intact—locked, undisturbed, which tells me the breach team entered from the front and didn’t bother with a secondary entry point. Arrogant. Sloppy. The kind of tactical oversight that gets people killed, and based on the silence emanating from inside, it got several of them killed by a woman in tights and a tank top.
I bypass the lock in two seconds—Victoria’s back-door mechanism is keyed to both of us, a modification I installed during my second month of being unable to sleep unless I knew I could reach her in under three minutes from any position in the compound—and the door swings inward on oiled hinges that make no sound because I oiled them for exactly this category of arrival.
The kitchen.
Dark. The pendant lamp has been shattered—glass on the counter, on the floor, the amber light replaced by whatever weak illumination the exterior lampposts push through the window I can see is still closed.She closed it.Before they arrived. Noticed the movement, closed the window, prepared. The thought produces a flicker of pride that I file away for later because later is when feelings get processed and now is when bodies get counted.
The smell hits me before the visual details resolve.
