My sixteen-year-old daughter squeezed my hand in terror when her arrogant martial arts instructor pointed at me in front of the entire class and announced that he wanted a “tired suburban mom in sweatpants” to demonstrate what happened when ordinary people challenged trained fighters. I tried to walk away, but when he cornered us and demanded a fight, he awakened something I had buried for thirteen years. “Fine,” I told him quietly. “But when this is over, you apologize to your students.”

The driver made a desperate reach for the glove compartment, but I closed the twenty-yard gap in four sprinting strides.

I leaped onto the hood of the SUV, the metal denting beneath my bare heels, and drove my heel through the driver-side window. The safety glass exploded in a shower of crystallized pebbles. My hand shot through the frame, catching the driver by his tactical collar, hauling his skull hard against the steel door pillar. He went limp, slumping over the steering wheel, the car horn blaring a long, deafening drone into the rainy suburban night.

The tablet man dropped his device, turned, and sprinted down the street toward the waiting Charger.

I didn't chase him. Let him run. A runner carries panic back to the hive, and a panicked enemy makes predictable mistakes.

I reached inside the wrecked SUV, severed the horn wire with a quick pull behind the steering column, and grabbed the dropped tablet from the wet pavement.

The screen was still unlocked. It showed a tactical dispatch map of our neighborhood, centered on our house, along with a secondary window streaming a private CCTV feed from an underground ring downtown—Vance's private fight club, operating out of the old railyard warehouse.

On the screen was a live video feed of Master Vance himself. He was older now, his hair silver at the temples, wearing a tailored three-piece suit while smoking a cigar at the edge of a cage. Next to him stood Jake, holding an ice pack to his swollen jaw, talking animatedly with his hands.

Vance had taken Jake's humiliation as an opportunity to hunt down the ghost that had vanished from his syndicate thirteen years ago with forty million dollars of his operational reserves.

I dragged the two unconscious men from my porch into the SUV, threw them in the back like sacks of mulch, put the vehicle in neutral, and pushed it down our sloped driveway until it rolled harmlessly into the drainage ditch at the corner.

The rain washed the blood from my knuckles as I walked back inside our ruined foyer.

The house was cold now, the front door hanging open on broken hinges.

"Sarah," I called out, my voice returning to its steady, motherly cadence. "Blueberry Pancake."

A quiet rustle sounded from the floor above. A moment later, Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs. She was trembling so violently she had to hold onto the banister with both hands. She looked down at the shattered glass, the blood spatter on the floral wallpaper, and the wet footprints leading back to her mother.