Tori thought she could leave four children with me while she flew to Japan, but she forgot one important detail: I had a flight of my own that afternoon, and I wasn't canceling it this time. / Chapter 33 / 131

Chapter 33 - The Struggle in the Sleet

The sleet was falling hard now, turning the flagstones of the back patio into an ice-slicked trap.

Marcus and the hooded man tumbled across the terrace, thrashing in a tangled heap of limbs, mud, and rain. The intruder was younger, faster, and driven by the reckless ferocity of someone who had nothing left to lose. He brought an elbow down against Marcus’s temple, knocking the flashlight free. It rolled across the grass, casting eerie, rotating shadows up into the bare branches of the oak trees.

"Get off him!" Caleb’s voice suddenly tore through the rain.

I didn't even see my son push past Patrice. Caleb, who had spent years shrinking into the corners of rooms whenever Tori raised her voice, who had avoided every conflict, who had allowed his children to be weaponized against his own mother—Caleb charged out into the freezing sleet like a wounded bull.

He tackled the intruder from behind, wrapping both arms around the man's neck and dragging him off Marcus.

"Caleb, watch his hands!" Marcus coughed, spitting blood and mud as he scrambled back to his feet.

The hooded man let out a snarling curse, twisting violently. A blade glinted in the half-light—a short, serrated hunting knife pulled from his waist. He swung it blindly backward, catching Caleb across the forearm. Caleb cried out in pain, but he did not let go. Instead, he tightened his grip, driving his knee savagely into the man's lower spine until the three of them went crashing into the iron patio furniture.

*Click.*

The intruder froze.

The cold muzzle of Arthur’s service revolver was pressed directly against the man's ear.

"Drop the knife," I said. My voice did not shake. The wind whipped my white hair across my eyes, but my hands were steady—steadier than they had been in forty years. "Drop it into the mud, or I will end this right where you stand."

The man went rigid. The feral breath hissed through his mask. Slowly, his fingers unclenched. The serrated knife slipped into the sodden grass with a dull splash.

Marcus was on him an instant later. He drove his knee into the man's shoulder blades, wrenching his arms behind his back with the brutal efficiency of an officer making a felony arrest. Steel handcuffs clicked around the intruder’s wrists with two sharp, definitive snaps.

Marcus ripped the neck gaiter down and tore the hood back.

The flashlight beam caught the face of a man in his late thirties, his skin sallow, eyes bloodshot and darting in frantic panic.

It wasn't a stranger.

"Jason," Caleb breathed, clutching his bleeding arm against his chest, staring down at the man in pure horror. "Jason... you're Tori’s cousin."

"She promised me fifty grand," Jason spat, coughing against the mud. "She swore the old bastard left it in the cellar! She said you were just an old widow who wouldn't do a damn thing!"