THE SOLDIER’S RECKONING: 31 FRACTURES AND THE WOLFE BLOODLINE

The detached armory beside the ten-car motor pool was a reinforced brick structure bristling with security cameras and floodlights. Inside, Silas and Cole Wolfe were frantically distributing automatic rifles and body armor to twenty surviving private guards.

"He's one man!" Silas screamed, racking the slide of an FN SCAR. "Set up overlapping fields of fire across the main driveway! The second you see movement, open up with the heavy .50 caliber!"

They were expecting a frontal assault. They were expecting a soldier to follow standard rules of engagement.

I was on the roof.

I had scaled the rain gutter on the blind side of the motor pool, planting two pounds of C4 directly above the structural steel support beam of the armory’s upper floor.

I clicked the remote detonator.

BOOM.

The controlled explosion didn't destroy the entire building; it blew a ten-foot hole through the reinforced ceiling, showering the interior with concrete debris, smoke, and blinding dust. Before the dust could settle, I dropped through the ceiling opening, landing on the hood of a luxury SUV inside the garage bay.

Through my thermal visor, the room was full of panicked targets scattering for cover.

I engaged with blinding speed.

Using controlled three-round bursts, I neutralized the weapons in the hands of the private contractors, striking wrists, shoulders, and weapon receivers. The mercenary guards, realizing they were outmatched by an elite Delta operator operating in close-quarters battle, threw their weapons to the floor and scrambled out the side exits into the rain, abandoning the Wolfe brothers.

"Cowards! Get back here!" Cole Wolfe roared, raising a customized shotgun.

I stepped off the SUV hood, swept his shotgun barrel aside with my left forearm, and drove a savage knee into his midsection. Cole doubled over with a sickening wheeze. I grabbed his tactical vest and hurled him across the concrete floor, slamming him into a rack of steel toolboxes.

Silas Wolfe raised his pistol with shaking hands, backing toward the rear exit. "Stay back! I'm warning you, Dalton!"

"You should have warned your father," I said, moving forward with relentless, measured steps.

Silas fired twice. Both rounds sparked harmlessly off my Level IV ceramic chest plate. I closed the distance, grabbed the slide of his weapon, racked it backward to eject the live round, stripped the magazine, and delivered a spinning back-fist that shattered his jawbone with an audible crack.

Silas hit the floor beside his brother Cole, both of them groaning in agony, completely immobilized.

Tristan Wolfe—the slick, suit-wearing brother who handled the family's media spin—was cowering in the corner behind a row of server racks, holding a tablet computer while trying to trigger an automated wipe of the hard drives.

I walked over, ripped the tablet from his trembling hands, and smashed his face into the server rack casing.

"Don't kill me! Please, Jack, we were just following our father's orders!" Tristan sobbed, blood running from his broken nose down his silk tie. "He told us Tessa would ruin the family! He told us it was business!"

"Thirty-one fractures isn't business," I snarled, zip-tying Tristan, Silas, and Cole together by their wrists with heavy-duty police restraints. "It’s a death sentence for your bloodline."

I plugged a portable thumb drive into the primary server rack, initiating an emergency data clone that bypassed Tristan's deletion sequence. Within forty-five seconds, every encrypted bank transfer, bribery video, and murder contract the Wolfe family had compiled over thirty years was transferred into JSOC cloud storage.

The armory was cleared. Six of the seven sons were now neutralized.

Only one man remained: Victor Wolfe, sealed inside the underground vault beneath the main mansion.

Suddenly, my tactical radio crackled. It wasn't Ray.

It was Victor.

"Dalton," Victor’s voice came through, dripping with venomous spite. "Look at your phone."

I pulled up my encrypted field feed.

A live security stream had overridden my tablet screen. It showed the high-security ICU wing at the mountain base. Standing outside the reinforced blast doors of Tessa’s medical unit was a man in a tactical uniform holding a remote detonator.

"You think you won, soldier?" Victor laughed, a ragged, psychotic sound. "I had a sleeper agent placed inside your logistics transport team three days ago. One press of this button, and the mountain room goes up in flames. Tessa dies, and you will live with the ashes forever."