Chapter 7
Blizzard heard them coming a full minute before they reached the door.
Too many vehicles for a normal patrol. Too coordinated for random traffic.
Blizzard set down his book and pulled his phone from his pocket. One text to Alpha: Company. Eight plus. Moving now.
Then he crossed to the stairs and climbed silently to the second floor.
Wendy's door was closed. He opened it without knocking and found her sitting up in bed, eyes wide, Hemingway clutched against her chest like a furry shield.
"Something's wrong," she whispered.
"Mrazek found us. Stay here. Lock the door. Don't come out until I tell you it's clear."
"Blizzard—"
"Stay here." He held her gaze, letting her see the cold certainty in his eyes. "I'll handle it."
She nodded once, fear and trust warring in her expression. He closed the door and heard the lock click behind him.
Good. She listened when it mattered.
He moved back downstairs as headlights swept across the front windows. Three vehicles—two sedans and a van—parking in a loose formation that blocked the street. Doors opened. Men emerged.
Eight of them. Armed. Moving with the confidence of a crew that expected to find a librarian and a cat.
They had no idea what was waiting for them.
Blizzard positioned himself in the front hallway, back against the wall, sightlines on both the front door and the kitchen entrance. The darkness wrapped around him like a second skin.
He heard Mrazek's voice through the front door—low, commanding, directing his men. Two to the back. Two on the side entrance. Four through the front.
Standard breach pattern. Predictable.
Glass shattered somewhere at the rear of the house. The side door splintered.
And then the front door exploded inward.
The first man through died before he processed the shadow moving in the hallway.
Blizzard caught him with a knife to the throat, one hand clamped over his mouth to muffle the gurgle. He lowered the body and stepped over it as the second man stumbled through the doorway.
This one had time to raise his weapon.
Not enough time to use it.
Blizzard drove his elbow into the man's temple, felt bone crack, watched him crumple. The third man fired blind into the darkness—muzzle flash strobing the hallway—but Blizzard was already moving, already inside his guard, already putting him down with brutal efficiency.
Gunfire erupted outside. Alpha and Razor hitting the street team, right on schedule. The Wolves had been positioned two blocks away, waiting for Blizzard's signal. They'd arrived in the chaos of the breach, catching Mrazek's backup from behind.
More glass shattered in the kitchen. The side entrance team.
Blizzard moved through the living room, stepping over bodies, tracking sound. Two men in the kitchen, maybe three. One of them breathing hard, scared. The other giving orders in a voice Blizzard recognized.
Mrazek.
Good.
He reached the kitchen doorway as the first of the side team came through. Young, twitchy, firing at shadows. Blizzard took him apart with three precise strikes—throat, knee, temple—and let him fall.
The second man tried to run. Didn't make it to the back door.
And then it was just Mrazek, climbing through the shattered kitchen window with a gun in his hand and murder in his eyes.
He saw Blizzard and froze.
"You."
"Me."
Mrazek raised his weapon. Blizzard moved.
The gun went off—once, twice—but Blizzard was already past the barrel, already inside the kill zone where firearms became liabilities. He caught Mrazek's wrist and twisted until bone snapped. The gun clattered to the floor.
Mrazek screamed and swung with his other hand.
Blizzard blocked. Countered. Drove his fist into Mrazek's ribs with enough force to splinter them.
The bigger man staggered. Tried to retreat. Found his back against the kitchen counter with nowhere to go.
"You think this ends anything?" Mrazek spat blood and smiled through crimson teeth. "Dante's got a dozen men. He'll burn this whole neighborhood to get what he wants."
"Let him try."
Blizzard's hand closed around Mrazek's throat.
"You threatened a woman," he said, his voice flat and cold as a frozen lake. "Left dead animals in her store. Described her routine like you were planning her murder."
"She should have taken the deal—"
"You threatened her cat."
Something shifted in Blizzard's expression. Not anger—he didn't do anger. Something colder. Something that had frozen solid in a mountain pass and never quite thawed.
"That was a mistake."
He squeezed.
Mrazek's eyes bulged. His hands clawed at Blizzard's grip, but he might as well have been trying to pry apart steel. The kitchen fell silent except for the wet sounds of a man choking on his last breaths.
It took longer than the movies suggested. Blizzard counted the seconds—eighteen, nineteen, twenty—until Mrazek's body went limp and his eyes went empty.
He let the corpse drop and stepped back, breathing steady, heart rate unchanged.
The kitchen was a wreck. Blood on the counters, glass on the floor, bodies sprawled in positions that would give a forensics team nightmares.
Not his problem.
Alpha met him at the front door, Razor a step behind. Both men were spattered with evidence of the street fight, but neither looked injured.
"Clean?" Alpha asked.
"Clean. Mrazek's done."
"His backup too. Scout's got a cleanup crew incoming." Alpha surveyed the hallway, the bodies, the destruction. "Dante's going to know we moved."
"Good. Let him."
Razor stepped over a corpse and peered into the kitchen. "Jesus. You did all this in the dark?"
"Works better that way."
"Remind me never to piss you off." Razor shook his head. "The woman?"
"Upstairs. Safe."
"You should go tell her." Alpha's voice carried something that might have been amusement in a man who showed amusement. "She's probably wondering if you're dead."
Blizzard climbed the stairs, leaving the carnage behind.
The hallway was dark, but he could see a thin line of light beneath Wendy's door. She was awake. Waiting.
He knocked once.
"It's me."
The lock clicked. The door opened.
Wendy stood in the doorway, Hemingway still clutched against her chest, her face pale but her eyes steady. She looked past him, toward the stairs, toward the sounds of brothers moving through the wreckage below.
"Is it over?" she asked.
"For tonight."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
She studied him—his face, his hands, his clothes. Looking for damage that wasn't there. Looking for proof that he'd just walked through violence and emerged unchanged.
"You killed them," she said quietly. Not a question.
"Yes."
No apology. No justification. Just the truth, delivered in the same flat voice he used for everything.
Wendy let out a breath that shook. "I should be scared of you."
"Are you?"
She was quiet for a long moment. Hemingway squirmed in her arms, demanding to be set down. She let him go, and the cat immediately trotted toward Blizzard and wound between his legs, purring.
"No," she said finally. "I'm not scared of you."
"That might be a mistake."
"Hemingway doesn't think so." She looked down at the cat, then back up at Blizzard. "And he's a better judge of character than I am."
Something loosened in Blizzard's chest. That frozen thing that had been thawing since she first laughed at his joke about her cat.
"We're moving you to the compound," he said. "Tonight. Dante's going to retaliate, and this place isn't defensible anymore."
"Okay."
"You're not going to argue?"
"Would it do any good?"
"No."
"Then okay." Wendy crossed her arms, and something almost like a smile ghosted across her face. "But Hemingway comes."
"Hemingway always comes." Blizzard bent down and scooped the cat into his arms. The orange demon settled against his chest like he belonged there. "Get dressed. We leave in ten."
He turned and walked back toward the stairs, carrying a cat that had never let anyone hold him, leaving behind a woman who should have been terrified but wasn't.
Downstairs, Alpha watched him descend with a knowing look.
"She good?"
"She's good."
"And the cat?"
Blizzard looked down at Hemingway, who had started purring loud enough to hear from across the room.
"The cat's coming with us."
Alpha laughed—short, sharp, genuine. "Never thought I'd see it. Blizzard going soft over a bookstore owner and her demon cat."
"Not soft." Blizzard's voice didn't change. "Just thawing."
He walked past his president and out into the cold November night, where cleanup crews were already making bodies disappear and brothers were loading bikes for the ride to the compound.
Mrazek was dead. The first message sent.
Now it was time to send more.