“You don’t understand!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “My father… he said Jake needed to learn a lesson! He said you were making him soft! I tried to stop them, John, I swear I did!”
“She’s lying, Vanguard,” Echo’s voice suddenly crackled into my earpiece.
I frowned, keeping my weapon trained on Arthur. “Explain, Echo.”
“We just intercepted a secure data transmission from the house’s internal server right before we cut the power,” Echo said, his voice urgent. “Your wife wasn’t hiding upstairs, John. She was signing the custody relinquishment paperwork. And there’s something else… They weren’t just beating the boy. They were waiting for you to arrive. This was a trap.”
Before I could process Echo’s words, a heavy, deafening sound shattered the night air outside.
It wasn’t the sound of the Jackals. It was the deep, rhythmic thumping of twin-engine military-grade helicopters approaching fast from the north, flying low beneath the civilian radar.
Suddenly, the red laser-sights of dozens of high-caliber sniper rifles sliced through the broken glass windows of the study, painting my chest, my head, and the walls in a web of lethal red dots.
Arthur Vance’s terrified expression suddenly twisted into a hideous, triumphant grin. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor and looked up at me.
“You really thought you were the only one with a past, John?” the old man sneered, his voice dripping with venom. “You thought you were the only one who knew how to call in the ghosts?”
My earpiece exploded with static and the sound of frantic gunfire.
“Vanguard! We have multiple hostile teams fast-roping onto the lawn! They’re not military, they’re—” Echo’s voice cut out into a sharp, agonizing scream, followed by the cold, definitive sound of a radio dying.
The red dots on my chest tightened. Christine slowly stepped back toward her father, her face no longer showing tears, but a cold, calculating detachment that mirrored the monsters around her.
I was surrounded. The Jackals were compromised. And the real enemy hadn’t just arrived—they were already aiming at my HERT
