I came home from a Delta deployment to find my wife in the ICU. Her face… I couldn’t recognize her. The doctor whispered, “Thirty-one fractures. Blunt force trauma. Repeated strikes.” Then I saw them outside her room—her father and his seven sons—smiling like they’d just won something. The detective said, “It’s a family matter. The police can’t touch them.” I looked at the hammer print on her skull and replied, “Good. Because I’m not the police.” “What happened to them… no court could ever judge.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket, shattering the silence. It was a number I didn’t know.

“Is this Hunter?” a voice asked. It was deep, professional, and tired.

“Speaking.”

“This is Detective Miller. You need to get to St. Jude’s Medical Center. Immediately.”

—————-

The drive to the hospital is a blur in my memory. I don’t remember the traffic lights. I don’t remember parking. I only remember the cold air hitting my face as I sprinted toward the emergency room doors. I flashed my military ID at the nurse’s station, breathless.

“Tessa Hunter. My wife. Where is she?”

The nurse looked at me with pity. That was the second warning. When the nurses look at you with pity, it means there is no good news.

“She is in the ICU, sir. Room 404. But you should know… the family is already there.”

The family.

My stomach twisted. Tessa’s family wasn’t like mine. I grew up with nothing, scrapping for every meal. Tessa grew up in a fortress. Her father, Victor Wolf, was a man who owned half the real estate in the county and the souls of the politicians who ran it. And then there were her brothers. Seven of them. Dominic, Evan, Felix, Grant, Ian, Kyle, and Mason.

The Wolf Pack, Victor called them. They were loud, arrogant men who treated the world like it was something they could buy or break. They had never liked me. To them, I was just a grunt, a government dog who wasn’t good enough for their princess.

I turned the corner toward the ICU waiting area, and there they were. It looked like a blockade. Victor was sitting on a bench, checking his watch like he was late for a board meeting. The seven brothers stood in a semicircle around the door to her room.