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 stared at the paper. A baby. We were having a baby.

“Victor couldn’t handle that,” Eleanor continued. “He wanted to wipe the slate clean. He wanted to kill the baby.”

“Did… did the baby survive?” I asked, my voice cracking.

Eleanor looked down. “The report from the ER said trauma to the abdomen. I don’t know, Hunter.”

I stood up. The rage I felt before was a candle flame. What I felt now was a nuclear explosion.

“Thank you, Eleanor. Go home. Lock your  doors.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to finish this. I’m going to kill them all.”

—————
The sun was bleeding into the sky—a bruised purple dawn—when I reached Victor’s estate. The “Fortress,” he called it. Twelve-foot walls, electrified wire, cameras.

I parked in the woods and moved on foot, scaling a massive oak tree that overhung the perimeter wall. I dropped onto the manicured lawn, moving like a ghost from shadow to shadow until I reached the main house.