I came home from a Delta deployment to find my wife in the ICU. Her face… I couldn’t recognize her. The doctor whispered, “Thirty-one fractures. Blunt force trauma. Repeated strikes.” Then I saw them outside her room—her father and his seven sons—smiling like they’d just won something. The detective said, “It’s a family matter. The police can’t touch them.” I looked at the hammer print on her skull and replied, “Good. Because I’m not the police.” “What happened to them… no court could ever judge.”

I looked at my reflection in the small mirror mounted inside the safe door. My eyes looked different. The blue was gone, replaced by a dark, dilated pupil. The husband was asleep. The Delta operator was awake.

I needed to know where they were. I needed to track the pack. And I knew exactly who the weak link was.

Mason. The youngest. The one shaking in the hospital. The one who held the coffee cup like it was a grenade. He was the one who held her legs. He was the one who watched.

And tonight, he was going to be the first one to speak.

—————
I closed the safe, grabbed a black hoodie, and walked out into the night. The silence of the house didn’t bother me anymore because I knew, very soon, the silence would be broken by the sound of Mason screaming.

I drove to a 24-hour hardware store three towns over. I walked the aisles under the buzzing fluorescent lights, looking like any other contractor fixing a leak. I bought a roll of heavy-duty plastic sheeting, a box of industrial-strength zip ties, a staple gun, and a hammer. A heavy, claw-style framing hammer. I weighed it in my hand. It felt balanced. Solid.