DAMIEN WEST ALMIGHTY SYSTEM

Chapter 9

Not long after, Damien reached the place. The taxi barely came to a full stop before he was already pushing the door open and stepping out onto the gravel path that led into the cemetery. 

His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat, and his legs moved faster than his mind could think. This was the resting place of his mother, his father, and his younger sister, the one quiet corner of the world that still felt sacred to him, the one place he visited every single week without fail.

But the moment he walked through the gate, everything inside him went cold.

There wasn't just one man standing there. There wasn't two. There wasn't even three. Damien's eyes moved across the open ground and counted more than fifteen men scattered around the graves, and every single one of them was holding a sledgehammer. Some of them gripped shovels instead, the metal blades resting against their shoulders like tools waiting to be used. A few of the men had made themselves completely comfortable, sitting right on top of the very graves Damien came to clean every week, the same stone he wiped down with his bare hands to keep it looking neat and untouched by dirt or time. Their boots rested lazily on the marble, legs crossed like they were relaxing on a bench in the park instead of standing on sacred ground.

Several of them were smoking, cigarettes hanging loose from their lips, and they were using the top edge of his sister's gravestone to snuff out the burning ends. Damien's gaze dropped to the grass in front of the graves, and his stomach turned when he saw the mess scattered there. More than fifteen, maybe twenty cigarette butts lay crushed into the ground. 

His jaw locked so tight that a muscle twitched along the side of his face.

"Where the hell is Nathaniel?" His voice cracked through the still cemetery air, sharp and demanding. "Where the hell is he?"

Nobody answered.

The silence pressed down on him like a weight, and it only made the fire in his chest burn hotter. "I said, where the hell is Nathaniel?"

That was when one man pushed himself up slowly from where he had been sitting at the center of the group. He was clearly the one in charge, the way he moved without any rush, the way the others glanced at him before doing anything themselves. He turned to face Damien with a lazy, almost amused expression, like none of this mattered to him at all.

"Where are the documents?" the man asked, his eyes sliding down Damien from head to toe and back up again. "Where are the documents?"

Damien didn't answer right away, because there was nothing to answer with. In the rush of anger after Nathaniel's call, the documents had been the last thing on his mind. He had run out of the house thinking only about getting here in time, about stopping whatever Nathaniel was planning to do, and now he stood there with empty hands.

The man's mouth curled into a slow, mocking smile, the kind that made Damien's skin crawl. "Don't tell me you didn't come with the documents. You didn't bring them, did you? You left them behind, just like that."

Damien's chest rose and fell with sharp, uneven breaths. "I said, where the hell is Nathaniel?"

Still, none of them gave him a real answer. Instead, the boss shook his head slowly, almost like he pitied him. "You broke the rules. You came here without what we asked for, so you have absolutely nothing to say for yourself right now. This grave is going down, and there's nothing you can do to stop it."

He said it so calmly, like he was talking about tearing down an old wooden fence instead of destroying the resting place of a family that had already suffered enough.

Then, without waiting for a response, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, pressed it against his ear, and spoke two short words. "Bring it in."

It didn't even take two full minutes.

The low growl of a heavy engine rolled through the cemetery grounds, growing louder with every passing second until the ground itself seemed to hum beneath Damien's feet. His parents and his younger sister were buried close to the front of the cemetery, right near the road, a spot that had always made visiting easier for him, a spot that never required him to walk far or disturb anyone else's resting place along the way. Now that same convenience was working against him, giving whatever they had planned an easy path straight in.

At that moment a massive truck rolled up along the road and came to a stop, its back ramp lowering with a slow, grinding creak of metal against metal. An excavator crawled down from the flatbed, its treads chewing into the dirt path, engine growling low and steady as it moved closer to where Damien stood.

The boss folded his arms across his chest and looked at Damien like he was something small and pathetic. "Like I told you before, you shouldn't have messed with us. You shouldn't have tried to play your dirty little games with people who don't play games at all. We gave you clear, simple instructions to follow, and you didn't listen. So now you're going to face exactly what comes after that."

He turned toward the machine and raised one hand in the air. "Crush it. Crush this whole place. Bring it down right now, all of it."

Immediately Damien's mind raced through every possible option, but he already knew the truth. There was no room to negotiate with men like this. Nathaniel wasn't even here to reason with. These men were following orders, nothing more, nothing less, and pleading with hired hands would get him nowhere.

So Damien didn't waste his breath trying.

Instead, he walked forward with slow, steady steps and planted himself directly between the excavator and the graves behind him, his feet firm against the grass, his shoulders squared, his eyes locked on the massive machine rolling toward him.

The boss burst out laughing, the sound loud and ugly in the quiet cemetery, and a few of the men standing nearby joined in, their laughter bouncing off the stone markers around them.

"What exactly do you think you're going to do?" the boss called out, wiping a hand across his mouth as he tried to stop chuckling. "You think we care if you're standing there like some kind of hero? We were sent here to kill you in the first place, so honestly, you're just making our job a whole lot easier for us. I'm not telling them to stop for you. If you want to stand there like a fool, I'll have them crush you right along with the grave you're trying so hard to protect."

Damien didn't respond. He couldn't trust his own voice in that moment, not with the anger boiling so violently beneath his skin that his hands had started to tremble at his sides.

The boss shrugged like the whole thing bored him and turned back toward the machine operator sitting inside the excavator's cab. "Crush him. Crush him and the grave together. Do it now."

Immediately the excavator's engine roared to life with a sudden burst of power, and the massive steel bucket swung forward through the air with brutal, crushing force, aimed straight at Damien and the graves resting behind him.

Right before the bucket could land, right before it could tear through everything Damien had left of his family, he lifted one hand into the air and caught it.

The bucket stopped dead in the air, frozen in his palm.