I came home from a Delta Force deployment and found my wife in the ICU with 31 fractures. “This wasn’t one moment of rage. It went on for a long time,” the doctor said. Then I stepped into the hallway and saw Victor Wolfe

Wolfe Mountain rose twelve hundred feet above the valley floor, shrouded in dense, tangled pine forests and jagged limestone bluffs. At the very summit sat the Wolfe Manor—a twelve-thousand-square-foot fortress of stone, timber, and bulletproof glass.

There was only one paved road leading up the mountain. It was blocked by a massive iron security gate flanked by two concrete guard towers.

At 4:00 AM, a cold autumn rain began to fall, turning the mountain clay into thick, slick red mud.

Inside the security gatehouse, Trent and Mason Wolfe were pacing like caged animals. They were wearing tactical vests over their civilian clothes, carrying customized AR-15 rifles.

"Garrett says the chopper lands at dawn," Mason muttered, checking his watch for the tenth time. "We pack the bearer bonds from the vault, we fly to the coast, and we're in the Cayman Islands by noon."

"What about Brody and Luke?" Trent snapped, his face pale with stress. "We just leave them in the hospital?"

"They're blown, Trent! The feds have Dock 4 crawling with agents right now! If we stay, we die in a federal supermax!"

Suddenly, the security monitors in the gatehouse flickered.

Camera 1—the lower gate—went to static.

Camera 2—the eastern perimeter fence—went black.

Trent raised his rifle, his knuckles turning white. "He's here."

"Who? Mercer? Through thirty armed mercenaries?" Mason sneered, though his voice cracked with terror. "He's one man!"

"He's not a man, Mason! Did you see what he did to Brody's knee?! Did you hear what Luke said on the radio before they hauled him off?!"

*THUD.*

A heavy sound echoed from the roof of the gatehouse.

Both brothers froze, their rifles pointed upward at the acoustic ceiling tiles.

"What was that?" Mason whispered.

A second passed. Two.

Then, the reinforced safety-glass window behind them shattered inward in an explosion of crystalline shrapnel.

Before the glass even touched the floor, a flashbang grenade rolled across the linoleum.

*BANG-FLASH.*

A blinding wall of magnesium light and a concussive blast of one hundred and eighty decibels tore through the tiny guard shack. Trent and Mason collapsed to their knees, clutching their ears, screams trapped in their throats as their equilibrium vanished into high-pitched ringing agony.

I dropped through the shattered window, landing silently on my boots amid the broken glass.

I didn't use the gun.

I stepped up to Mason Wolfe. As he blindly raised his rifle, I drove an open-palm strike directly into the center of his face. His nose broke with an audible crunch, sending blood spraying across his tactical vest.

*Five.*

Trent swung his rifle barrel blindly toward the sound. I caught the barrel, stripped the weapon from his hands with a circular disarm technique, and drove the heavy buttstock directly into his left collarbone.

*CRACK.*

The clavicle snapped clean through. Trent shrieked, collapsing against the control console, pressing buttons frantically with his uninjured hand, setting off the main estate siren.

*WHEEEEE-OOOOO.*

The wailing siren ripped through the mountain air, echoing across the bluffs, alerting every mercenary on the summit that the gate had fallen.

I pulled two pairs of steel handcuffs from my vest, cuffed Mason and Trent to the heavy steel pipes of the gatehouse radiator, and looked down at them through the red emergency lights.

Mason was spitting blood, sobbing. "Kill us! Just kill us, you psycho!"

"You don't get to die, Mason," I said coldly. "You get to sit in a federal penitentiary for the next forty years, eating off a plastic tray, knowing that your father traded your entire life for a few pieces of paper."

I walked over to the console, flipped the master switch that unlocked the main iron gates, and grabbed a handheld radio from Trent's belt.

I keyed the mic.

"Victor," I said into the channel.

A long, static-filled pause hung over the radio. Then, Victor Wolfe’s voice answered—raspy, furious, shaking with elderly rage:

"Mercer."

"Your gate is open," I said. "Six of your sons are broken. Send Garrett down to meet me, or I'm coming through your front door."

"You're a dead man, Daniel!" Victor screamed over the radio. "I have thirty men on this hill! You won't make it fifty yards past the tree line!"

"Thirty men," I said, looking out at the dark mountain road winding upward into the mist. "They're drawing forty dollars an hour, Victor. I'm doing this for free."