Chapter 4 - The Wolves Gather
Claire was still unconscious when Ethan arrived at the ICU.
Her face was still swollen, still purple and black and yellow with bruises. Her breathing was shallow, assisted by the machine beside her bed. The doctors said she was stable. They said the worst was over. But Ethan knew better. He could see it in the way her hand trembled when he held it. In the faint, almost imperceptible frown that touched her lips even in sleep.
She was fighting. Not just for her life. But against the nightmares.
He sat beside her, holding her cold hand in both of his, and whispered to her. Told her about Marcus. About Caleb. Told her that the men who’d hurt her were already paying for what they’d done. Told her that he wasn’t going to stop until every single one of them was in the ground or in a cell.
He stayed for an hour. Maybe two. He lost track of time when he was with her.
Eventually, though, he had to leave. He had work to do.
He kissed her forehead gently, whispered that he loved her, and walked out into the hallway.
That was when they struck.
Four men. Big men. Dressed in plain black, their faces hidden by hoods and baseball caps. They came at him from three directions—from the stairwell, from the elevator, from the waiting room at the end of the hall. Moving fast. Silent. Professionals.
Not the local thugs the Blackwoods usually hired. These were men who’d done this before. Men who knew how to make a body disappear in a hospital where hundreds of people came and went every day.
Ethan didn’t panic.
He’d been in worse situations. With less warning. Against more men.
He moved first.
He grabbed the heavy metal fire extinguisher off the wall beside him and swung it with every ounce of strength he had. It connected with the first man’s head with a sickening crack. The man dropped like a stone, out cold before he hit the floor.
The second man threw a punch. Ethan ducked, drove his elbow into the man’s throat, and then slammed his knee into his groin. The man gagged and doubled over. Ethan finished him with a sharp blow to the back of the neck.
Two down in three seconds.
The third and fourth men hesitated. They hadn’t expected this. They’d been told he was just a security consultant. A discharged soldier. Out of shape. Out of practice.
They’d been lied to.
Ethan didn’t give them time to recover. He charged the third man, tackling him through the double doors of the nearby supply closet. They crashed into shelves of bandages and antiseptic, bottles shattering everywhere. The man swung a knife at him—short, sharp, deadly. Ethan caught his wrist, twisted it until he heard the snap, and then drove the man’s own knife into his thigh. Not deep enough to kill. Just deep enough to take the fight out of him.
He turned to face the fourth man just as the man raised a gun.
Silenced. Black. Pointed right at Ethan’s chest.
“Don’t move,” the man said. His voice was flat. Professional. “This ends here, Walker. You should have stayed in Oregon. You should have let sleeping dogs lie.”
Ethan didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He just stared the man in the eyes.
“Who sent you?” he said. “Victor? Or was it the brothers?”
The man smiled. Cold. Empty. “You think it matters? Dead is dead. And you’re a dead man walking. You’ve made a lot of powerful enemies this week, Mr. Walker. They all want you gone. And they’re all willing to pay very well to make it happen.”
He tightened his finger on the trigger.
Ethan didn’t wait.
He’d been moving the whole time—slowly, imperceptibly shifting his weight, reaching behind him with his left hand. He grabbed the first thing his fingers touched—a heavy glass jar of rubbing alcohol—and threw it right at the man’s face.
The man flinched. His gun hand jerked up.
The bullet went through the ceiling tiles, sending a shower of plaster down on both of them.
Ethan was on him before the echo died away. He disarmed the man with a quick, brutal twist of the wrist, drove the butt of the gun into his temple, and then slammed him face-first into the cinder block wall.
The man slid to the floor, unconscious.
Silence returned to the hallway.
Ethan stood there for a second, breathing hard, his heart hammering against his ribs. Blood trickled down his forehead from a cut he hadn’t even noticed. His knuckles were split. His shoulder ached where the first man had managed to land a lucky blow before going down.
He was getting too old for this.
Or maybe he was just getting tired.
The sound of running footsteps echoed down the hall. Nurses. Doctors. Security. The police. They’d heard the gunshot. They’d seen the four men lying on the floor.
Ethan didn’t wait for them.
He dropped the gun, wiped his fingerprints off it with the edge of his shirt, and slipped into the stairwell before anyone could round the corner. He took the stairs two at a time, out the back exit, and into the parking garage.
His car was still there. But it wasn’t alone.
Two more black SUVs were parked beside it. Men were leaning against them, watching the stairwell doors. Waiting.
Ethan changed direction.
He didn’t go to his car. He went deeper into the garage, toward the service exit, moving between the rows of cars like a ghost. He stole a set of keys from an unlocked pickup truck—old, beat-up, brown, the kind of car no one would ever notice—and drove out of the garage before the men by his car realized what had happened.
He was halfway across the city before he allowed himself to think.
The attack at the hospital changed everything.
Up until now, it had been a war of secrets and evidence and public humiliation. Ethan had been picking them off one by one, using their own weaknesses against them. But now they’d stopped playing by the rules. Now they’d decided to just kill him. Simple. Clean. Efficient.
And they wouldn’t stop at one attempt.
They’d keep coming. At the hospital. At his house. At the grocery store. Wherever he went, whatever he did, there would be men with guns and knives and orders to put him in the ground.
Ethan gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.
Fine.
If that was how they wanted to play it, then so be it. He’d been trying to do this the right way. The legal way. The way Claire would have wanted him to—with evidence and courts and justice served by the system.
But the system was broken. The Blackwoods owned it. And now they’d shown they were willing to kill anyone who stood in their way.
No more rules.
No more holding back.
Ethan pulled into the parking lot of a cheap motel on the edge of town, paid cash for a room, and locked himself inside. He pulled out the files on the remaining five brothers and spread them across the bed.
Daniel. Gideon. Jonah. Levi. Eli.
Five men. Five more secrets. Five more ways to destroy a life.
But this time, he wasn’t going to wait for them to make the first move. This time, he was going to hit them. All of them. At once. So hard and so fast that they wouldn’t have time to call for help, wouldn’t have time to hire more killers, wouldn’t have time to do anything but burn.
He picked up the burner phone and dialed the number again.
The same woman answered. “I told you not to contact us, Mr. Walker.”
“I need more,” Ethan said. “I need everything you have on the remaining Blackwood sons. And I need it now. Money is no object. Just get it to me.”
A pause. Then, “You have made them very angry. They have doubled the contract on your life. There are now three separate teams hunting you. You will not survive if you stay in Austin.”
“I’m not leaving,” Ethan said. “Not until it’s over. Now send me the files.”
He hung up.
Thirty minutes later, there was a soft knock on the door. Ethan opened it, gun drawn, to find a plain manila envelope sitting on the doormat. No one was in the hall. No one was on the stairs. Just the envelope.
He brought it inside, tore it open, and started reading.
And as he read, a plan began to form in his mind. A terrible, beautiful, devastating plan that would bring the entire Blackwood dynasty crashing down in one single, explosive night.
It was risky. It was dangerous. It was almost certainly suicidal.
But it was also perfect.
Because the Blackwoods thought they were the predators. They thought they were the wolves hunting a lone, wounded soldier.
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They had no idea that the soldier was the one who’d been hunting them all along.
And the hunt was about to end.
