Glass sprayed inward across the kitchen linoleum. The crack of a suppressed carbine shattered the rural silence, followed instantly by the hollow whine of a ricochet chewing into the pine cabinets. "Down!" Rixa grabbed the collar of Paxen’s flannel shirt and yanked him behind the cast-iron stove. "Get your head down, you idiot!" "Are those hunters?" Paxen squeaked, his knees knocking against the rusted kettle on the floor. "I told Mr. Calder the deer signs were posted backwards! I told him!" "Those aren't hunters, Paxen. Those are private corporate security contractors." Rixa kept her gaze locked on the perimeter feed glowing on her handheld. Beyond the glass, three silhouettes in tactical windbreakers cut across the gravel drive, their boots crunching deliberately toward the equipment sheds. "They’re here to burn every hard drive I own and leave us in a ditch." A heavy boot struck the side porch. Kellen’s text still burned behind her eyelids—*The trial is closed forever.* The man had not merely shut Toris out of treatment; he had dispatched cleanup crews to bury the witnesses. The bitter gall that carried Rixa out of the capital stiffened her spine. "The workshop power," she whispered, leaning into Paxen’s ear. "Did you finish wiring that high-voltage capacitor to the tractor gate like I told you?" "You mean the illegal one that fried Mrs. Gable's toaster?" Paxen asked, sweat plastering his mop of hair to his forehead. "Yes. That one." "It’s wired. But Rixa—" "No buts. We don't have firearms. We have farm scrap and bad attitudes. Move to the rear breezeway. You take the north paddock latch." Paxen swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing violently. "The north paddock? That’s where—" "Do it now!" She shoved him toward the pantry door. Paxen scrambled on all fours, scrambling through the shadows like a startled badger. Rixa bolted for the central hall. A beam of white tactical light slashed through the living room window, illuminating suspended motes of hay dust. Footsteps crested the wooden veranda. Heavy, disciplined, two men advancing in a staggered sweep. She snatched the tripwire spool she had anchored beside the hall archway—two miles of high-tensile nylon monofilament she’d purloined from the tackle shed. With a sharp snap, she jerked the retaining pin free. A boot smashed through the mesh doorframe. A second later, the heavy copper counterweight plunged down the laundry chute, yanking a cluster of five-gallon metal milk canisters down from the ceiling joists above the outer threshold. The metal crashed with the roar of a collapsing boiler. A muffled oath echoed into the yard, followed by the clatter of discarded tactical gear. "Breach team two, hold! Trap on the eastern porch!" "Paxen!" Rixa yelled, sprinting toward the rear barn doors where her primary processing terminal sat humming in the darkness. Across the moonlit yard, Paxen was running for his life. Behind him, boots pounded against gravel—the lead contractor, broad-shouldered and armed with a composite baton, was closing the distance with terrifying ease. "Hey! Corporate stooge!" Paxen shrieked, his voice cracking into a shrill falsetto as he reached the perimeter of the south corral. "You want trespassing? I’ll give you agricultural non-compliance!" With a wild, desperate jerk, Paxen hauled on the rusty iron chain binding the heavy oak gate of Paddock Four. The gate swung wide. From the deep shadows of the pen emerged two hundred and forty pounds of coiled, furious muscle, capped by a pair of ridged, curled horns that had fractured three tractor fenders that autumn alone. Lord Woolsey blinked into the moonlight, nostrils flaring as his yellow pupils locked onto the nearest moving threat. The lead fixer paused, raising his baton. "What the—" Paxen leaped sideways into a manure trough, bellowing with absolute, theatrical conviction: "Charge, my woolly demon! Reclaim your land!" Lord Woolsey did not need encouragement. With a snort that sounded like a cracked exhaust pipe, the ram launched himself forward at thirty miles an hour. Hooves tore up divots of turf. The contractor tried to raise his arm to aim, but the ram struck him squarely in the midsection with the impact of a bowling ball hitting a carton of eggs. The man folded in half, expelled every ounce of air in his lungs with a wet gasp, and flew backward four yards through the air, crashing into the wooden watering trough with a tremendous splintering splash. Paxen poked his head out of the trough, covered in wet mulch, his grin manic and triumphant. "Rural survival, baby! That’s how we manage livestock in the valley!" "Paxen, run!" Rixa screamed. A shadow surged from the gloom of the barn entrance behind her. A thick, gloved hand clamped over Rixa’s mouth, cutting off her shout. Heavy fingers hooked around her shoulder, dragging her violently back into the pitch darkness of the hayloft. "Quiet, bitch," a low voice rasped against her ear. "Mr. Kellen wants the drives intact, but he said nothing about your ribs." She brought her heel down hard on his instep, but steel-toed boots absorbed the blow. She bit down on his leather glove, tasting salt and grit, but his arm tightened around her throat, choking off the air. Black spots crowded her peripheral vision. She clawed at his wrist, throat burning, nails tearing at dense weave. Then the barn went dead black as the master breaker tripped by the side gate. The fixer froze, his night-vision goggles useless in the zero-light trap of the windowless barn. "What the hell?" Out of the absolute void came no footsteps. Only the steady, rhythmic scrape of sole leather against dried floorboards, perfectly measured, entirely confident. "Who's there?" the fixer growled, shifting his grip on Rixa, bringing a weapon up. "Six paces from the hay press," a quiet voice said from the dark. It was Toris. "Show yourself!" the man barked, swinging the muzzle blindly into the gloom. "Four paces. Left of the upright timber. You're favoring your right knee because the flooring dips two inches near the oat bins." Before the mercenary could register the words, a silhouette broke through the pitch. Toris drove forward without hesitation, navigating solely by the rasp of the man’s respiration and the rustle of synthetic fabric. A sickening thud echoed through the rafters. Toris struck the fixer with brutal, low-center leverage, using the heavy cast-iron chassis of his vintage rangefinder camera like a knuckle-duster. The blow caught the man squarely beneath the cheekbone. The mercenary collapsed like cut hemp, his forehead bouncing against the oak boards. Rixa hit her knees, coughing, dragging cold air into her raw throat. "Toris..." In the complete dark, hands found her shoulders. Gentle. Trembling slightly, but steady in their touch. Toris knelt beside her, his palms sliding up to cup her face, his thumbs brushing away the strands of hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks. "Are you whole?" he whispered, his face inches from hers. His hazel gaze remained wide and unblinking, reflecting nothing in the blackness. He stared past her features, yet his fingers found her cheek without faltering. "I'm whole," she breathed, leaning into his hands, the fury in her ribcage tightening into a coppery ache. "How did you—" "I’ve walked this barn every night for three months trying to memorize the floor before the light goes entirely," he murmured, his voice cracking with quiet exhaustion. "In the dark, we're on my terms." A metallic chime sounded from the floorboards near the unconscious thug. Rixa scrambled on her knees, sweeping across the timber until she found the fallen handset. The panel flared with harsh blue light, illuminating Toris's pale, sculpted jaw and the exhaustion carved around his eyes. The device was unlocked, running an encrypted terminal linked to Kellen’s internal engineering repository. Rixa tapped the glass, fingers flying as she bypassed the local keychain. "Let's see what he was so desperate to protect." A schematic unrolled across the panel—the production blueprint for the flagship agricultural drone system Kellen had stolen from her, scheduled for demonstration tomorrow morning before five thousand investors at the valley fair. Rixa leaned closer, her pulse jumping. "What is it?" Toris asked, tilting his head toward the glare he could no longer decipher. "He bypassed my thermal safety loop," Rixa whispered, dread replacing her triumph as she traced the altered power grid on the schematic. "To cut component costs by forty percent, he routed the high-voltage discharge into the operator harness. When they fire the high-output sequence at the demonstration tomorrow... the harness won't ground. It will deliver sixteen hundred volts straight into the user's chest." She looked down at the memo attached to the production order, signed with Kellen’s digital cryptographic key. *Proceed with deployment,* the note read. *System architect Corthell's original schematics will be submitted to investigators after the incident as proof of sabotage.*

Lord Woolsey's Revenge