Chapter 2 - AMBUSH IN THE SHADOWS
The elevator doors did not just open; they hissed like a viper preparing to strike. Dominic Wolfe stood framed in the yellow fluorescent glare of the parking deck, his black leather jacket hanging open, heavy silver rings glinting across his knuckles. Behind him, two men in matching dark windbreakers stepped into view—hired muscle with the unmistakable bulky silhouettes of concealed handguns beneath their ribs.
"Mason," Dominic purred, his voice dropping into a register designed to terrify. "What did Father tell you about wandering off with the stray dog?"
Mason’s breath hitched in his throat. He backed away so quickly his heels clipped the concrete pillar, sending the empty paper cup bouncing across the oil-stained floor. "Dominic... listen, I was just—"
"Shut up," Dominic snapped, his eyes locking directly onto the USB drive wrapped in the bloodstained receipt in my palm. "Give it to me, soldier. You don't know what you're holding. You think you're still in the sandbox playing hero? This is our town. Everything inside that house belongs to the Wolfe family. Including the bitch in the ICU."
The word hit the back of my skull like a live electrical wire. In Delta, they train you to master adrenaline—not to suppress it, but to funnel it into cold, surgical lethality. My heart rate dropped from eighty beats a minute to fifty-five. My vision narrowed, hyper-focusing on Dominic’s center mass, the angle of his shoulders, and the twitch in the right hand of the guard behind him.
"You're standing on public hospital property," I said, my voice dead and level. "Turn around and walk back into that elevator."
Dominic laughed, a wet, ugly sound that echoed off the low concrete ceiling. "Take him down. Break both his legs. Make sure he watches when we pull the plug on his wife."
The guard on the left lunged first, reaching under his jacket for a sidearm.
He never cleared leather.
I closed the six-foot gap in two-tenths of a second. My left hand clamped down over his drawing wrist, pinning the firearm inside his holster, while the heel of my right palm drove upward into his nasal bone with four hundred pounds of compressed kinetic force. The cartilage shattered with a sound like dry branches snapping under boot leather. As his head jerked back and his knees buckled, I pivoted on my rear foot, catching his descending body, stripping the Glock 19 from his waistband, and driving my elbow into the temple of the second guard who was still trying to process the speed of the breach.
The second man collapsed like a sack of wet concrete.
Dominic’s smirk died on his lips. His hand flew toward his back pocket, but before his fingers could wrap around the grip of his blade, I was inside his guard. I drove my forearm across his throat, slamming him backward into the reinforced concrete pillar so hard the dust shook loose from the overhead pipes.
His air exploded out of him in a ragged gasp.
I pressed my forearm deeper into his windpipe, lifting him until his designer boots scraped uselessly against the pavement. With my free hand, I pressed the cold steel barrel of the confiscated Glock directly under his jawline, right against his carotid pulse. It was hammering like a trapped bird.
"You like thirty-one fractures, Dominic?" I whispered into his ear, my breath warm against his cheek. "Let's talk about the first five."
"You... you won't shoot..." Dominic wheezed, his face turning a deep, suffocating purple. "Miller's... Miller's upstairs... you'll do life..."
"Delta operators don't do life," I replied softly. "We disappear. And right now, the only thing keeping your trachea intact is the fact that I want your father to watch you beg before this is over."
I dropped him. Dominic crashed to the concrete, coughing violently, clutching his crushed throat while vomiting bile onto his polished leather boots.
I turned around to find Mason staring at me with his eyes wide, trembling so hard he couldn't stand straight.
"Get in your car and leave the state, Mason," I told him without looking back. "Because when I come for your brothers, I won't ask who was holding her hands and who was throwing the punches."
I pocketed the Glock, gripped the USB drive until the plastic edges bit into my skin, and sprinted toward the emergency stairwell. If Dominic was down here, Victor had already initiated the next phase of his cleanup upstairs.
When I burst through the heavy fire doors of the fourth-floor ICU, my blood turned to ice.
May you like
The hallway was empty. The nurses' station was deserted. And outside Room 412, the heart monitor was emitting a flat, relentless, continuous tone that pierced the sterile air like a siren of death.
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