“Unto me.”
“And through me… unto Captain Marcy Mercer.”
“Arthur Sterling-Vance could not buy Conduit Ten.
His shadow consortium in Vaduz could not seize it through corporate factoring without triggering an automatic military inquest.”
“So your family deployed Dustin!”
“You targeted Marcy in Lakewood.”
“You courted her.
You brought her into this gym.”
“And three weeks ago, when your great-uncle’s statutory seventy-year spendthrift restriction entered its final twenty-one days, you began testing her limits!”
I stopped two feet from the edge of the cage:
“You gave her fingerprints on her arms to see if she would break.”
“You forced her into turtlenecks to see if her family would intervene.”
“And this afternoon, when she discovered the four-hundred-page blue-vellum deed of conveyance hidden in your locker—the deed transferring forty miles of nuclear defense bedrock to The Valkyrie Trust for carried interest—you threw her down a flight of oak stairs!”
“You cracked her ribs!”
“You gave her a traumatic brain injury!”
“Because under Clause Fourteen of the 1944 Charter:”
“If an active commissioned lineal custodian is hospitalized with certified traumatic brain damage, and her civilian domestic partner files for emergency legal conservatorship before midnight on the statutory anniversary…”
“…the entire sixty-billion-dollar sovereign defense title defaults automatically to the occupying partner as statutory receiver for the court!”
I checked the chronometer on my wrist:
`18:14:22 EST.`
“Tonight is the statutory deadline, Dustin!”
“Midnight, October second, twenty-twenty-six!”
“While you were standing in this cage laughing with your coach, your private equity attorneys were sitting in an executive suite at the Union Club on Euclid Avenue with an unsealed, four-hundred-page petition for emergency domestic conservatorship!”
“They had Dr.
Aris Vance’s forged clinical evaluation ready to file!”
“And at zero-two-hundred hours tonight in Washington…”
I bared my teeth in a cold, terrifying line of white bone:
“…Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance was scheduled to convene an extraordinary emergency midnight session of the Supreme Court to execute the master conveyance deed—transferring forty miles of nuclear defense bedrock to The Valkyrie Trust for sixty billion dollars in carried interest!”
CHAPTER 3: THE BREACH AT APEX COMBAT
Dustin let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from inside the cage:
*“KILL HIM!
REX, SHOOT HIM!
HE’S JUST ONE MAN!
HE DOESN’T LEAVE THIS BUILDING!”*
Coach Rex Kovacs lunged forward, his hand clearing the Glock from his waistband, the black steel slide racking with a sharp, mechanical clatter:
*CLACK.*
*KABOOOOM.*
The heavy, four-inch-thick steel-reinforced roll-up bay doors at the rear of the gym did not slide open on their tracks.
They were cleaved clean off their structural steel jambs by an eighty-pound linear hydraulic tactical breaching ram deployed by an active direct-action assault element from the **United States Navy Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU Red Squadron)** and the **United States Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG)**:
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
A concussive shockwave of freezing autumn rain, pulverized cinder-block dust, and high-pressure tactical propellant blew through the warehouse, blowing twenty-four hanging heavy bags fifteen feet across the room:
*SCREAMS-PANTING-TERROR.*
Through the smoke, through the pulverized masonry dust, through the freezing draft of Lake Erie air…
Moving with that fluid, terrifying, synchronized mechanical velocity of an active direct-action assault element…
Came twelve operators in sterile dark-charcoal Nomex drysuits, Level IV boron-carbide plate carriers, and Ops-Core ballistic helmets fitted with panoramic night-vision brackets folded onto their foreheads.
Across their chests hung suppressed SIG Sauer MCX Rattlers, their weapon-mounted PEQ-15 infrared lasers cutting through the gym’s dim halogen haze in twelve razor-sharp needles of incandescent crimson light:
“FEDERAL INQUEST!
CORDON ESTABLISHED!
SPREAD YOUR FINGERS FLAT ON THE FLOORBOARDS!
DO NOT REACH FOR WEAPONS!”
Coach Rex Kovacs’s Glock 19 never leveled.
Before his muzzle could lift two inches, two SOG tactical operators stepped forward in fluid, synchronized mechanical precision:
Their gloved hands intercepted his wrist in mid-draw, twisting his forearm ninety degrees until the radius bone cracked with an audible, sickening snap:
*CRACK.*
