One of them flips the table and reaches for a shotgun leaning against the wall.
Bracken shoots him in the shoulder and he spins, hits the counter, slides down.
The other one puts his hands up. "Don't," he says. "Don't, I'm not?—"
Bracken zip-ties his wrists behind his back and puts him face-down on the kitchen floor.
He's not going anywhere. He's going to lie there and listen to what happens to his friends, and then it's going to be his turn.
Upstairs, Maddox has two more.
I can hear him. The sound of a man the size of a refrigerator moving through a hallway, doors opening, bodies hitting walls.
One of them tries to go out a window.
Krypton is outside. The man doesn't make it to the ground before he's dragged back inside by his ankles.
That's five. Ounce said six.
I find the sixth one in the basement.
The older suit.
The one who stood on my porch and told me about the debt.
The one who looked at my daughter's photos on the wall and saidnice family.
The one who sent three men into my home while I wasn’t there.
He's standing at the bottom of the stairs with a duffel bag in one hand and a gun in the other, and the gun is shaking.
He heard everything—the doors, the shots, the sound of his operation falling apart above him in under ninety seconds.
And now he's looking up the basement stairs at me, and whatever he sees on my face makes the gun shake harder.
"Adkins," he says. "Listen. We can?—"
"Put the gun down."
"There's money in the bag. A hundred grand. Take it. Take it and we'll?—"
"Put. The gun. Down."
His hand is shaking so badly the barrel is doing figure eights.
He's calculating. I can see it.
Measuring the distance between us, measuring his chances, measuring whether he can put a bullet in me before I put one in him.
The math doesn't work and he knows it, because I'm standing at the top of the stairs with a Glock that isn't shaking at all, and twelve men behind me who just took apart his entire crew in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
He puts the gun down.
I come down the stairs. Step by step. No hurry.
The same deliberate pace I use for everything—walking into a room, flipping a coin, touching the woman I love.
Every movement intentional. Every second counted.
