I looked back at Tessa. I gently lifted her arm, the one that wasn’t in a cast. I looked at her fingernails. They were clean.
“Detective,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “My wife is a fighter. She takes kickboxing classes three times a week. If a stranger broke into our home and attacked her, she would have clawed his eyes out. There would be skin under her nails. There would be defensive wounds on her forearms.” I pointed to her smooth arms. “She didn’t fight back. Which means she knew the person. She let them get close. Or she was held down.”
The detective’s eyes flickered toward the window, toward Victor. It was a micro-expression, a tiny split-second of fear. I caught it.
“We are investigating all leads,” Miller said, sweating now. “But the father, Mr. Victor… he has been very helpful. He hired a private security team to watch the house now.”
“I bet he did,” I said.
I walked out of the room. The seven brothers stopped talking as I approached. Victor looked at me with cold, dead eyes.
“Tragedy,” Victor said flatly. “But we will take care of her. Hunter, you have done your duty. You can go back to your base. We have the best doctors money can buy.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“She’s my daughter!” Victor snapped, his voice rising. “And you are just a husband who is never there. You weren’t there to protect her. I’m handling this.”
I stepped close to him. I was three inches taller than him and carried fifty pounds more muscle than his security guards.
“That’s the problem, Victor,” I whispered so only he could hear. “You’re handling it too well. You don’t look sad. You look inconvenienced.”
Victor’s eye twitched. I looked at the brothers. Seven strong, capable men, yet not a single scratch on any of them. But I noticed something else. Mason. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the floor. His hands were shaking. He was holding a coffee cup, and the liquid inside was rippling.
“A robbery,” I said loud enough for all of them to hear. “That’s the story. Some junkie broke in and hit her. How many times?”
I looked at the medical chart I had swiped from the end of the bed.
“Thirty-one times,” I read aloud. “Thirty-one strikes with a blunt object. Probably a hammer.” I looked at Grant, then Ian, then Dominic. “A robber hits once to knock you down. Twice to keep you down. Thirty-one times…” I shook my head. “Thirty-one times is personal. Thirty-one times is hate.”
“Watch your mouth,” Dominic warned, stepping forward again.
“I’m going to find who did this,” I said, looking directly at Victor. “And when I do, I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to do what I was trained to do.”
I turned my back on them and walked toward the exit. I needed air, but more than that, I needed to get back to the house. The detective said it was a robbery, but my gut—the same instinct that kept me alive in the mountains of Afghanistan—told me the enemy wasn’t some stranger in the dark.
The enemy was standing in the waiting room. And they had made one fatal mistake.
They didn’t kill her. And they didn’t kill me.
—————-
The drive back to the house felt like a funeral procession of one. The streetlights flickered past my windshield like strobes, counting down the seconds until I had to face the reality of what happened in my own dining room.
I parked my truck on the curb, killing the engine. The house sat there in the dark, silent and accusing. The police tape strung across the front door was already sagging, fluttering lazily in the cold wind. It felt like the cops had already decided this crime wasn’t worth the effort of a tight knot.
I ducked under the yellow tape and pushed the front door open. The house was freezing. The heating must have been turned off, or maybe the cold just lived here now. I didn’t turn on the main lights. I flipped the switch on my tactical flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air—dust kicked up by a struggle.
I walked straight to the dining room. In the hospital, I was a husband. Here, in the dark, I was an operator. I needed to switch off the part of my brain that loved Tessa and switch on the part that analyzed kill zones.
I knelt down near the spot where the bleach smell was strongest. The wood was warped from the chemicals, but the stain was deep. I traced the outer edge of the splatter with my gloved finger.
“Low velocity,” I whispered to the empty room.
If a stranger strikes you in a panic, they swing wide and wild. The blood flies in long, thin arcs, casting patterns on the walls. I shone my light on the walls. They were clean. That meant the blows were vertical. Straight down. Controlled. Someone hadn’t been fighting her here. They had been punishing her.
I moved to the center of the stain. There were four distinct scuff marks on the floor around the blood pool. Boot marks. Heavy treads. I placed my own boot next to one. It was a match for size, maybe an 11 or 12. But there wasn’t just one set. There were scuffs at the head, scuffs at the arms, scuffs at the legs.
They had pinned her.
“Seven sons,” I muttered, bile rising in my throat. “And one father.”
I could see the geometry of the violence now. It wasn’t a fight. It was an execution that stopped just short of death.
I stood up, breathing heavily. I needed proof. Detective Miller clearly wasn’t going to look for it. Victor had likely bought the department a new fleet of cruisers years ago. If I wanted justice, I had to find what the cops were paid to ignore.
Why here? Why the dining room?
Tessa was smart. Smarter than me, certainly smarter than her brothers. She knew who her family was. She had told me once, right before I deployed: “Hunter, my father is getting paranoid. He thinks I know too much about the shipping containers at the docks. If anything ever happens, check the table.”
