A gasp echoed from the corner of the room. It was Scott. His eyes had finally adjusted enough to recognize my silhouette behind the blinding light. “John? Is that you? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m here to collect the debt,” I said, walking slowly into the room, the crunch of broken glass beneath my boots sounding like bones snapping.
Brian tried to be brave. He took a step toward me, puffing out his chest. “You think you can walk into our house with a gun, you piece of trash? Do you know who our father is? The police will have you in chains before—”
Before he could finish the sentence, I moved.
Years of muscle memory took over. I closed the distance between us in a fraction of a second. I brought the butt of my heavy pistol down hard across Brian’s jaw. The sound of fracturing bone echoed in the quiet room. Brian let out a wet, choked gurgle and collapsed hard onto the hardwood floor, clutching his shattered face as blood poured through his fingers.
“Brian!” Scott screamed, lunging forward.
I pivoted, catching Scott’s extended arm. I twisted it violently behind his back until his shoulder popped out of its socket with a sickening pop. As he screamed in agony, I kicked the back of his knee, forcing him down to his joints on the very floor where his brother was groveling.
In less than five seconds, two grown men were broken at my feet.
I stood over them, the flashlight beam now trained directly onto Arthur Vance’s pale, trembling face. The old man’s supreme confidence had completely evaporated. For the first time in his long, protected life, he was looking at a man he could not buy, threaten, or destroy with a phone call.
“You…” Arthur stammered, his cigar dropping from his limp fingers onto the rug. “What are you?”
“I’m the man you should have left alone,” I whispered.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors of the study opened, and a faint beam of light from a cell phone illuminated the hallway.
“Dad? What’s going on down here?”
The voice belonged to Christine.
She stepped into the room, her eyes widening in horror as the pale light revealed her brothers bleeding on the floor and her husband standing over them with a suppressed firearm.
“John?” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Oh my god, John, what did you do?”
I didn’t lower the gun. I turned my head slightly, looking at the woman I had shared a bed with for ten years. “Where were you, Christine? Your son was bleeding from his ear on a concrete sidewalk, and you were upstairs in this house.”
“You don’t understand!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “My father… he said Jake needed to learn a lesson! He said you were making him soft! I tried to stop them, John, I swear I did!”
“She’s lying, Vanguard,” Echo’s voice suddenly crackled into my earpiece.
I frowned, keeping my weapon trained on Arthur. “Explain, Echo.”
“We just intercepted a secure data transmission from the house’s internal server right before we cut the power,” Echo said, his voice urgent. “Your wife wasn’t hiding upstairs, John. She was signing the custody relinquishment paperwork. And there’s something else… They weren’t just beating the boy. They were waiting for you to arrive. This was a trap.”
Before I could process Echo’s words, a heavy, deafening sound shattered the night air outside.
It wasn’t the sound of the Jackals. It was the deep, rhythmic thumping of twin-engine military-grade helicopters approaching fast from the north, flying low beneath the civilian radar.
Suddenly, the red laser-sights of dozens of high-caliber sniper rifles sliced through the broken glass windows of the study, painting my chest, my head, and the walls in a web of lethal red dots.
Arthur Vance’s terrified expression suddenly twisted into a hideous, triumphant grin. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor and looked up at me.
“You really thought you were the only one with a past, John?” the old man sneered, his voice dripping with venom. “You thought you were the only one who knew how to call in the ghosts?”
My earpiece exploded with static and the sound of frantic gunfire.
“Vanguard! We have multiple hostile teams fast-roping onto the lawn! They’re not military, they’re—” Echo’s voice cut out into a sharp, agonizing scream, followed by the cold, definitive sound of a radio dying.
The red dots on my chest tightened. Christine slowly stepped back toward her father, her face no longer showing tears, but a cold, calculating detachment that mirrored the monsters around her.
I was surrounded. The Jackals were compromised. And the real enemy hadn’t just arrived—they were already aiming at my heart.
