Chapter 7 - An Unwelcome Visitor
I struck before his heel hit the floorboards.
My left hand flashed out, driving two rigid fingers directly into the soft triangle above his clavicle, collapsing his brachial plexus and shutting down the motor function in his right arm. The pistol dropped from his numbed fingers.
Before the weapon could hit the hardwood, my right foot caught it mid-air, kicking it sliding across the floor into the living room.
The man gasped, his eyes bulging as his body tried to process the shock, but I was already inside his space. I grabbed his lapel with my towel-wrapped fist, twisted my hips, and smashed my elbow upward into the hinge of his jaw with the sound of a dry branch snapping.
He went limp instantly. I caught his dead weight before he could collapse, dragging his body into the shadows beneath the coat rack.
"Clear," I grunted in a low, gravelly rasp, mimicking his gravelly baritone.
"Entry two," a voice whispered from the porch.
The second man stepped through the doorway, his weapon raised, his eyes scanning low.
I didn't give him the chance to adjust. I lunged from the gloom, sweeping the heavy wooden umbrella stand across his shins. He cursed, stumbling forward, his weapon firing a single suppressed *pfft* into the baseboard.
I stepped into his guard, seizing his gun wrist with both hands, twisting it clockwise with violent, merciless torque. The bones in his wrist separated with a sickening crunch. He opened his mouth to scream, but my forehead slammed forward into the bridge of his nose in a brutal, concise headbutt.
Blood sprayed across the foyer wall. He crashed backward onto the porch mat, unconscious before his head hit the welcome sign.
Two down. Twenty seconds elapsed.
I stepped out onto the porch into the pouring rain.
The remaining two men by the SUV froze. The driver had one hand on his door handle; the other man was holding an open tablet displaying a live satellite feed of our block.
They stared at me—a woman in sweatpants and a tank top, drenched in rain, standing over two fallen operators who had completed tours in Kandahar.
"Where is Vance?" I asked, my voice cutting through the drumming rain like a blade.
The man with the tablet swallowed, his swagger evaporating into the autumn chill. "He... he's at the downtown facility. He wants the debt settled, Lily. You can't kill all of us."
May you like
"I don't need to kill all of you," I said, stepping off the porch into the grass. "Just enough of you so that the rest remember why you were ordered never to say my name."
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