I put the truck in gear and drove the rest of the way home.
We lived in an old, reinforced log cabin situated on four acres of heavily wooded land outside the city limits. After Clara died, I bought the place specifically for its isolation. It was defensible, quiet, and equipped with a heavy steel core door and shatter-resistant windows.
I parked the truck behind the house, out of sight from the main road. I brought Leo inside, made him a sandwich, and turned on cartoons in the living room.
"Stay here, eat your food, and relax," I told him. "I'm going to do some work in the garage."
I took the burner phone and went into my attached workshop. The air was cool, smelling of sawdust and motor oil. I sat down at my heavy steel workbench and plugged the phone into a custom-built encrypted laptop I kept locked in a tool chest. The laptop was a relic from my days running intelligence extraction for PMC teams in Eastern Europe.
The phone was locked with a heavy biometric and alphanumeric passcode. Standard corporate encryption, but nothing military-grade.
I booted up a brute-force decryption program. Rows of green code began cascading down the black screen of my laptop. "Come on," I muttered, watching the progress bar crawl. "Tell me what you're hiding, Marcus."
My initial false interpretation was simple: Rick was probably dealing high-end drugs to the rich kids at the academy, using his father's construction connections to move the product. The burner phone was his contact line. That would explain the panic and the aggressive secrecy.
But as I watched the decryption software run, motion caught the corner of my eye.
The security camera feed on the wall monitor, which covered the front driveway of my cabin, showed a vehicle pulling up. It wasn't the black SUV. It was a sleek silver sedan.
Three men got out.
The first was Principal Higgins, the weak-willed, overly polished headmaster of Oakridge Academy. But the two men standing behind him weren't school staff. They wore dark, unbranded tactical windbreakers, cargo pants, and thick boots. They moved with the unmistakable posture of private security muscle—or fixers. They were scanning my tree line, their hands hovering naturally near the waistbands of their jackets.
I closed my laptop securely, leaving the decryption program running. I locked the workbench drawer, checked the security feed to ensure Leo was still safely occupied in the living room, and walked out the front door, closing it firmly behind me.
I stood on my wooden porch, my arms crossed over my massive chest, looking down at the three of them.
Higgins flinched slightly when he saw me. He had always been intimidated by my size. "Mr. Thorne," Higgins said, clearing his throat, trying to sound authoritative. "We need to have a very serious conversation."
"It's Saturday, Higgins," I said, my voice low and steady. "I'm off the clock."
"This isn't about the HVAC system, Elias," Higgins said, stepping up to the bottom stair of the porch. The two fixers moved up beside him, flanking him. "I just received a very disturbing phone call from Marcus Vance. His son, Rick, came home highly distressed. He claimed you physically assaulted him on the school roof today. That you threatened to throw him over the edge."
"He was dangling my son over a five-story drop," I replied, my expression unreadable. "I pulled him back. That's all that happened."
"That is not the story Rick is telling," Higgins said, his tone tightening. "Marcus Vance is outraged. He wants you arrested, Elias. But he is a reasonable man. He believes there might have been a misunderstanding over a... personal item Rick lost near the gym today. A piece of electronic equipment."
The fixers shifted their weight. They were trying to look intimidating, but they were telegraphing their aggression too loudly. Amateurs.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied smoothly.
Higgins sighed, looking genuinely nervous. "Elias, please. Marcus practically built the school. These gentlemen with me are Mr. Vance's personal security consultants. They just want to take a quick look around your house, just to ensure the item didn't accidentally end up in your son's bag. If they find it, this whole assault accusation goes away."
"Nobody," I said, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous growl, "is going inside my house."
The larger of the two fixers, a man with a thick neck and a shaved head, smirked. He stepped onto the porch. "Look, mechanic. We aren't asking for permission."
He reached out to shove past me.
It was a fatal miscalculation.
I didn't punch him. Punching is loud, messy, and leaves evidence. I simply intercepted his outstretched arm, stepped inside his guard, and locked my massive hands around his wrist and elbow. With a violent, twisting motion, I used his own forward momentum against him.
The fixer gasped as the joints in his arm locked to the breaking point. I spun him around and drove my knee firmly into the back of his thigh, collapsing his leg. As he dropped, I shoved him forcefully backward off the porch. He crashed heavily into the dirt driveway, groaning and clutching his shoulder, totally neutralized without a single drop of blood being drawn.
The second fixer reached into his windbreaker.
I didn't give him the chance to draw whatever he was reaching for. I launched myself off the porch, tackling him directly into the side of the silver sedan. The impact dented the car door inward. I pinned him against the metal, my forearm pressed horizontally across his collarbone, applying enough crushing pressure to cut off his oxygen instantly. His eyes went wide with shock.
"Keep your hands exactly where they are," I whispered directly into his ear.
He nodded frantically, his face turning purple. I released him, letting him slump against the car, gasping for air.