Chapter 14 - Steel and Smoke
The mercenary leveled the shotgun at the kitchen archway, but I threw myself forward, tackling him around the midsection before he could depress the trigger. The blast went wide, shredding the ceiling rafters into sawdust.
We hit the flagstone floor hard. The man weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, packed with dense muscle. He slammed his armored elbow into my ribs, driving the breath from my lungs, and reached for a combat blade sheathed horizontally across his tactical belt.
I caught his wrist inches from my throat, feeling the raw, desperate power of a trained killer. He twisted, trying to pin me down, his face inches from mine—his eyes wild with adrenaline.
"You should have stayed buried with your daddy, Sinclair!" he snarled, spitting blood onto my cheek.
"My father died with honor," I hissed, leveraging my hips and snapping an arm-bar across his extended elbow.
The sound of bone fracturing popped like dry kindling.
The mercenary screamed, dropping the blade. I rolled swiftly on top of him, drove my palm into his nasal bone with crushing force, and stripped the sidearm from his hip, pressing the cold barrel between his eyes.
"Who coordinates your exfil?" I demanded, my voice freezing the air in the wrecked room.
He coughed, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips, but he grinned with bloody teeth. "Too late, captain... Kane isn't waiting in the mountains. He's already on the water. Three miles out... on the *Sovereign Leviathan*... Catherine’s private superyacht. He has the servers. He has the satellite uplink. By morning, your names are on every federal red notice for Catherine’s murder..."
"Then he won't be surprised when I arrive," I said coldly.
I knocked him unconscious with the butt of the weapon, grabbed his tactical comms unit, and secured his zip-tied limbs in under ten seconds.
Rosalie appeared in the doorway, her weapon lowered, taking in the devastation of our home. Her breathing was ragged, but she walked forward, stepping over the debris without flinching. She looked at the mercenary, then at me.
"A superyacht?" she asked, her voice steadying. "Catherine owned one. The *Aegis Sovereign*. She bought it through an offshore maritime company three years ago. It’s registered in the Marshall Islands. It has its own heli-pad, encrypted communications bunker, and private security dock."
"Briggs!" I snapped into my encrypted radio, pulling up the comms channel.
"Sinclair! Sitrep! We intercepted chatter—"
"I have six hostiles down at my residence," I cut him off. "Kane is offshore on Catherine’s mega-yacht, running the operation outside federal maritime boundaries. I need Unit Seven’s black-ops bird and an offshore boarding craft. Now."
There was a two-second pause on the other end.
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"Alex," Briggs said with a dangerous edge in his voice. "Boarding an internationally registered sovereign vessel in international waters is an act of war."
"They declared war when they put twenty-seven broken bones into my wife's body," I replied, staring at the Atlantic expanse visible through the shattered wall. "And I intend to finish it."
