Chapter 15 Sixteen Bodies And A Kitten
Sixteen Bodies And A Kitten
~HAWK~
Iclear the back fence in a single motion—hands on the top rail, body over, boots hitting compacted earth on the other side before the momentum of the jump has finished traveling through my frame.
Seconds.
I’m seconds from the back door.
The dull, hollow silence that wraps the building is the kind that has weight—the particular absence of sound that occurs when an environment that should contain noise has been forcibly emptied of it.
No voices. No movement. No ambient hum of residential activity from the surrounding units.
Just the ringing in my ears—the persistent, high-frequency whine that my auditory system generates after sustained weapons discharge, a tinnitus that operates as the body’s receipt for violence performed and is currently itemizing tonight’s expenditures with meticulous, unwanted clarity.
The silence grows louder with every step I take toward the building.
Whatever backup team was staged at the perimeter—the second wave, positioned at strategic intervals around Victoria’s townhome in the particular formation that says we expect the first team to fail and are here to finish what they start—are all dead.
Every one of them. Fifteen armed operatives distributed across the compound’s rear quadrant, utilizing cover positions behind hedgerow and utility structures and the shadowed recesses between buildings where the lamplight doesn’t reach.
I shot each of them before they noticed I’d arrived.
Not bragging. Stating operational fact. The golden gun with the metallic red script—my father’s weapon, the one inheritance he left that was worth keeping—performed its function with the reliability I expect of it, and my hands performed theirs.
Fifteen targets. Fifteen rounds. The math is clean because the math has to be clean when the variable on the other side of the building is the only person who makes the mathematics of my existence produce a positive sum.
Fifteen.
As a second wave.
Which means the first wave was at least that.
My stomach tousles with something that I don’t usually permit access to my conscious awareness—fear.
Not the operational variety, not the productive, adrenaline-adjacent alertness that combat generates and that I channel into performance.
This is the other kind. The kind that has nothing to do with my own survival and everything to do with the survival of someone I can’t currently see or hear or smell, someone who is inside a building that thirty-plus armed operatives have been sent to breach, someone who is strong—
My Precious is strong.
I know this.
I’ve watched her dismantle ten. I’ve seen her handle twelve—bruised, bleeding, standing over a floor of broken men with brass knuckles that needed cleaning and a pulse that needed checking but still on her feet, still breathing, still Victoria.
But fifteen is pushing it.
And I don’t know what the first wave numbered.
I reach the back door. It’s intact—locked, undisturbed, which tells me the breach team entered from the front and didn’t bother with a secondary entry point.
Arrogant. Sloppy. The kind of tactical oversight that gets people killed, and based on the silence emanating from inside, it got several of them killed by a woman in tights and a tank top.
I bypass the lock in two seconds—Victoria’s back-door mechanism is keyed to both of us, a modification I installed during my second month of being unable to sleep unless I knew I could reach her in under three minutes from any position in the compound—and the door swings inward on oiled hinges that make no sound because I oiled them for exactly this category of arrival.
The kitchen.
Dark. The pendant lamp has been shattered—glass on the counter, on the floor, the amber light replaced by whatever weak illumination the exterior lampposts push through the window I can see is still closed.
She closed it. Before they arrived. Noticed the movement, closed the window, prepared.
The thought produces a flicker of pride that I file away for later because later is when feelings get processed and now is when bodies get counted.
The smell hits me before the visual details resolve.
Blood. Multiple sources—the metallic, copper-iron scent of arterial spray layered over the thicker, more organic smell of wounds that have been bleeding long enough for the blood to begin its chemical transition from liquid to gel.
Beneath the blood: gunpowder residue, the acrid signature of discharged firearms. Beneath that: the faint, persistent baseline of Victoria’s scent—cold iris and night rain—threading through the violence like a melody underneath noise.
She’s still here.
Or was recently.
The scent is too strong for absence.
I’m rushing through the kitchen toward the sitting room when footsteps behind me announce that the three Alphas managed to keep up. The fact registers with mild surprise—I was moving at a pace that doesn’t typically accommodate companions—and then Dominic enters.
And trips.
Over two bodies stacked in the kitchen’s narrow corridor—large men, armored, their tactical gear blood-soaked, their limbs arranged in the particular disarray of people who were taken down fast and close and didn’t have time to assume defensive positions before the fight was over.
Dominic catches himself on the counter, his hands slapping marble, his body lurching forward with enough momentum that he barely avoids face-planting into the pool of blood that has spread from the bodies’ collective wounds across the kitchen tile in a dark, viscous lake.
He curses.
Looks at me. His aged-whiskey eyes carry a question that involves the words what the fuck arranged in a sequence that his face communicates even though his mouth doesn’t produce it—
My finger is already at my lips.
Pressed. Firm. The universal signal for shut up that bypasses language and culture and the particular communication barriers that exist between a feral Alpha who is currently operating at approximately seventy percent of his rational capacity and a Prime Alpha who has just discovered that the floor is made of dead people.
There’s still life in this silent house.
I can feel it.
Not see it. Not hear it. Feel it—the feral’s environmental awareness operating on frequencies that conscious perception doesn’t access, the particular sensitivity to biological presence that my deteriorated neurology produces as compensation for the rational function it’s in the process of consuming.
The twins arrive behind Dominic.
Unlike their Prime, they walk slowly. Deliberately.
Their footfalls are so precisely controlled that they produce essentially no acoustic signature—a skill that I clock immediately as professional rather than instinctive, the product of training that prioritized stealth as a survival mechanism rather than an aesthetic choice.
Smart. The smarter of the three-man unit by a considerable margin in this specific context.
I take the lead.
Through the sitting room, where the damage is more extensive—the vinyl player overturned, records scattered across the floor like dark, circular casualties, the bookshelf that held Victoria’s modest collection of volumes toppled against the far wall.
Furniture displaced. The sitting room’s single window cracked but not breached.
Two more bodies on the floor here—one slumped against the baseboard with a wound pattern that says brass knuckles to the temple, the other face-down in a position that suggests the fall was the last thing he did and the knife wound in his neck was the reason.
That’s my girl.
The chaos these fuckers inflicted on her space is comprehensive.
Drawers pulled. Surfaces swept. The systematic, destructive search pattern of operatives looking for something specific while simultaneously eliminating the person who possesses it.
Obviously, there wasn’t much here to find.
Victoria never treated this townhome as permanent—never invested in it the way people invest in spaces they expect to keep, never filled it with the accumulation of objects that turns a residence into a home.
Because this was never her home. This was a holding cell with better furniture, a waiting room between the life she’d been forced to live and the life she might someday be permitted to choose.
She was here to get her chance at freedom.
And these fuckers wanted to kill her before she could have it.
I hold back a growl.
The sound builds in my chest—low, involuntary, the feral’s response to a threat against his territory and the person who occupies it.
I suppress it through the sheer application of will that constitutes my daily practice of keeping the other version of myself contained.
The growl recedes. Barely. The feral recedes with it.
Barely. Both of them are right there, right at the surface, waiting for the trigger that gives them permission to stop pretending they’re not the dominant operating system.
I ascend the stairs.
Silent. The staircase’s acoustic map is stored in my muscle memory—third step from the bottom, higher pitch, slight lateral give; avoid.
Fifth step, compressed wood, silent; use.
I navigate the sequence with the unconscious precision of a man who has climbed these stairs hundreds of times in the dark, in the quiet, in the specific hours between midnight and dawn when the only reason to be here is the woman sleeping in the room at the top.
The scent thickens as I climb.