Chapter 7 - The Wolf at the Gates
The realization did not paralyze Damon Mercer. It ignited him.
Every ounce of restraint, every calculated reserve of aristocratic control he had maintained for fifteen years dissolved, leaving behind only the pure, lethal essence of a Mercer at war.
“Marcus,” Damon said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Can you shoot?”
Marcus pressed a wad of gauze against his bleeding shoulder and pulled the slide on his Colt .45 with his teeth. “I can kill three of them before I pass out.”
“Make it four,” Damon said. “Hold the pantry hatch. If anyone other than me tries to lift that iron door, empty the magazine into their faces.”
“What are you going to do?”
Damon reached into the weapons locker bolted behind the kitchen chimney. He didn't pull out a carbine. He pulled out a customized Remington 870 trench gun and two fragmentation grenades.
“I’m going to introduce them to the owner of the house.”
Damon didn't wait behind cover. He kicked open the splintered rear screen door and stepped out into the freezing mountain rain.
The forest was illuminated by the flickering green lasers of night-vision scopes and the muzzle flashes of mercenary rifles. Rain lashed Damon’s face, plastering his dark hair to his forehead. He didn't take cover. He moved through the shadows of the porch like a ghost born of gunpowder and spite.
A shooter stepped around the corner of the woodpile, weapon raised.
Damon fired. The blast ripped through the dark, folding the man in half. Before the spent shell hit the wet pine needles, Damon pumped the action, pivoted ninety degrees, and fired again at a muzzle flash behind the stone well.
A scream echoed through the trees.
“Mercer is outside!” a voice shouted in the gloom. “Concentrate fire! Take him alive if you can—Vance wants him on his knees!”
“Vance is going to choke on your teeth!” Damon roared back into the storm.
He pulled the pin on the first grenade with his teeth, counted to two, and hurled it high into the canopy above the granite outcrop where the laser sights were originating.
The explosion in the branches rained shrapnel, burning bark, and shattered wood down on the operators below. Two men stumbled out into the open, disoriented and deafened.
Damon moved forward, firing rhythmically—*BOOM, clack-clack, BOOM*.
He was relentless. He took a round to his left shoulder—a searing burn that tore through flesh—and didn't even stumble. He was an engine of retribution. These men had terrified a two-year-old child. They had beaten the woman he loved. They had brought the stench of blood into his sanctuary.
He reached the granite boulder. The last surviving operator—the team leader, bearing the tactical insignia of Vance’s private guard—was frantically reloading his sidearm, his night-vision goggles hanging broken from his helmet.
Damon grabbed the barrel of the man’s pistol, twisted it until the contractor's wrist snapped with a sickening *pop*, and drove his combat knife straight through the man’s tactical vest, pinning him against the wet stone.
The mercenary screamed, blood bubbling to his lips.
Damon leaned in, his face inches from the dying man’s ear, the rain washing the gunpowder residue into his eyes.
“Where is Cassian Drake?” Damon whispered.
The man gagged, clutching Damon’s forearm. “F-Fuck you, Mercer...”
Damon twisted the blade half an inch.
“Where is Drake?” Damon repeated, his voice lower than the rumble of the thunder above.
“The docks...” the contractor gasped, his eyes rolling back in terror. “Pier 42... Vance and Drake are... they’re loading the Tucson shipment into the container freighter... they’re leaving the country at dawn...”
“And the child’s tracker?”
“Drake... Drake told Vance about the girl... said she was Mercer’s weak spot... said you’d run to the ends of the earth to save her...”
Damon pulled the knife free.
The man slid down the granite rock into the mud, lifeless.
Damon stood in the rain, breathing heavily, the water washing the blood from his hands. Around the cabin, the forest was dead silent, save for the patter of raindrops on pine needles and the crackle of burning branches.
The hit squad was eliminated.
Damon walked back up the porch steps, his boots heavy on the wet wood. He stepped through the ruined front room, where Marcus sat slumped against the pantry door, his Colt resting on his knees, still breathing.
“It’s done,” Damon said.
He bent down and knocked three times on the iron hatch of the root cellar.
“Selena. It’s me.”
A pause. Then, the sound of the internal bolt sliding back.
The heavy iron door swung upward. Selena appeared in the opening, her face pale, the tailor's shears still gripped tightly in her hand like a dagger.
When she saw Damon—covered in mud, rain, and blood, his shirt torn open, his shoulder bleeding—the shears fell from her hand.
She climbed out of the cellar and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face into his wet, cold shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.
“You came back,” she wept. “You came back.”
Damon wrapped his good arm around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest, burying his face in her dark hair. “I told you I would.”
From beneath the hatch, two tiny hands appeared on the wooden rim, followed by a mop of dark curls.
Ruby climbed up, holding Barnaby by his unstitched ear. She looked around the ruined room, looked at Marcus’s bandage, and then looked at Damon’s bloody face.
She didn't cry.
She walked forward, her little mismatched socks squelching slightly on the damp floorboards, stopped in front of Damon, and held out her stuffed rabbit.
“Barnaby was bad,” she whispered solemnly.
Damon sank down onto his knees in front of her, despite the agony in his shoulder. He looked at the child, his chest aching with a love so vast and terrifying it eclipsed every empire he had ever built.
“Barnaby wasn't bad, sweetheart,” Damon said gently, taking the rabbit from her hands. “Barnaby was just used by bad men.”
He gently unpicked the torn seam of the rabbit’s ear, pulled out the crushed plastic tracking device, and crushed it to dust beneath the heel of his boot.
May you like
Then he pulled Ruby and Selena into his arms together, holding them against his heart in the ruined cabin, while the first gray light of dawn began to pierce the black pines.
***