Chapter Six
They came at dawn.
Three trucks rolling up the forest road in a convoy, headlights cutting through the gray morning light. Lockjaw counted bodies as they dismounted—ten men, armed, moving with the confidence of professionals who expected easy prey.
Bryce Hedlund stepped out of the lead truck with a smile on his face and a gas can in his hand.
Same can. Same smile. Same arrogance that said he thought this was already over.
He was wrong.
Lockjaw keyed his radio from his position in the tree line. "Contact. Ten hostiles, north approach. Bryce is leading."
"Copy." Tundra's voice was flat, professional. "ETA twelve minutes."
Twelve minutes. An eternity in combat time.
But Lockjaw had spent two days turning this clearing into a trap, and Bryce Hedlund was about to walk into every piece of it.
The first man hit the tripwire at the edge of the tree line.
The improvised noisemaker—cans filled with gravel, strung at ankle height—exploded with a crash that shattered the morning silence. The point man stumbled, cursing, and Lockjaw put a round through his shoulder before he could recover.
The clearing erupted.
Bryce's men scattered, looking for cover that didn't exist where Lockjaw expected them to look. The defensive positions he'd built channeled them toward the cabin, away from the trees, into the open ground where superior numbers meant nothing.
"Contact left!" someone screamed.
Lockjaw was already moving, circling through the forest with the silent efficiency of a man who'd learned to read pursuit patterns or die trying. Two of Bryce's men had taken cover behind the destroyed canoes—ironic, using her equipment as a shield—and he flanked them without being seen.
The first went down to a shot through the leg.
The second spun to face him and caught the butt of Lockjaw's rifle across his face. Teeth scattered. Blood sprayed. The man crumpled.
"Where the fuck is he?" Bryce's voice cut through the chaos, high and angry. "There's supposed to be one of them!"
There was one of them.
One man who'd spent two days learning every sight line, every approach, every piece of terrain that could be turned into a weapon.
One man who'd promised a woman with fire in her eyes that her property would be secured.
One man who had absolutely no intention of letting Bryce Hedlund burn anything else.
Lockjaw moved through the chaos like a ghost, putting down Bryce's men one by one.
A shot here, a strike there, the methodical violence of someone who'd learned that speed and precision beat numbers every time.
His repo instincts screamed warnings—two on your left, one circling behind, the guy with the shotgun is panicking—and he listened to every one.
Four men down in ninety seconds.
Six still standing, including Bryce.
The odds were getting better.
"Fall back!" Bryce screamed. "Fall back to the trucks!"
But the trucks were two hundred yards away, and Lockjaw had positioned himself between the surviving attackers and their escape route.
Engines roared in the distance.
The cavalry was coming.
Tundra hit the clearing like a force of nature.
Three bikes burst from the forest road—Tundra, Ironside, and Ice—cutting off the retreat and turning Bryce's organized assault into a rout. The remaining attackers found themselves caught between Lockjaw in the trees and three Savages on motorcycles, with nowhere to run and no cover worth using.
Two of them threw down their weapons immediately.
Smart.
The others learned the hard way.
Ironside dismounted and waded into the fight with a sledgehammer he'd pulled from somewhere, his massive frame absorbing hits that would have dropped a smaller man.
The first attacker who tried to stand against him caught the hammer across his ribs—Lockjaw heard the crack from thirty feet away—and the second went down to a backhand that lifted him off his feet.
Ice flanked left, cutting off an escape attempt with precision shooting that pinned two more men behind a stack of firewood. Tundra coordinated from the center, his military training turning chaos into controlled violence.
And through it all, Lockjaw hunted.
He'd lost track of Bryce in the initial chaos, but the lodge manager couldn't have gone far. The clearing was surrounded. The trucks were blocked. There was nowhere to run—
Movement near the gear shed.
Lockjaw spun to find Bryce Hedlund crouched behind the structure, gas can in hand, lighter flickering in his other fist. The shed held what remained of Tamsin's equipment—paddles, life jackets, the portable gear she'd managed to save from the canoe destruction.
Bryce was going to finish the job.
"Don't."
The word came out flat. Final. Lockjaw stepped into the open, tire iron in hand, making no attempt to hide.
Bryce looked up, and for the first time since the assault began, his confident smile cracked.
"You're supposed to be dead," Bryce said. "Ten men. We planned this for—"
"Two days." Lockjaw kept walking. "Same two days I spent turning this place into a trap. You mapped the approaches. I mapped the kill zones. Guess whose homework was better."
"Stay back." Bryce's thumb found the lighter's wheel. "I'll burn it. I'll burn everything she has left."
"You'll try."
"I'm serious—"
"So am I."
Lockjaw closed the distance in three strides.
Bryce's thumb sparked the lighter, but the tire iron was already moving—a vicious arc that caught the lodge manager's wrist and sent the flame spinning into the dirt. Bryce screamed, gas can dropping from nerveless fingers, and stumbled backward into the shed wall.
"She told you to get off her property." Lockjaw's voice was ice. "You didn't listen."
"Pruitt will—"
"Pruitt will get the same message. Eventually." He raised the tire iron. "But you won't be there to see it."
"Wait—"
The first blow caught Bryce across the temple, dropping him to his knees. The second opened a gash above his eye that painted half his face red. The third—
The third was for Tamsin.
For the canoes stabbed through with pikes. For the truck with sugar in the gas tank. For the gasoline and the threats and the arrogant assumption that a woman alone could be bullied into giving up everything she'd built.
Bryce Hedlund hit the ground and didn't get up.
His skull was caved in where the tire iron had landed, blood pooling in the dirt beside the gear shed he'd tried to burn. His eyes were open, surprised, like he still couldn't believe a repo man had outmaneuvered him.
Lockjaw stood over the body, breathing hard, tire iron dripping.
The clearing had gone quiet.
"Property secured."
Lockjaw's voice came out rough as he surveyed the aftermath. Seven of Bryce's men down—three dead, four wounded and restrained. The other three had surrendered the moment they'd seen Ironside's sledgehammer work, and were currently zip-tied near the trucks with Ice standing guard.
"Casualties?" Permafrost's voice crackled through the radio.
"None of ours. Bryce is dead. Seven of his people accounted for, three fled into the forest."
"Let them run. They'll carry the message back to Pruitt." A pause. "The woman's property?"
Lockjaw looked at the cabin—intact, untouched, exactly where he'd promised it would be. The gear shed behind him still stood, Bryce's gas can lying uselessly in the dirt.
"Secured."
"Good work. Bring the wounded to Ely, let the local doc patch them up. Leave the dead for Pruitt to collect." Permafrost's voice carried something that might have been approval. "Then get back to the compound. Church in two hours."
"Copy."
The radio went silent.
Tundra appeared at his shoulder, surveying the scene with the professional detachment of a man who'd seen worse in Afghanistan.
"Clean work," the VP said. "Your positions held."
"They came exactly where I expected."
"That's not luck. That's reading the enemy." Tundra's eyes found the body by the shed. "Bryce?"
"Tried to torch her equipment. I stopped him."
"Permanently."
"Yeah."
Tundra was quiet for a moment.
"You know this isn't over. Pruitt's lost his lodge manager, but he's got more muscle. Duluth enforcers. Local hires. He'll escalate."
"I know."
"You ready for that?"
Lockjaw looked at the tire iron in his hand—blood-stained, heavy, the same tool he'd used a hundred times to pry open doors and disable steering columns. Different work now. Different reasons.
Violence for a finance company had always tasted like ash.
Violence for someone he was choosing to protect tasted like victory.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm ready."
Tundra clapped him on the shoulder and moved to help Ironside with the prisoners.
Lockjaw stood alone in the clearing, staring at Bryce's body, and let himself feel the weight of what he'd done.
Bryce Hedlund had been Pruitt's right hand. His day-to-day operations coordinator. The man who'd identified Tamsin as a problem and orchestrated the campaign to destroy her business.
Now he was cooling meat in the Minnesota morning.
And Pruitt—the man who'd ordered all of it, who thought money could solve everything, who'd built a decade-long operation on the assumption that witnesses could be eliminated without consequence—was about to learn that his confidence had been misplaced.
The Savages were coming for him.
And Lockjaw was leading the charge.
He keyed the radio one final time, jaw clenched tight with the particular satisfaction of a job well done.
"Property secured. Threat assessment escalating. Heading back to compound."
Somewhere in the distance, the three men who'd fled were carrying a message to Gordon Pruitt.
The message was simple:
The Savages remember whose territory this is.
And they're just getting started.