Never Cross the Back-Gate Guard

Chapter 002

All the color drained from Victoria’s face. She lunged for the sofa and scooped the little girl into her arms. “Lily! Baby, stay with Mommy!”

Nathan scrambled over to the side table, yanking open drawers with shaking hands until he found a small white prescription bottle. He twisted the cap off and turned it upside down—not a single pill came out.

Cole crossed the room in two strides, his voice dropping into a calm, commanding register. “Put her flat. Let me look at her.”

From the moment he walked through the door, he had noticed the girl’s waxy complexion and shallow respiration. Regardless of how vile Victoria had just been to him, the child was innocent—and she had Nathan’s blood running through her veins.

Victoria laid Lily back on the cushions and whipped her head around, shrieking at him, “Get away from her! Don’t you dare lay a finger on my daughter!”

Across the room, Nathan was frantically dialing 911, screaming their address into the receiver. Seconds later, his face went灰as the dispatcher informed him that St. Jude’s had already flagged the patient as terminal and non-responsive to standard intervention. In a fit of despair, Nathan hurled his phone against the wall, shattering it into pieces.

There wasn’t a second to waste. Cole dropped to one knee beside the sofa, his fingers finding the carotid sinus and the vagus nerve cluster along Lily’s neck, applying precise, measured pressure to drop her spiking vascular pressure and stem the internal hemorrhage.

Seeing him touch her child, Victoria lost her mind and swung a vicious backhand straight at Cole’s face.

Cole whipped his head around. His eyes—cold, dead, and razor-sharp—locked onto hers.

Victoria’s hand froze mid-swing. A cold shudder ran straight down her spine, stopping her breath in her throat. She had spent years in cutthroat corporate boardrooms and seen plenty of ruthless men, but she had never looked into eyes like these. It felt like staring into an open grave. She didn’t have a shred of doubt that if her palm touched his skin, he would snap her neck before she could blink.

Cole turned back to the child, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “If you don’t want your daughter to die in the next three minutes, shut your mouth.”

Standing behind his wife, Nathan let out a shaky breath, relieved the slap hadn’t landed. If he’d had any idea Victoria had cut her trip short, he never would have brought Cole here tonight.

Unable to face Cole, Victoria turned her panic and fury on her husband. “You useless piece of trash! If anything happens to Lily tonight, I’ll make sure you and your brother both rot in hell!”

Nathan’s shoulders trembled as his fists balled at his sides, his knuckles turning white as he fought to keep his composure.

Cole tuned them both out and gently pried Lily’s jaw open. Her gums were bloodless, and beneath her tongue ran a network of faint, thread-like black striations—so fine an untrained eye would miss them entirely.

Cole’s brow furrowed. “How long has she been having these episodes?”

Nathan unclenched his fists and hurried closer. “About… about three months now.”

Before the words had fully left his mouth, Lily arched her back in another violent seizure. Beneath the translucent skin of her throat, dark, ink-like lines suddenly surfaced, spiderwebbing upward toward her cheeks in seconds.

Victoria gasped in horror, pointing a trembling finger at Cole. “What did you do to her?! She’s never looked like this before! You poisoned her!”

Cole’s eyes narrowed to slits as he stared at the spreading black veins. “Chimera-7,” he murmured under his breath. “How the hell did Chimera-7 make it onto domestic soil?”

Chimera-7 was a weaponized synthetic hemophage—a bio-engineered parasite that colonized the host’s bloodstream and fed on red blood cells. It had a six-month incubation cycle. Once it reached full maturity, the pathogen became airborne through respiratory droplets, capable of wiping out an entire city block in days.

Six years ago, the S-class black op that cost thirty of his brothers their lives had been a raid to incinerate the covert laboratory developing this exact strain. No wonder Victor had warned him those bastards were regrouping.

A lethal chill flashed through Cole’s eyes. He reached into his canvas duffel, pulled out a compact black leather roll, and unfurled it on the coffee table, revealing a row of gleaming, hair-thin surgical micro-needles.

Victoria’s eyes widened, and she lunged forward to block him. “Get those away from her, you lunatic!” If not for the lingering terror of his glare a moment ago, she would have clawed his eyes out.

Nathan grabbed his wife around the waist, his voice cracking as he pleaded, “Victoria, for God’s sake, look at her! The hospital won’t even send an ambulance! Do you really want to just stand here and watch her die? Let Cole try!”

“Try?!” Victoria spat, flecks of saliva hitting Nathan’s face as she thrashed in his grip. “He’s sticking needles into her! He’s a twenty-something ex-con who’s spent the last six years in a cell! Even the chief of neurology from Johns Hopkins didn’t dare risk a direct nerve intervention on her—where does he get the nerve?!”

Deaf to her screaming, Cole plucked a three-inch micro-needle from the roll and slid it with pinpoint accuracy into the cervical ganglion at the base of Lily’s neck.

“You bastard, stop!” Victoria shrieked, aiming a high-heeled kick at Cole’s ribs.

Nathan threw his weight against her, dragging her back. “Victoria, stop! If he doesn’t do something right now, she’s not going to survive the night!”

Slap!

Victoria twisted around and struck Nathan across the face so hard he stumbled backward and hit the floor. “The only reason I haven’t divorced you is because of Lily! If she dies on that couch, you might as well throw yourself off the roof!”

Without looking up from his work, Cole spoke in a voice like winter ice. “If I fail to save my niece tonight, you can have my life on the spot.”

“Your worthless life isn’t worth a single hair on my daughter’s head!” Victoria screamed.

Cole suddenly rose to his full height. He turned his head slowly, fixing her with a gaze of pure, unfiltered lethality.

Victoria choked on her next breath, her jaws snapping shut as a cold sweat broke out across her back.

Cole knelt back down beside the sofa and resumed his work. What he was performing wasn’t ordinary field medicine—it was percutaneous neuro-vascular stimulation, a classified technique developed by The Surgeon to force the autonomic nervous system into hyper-drive, isolating blood-borne pathogens and purging them through the digestive tract.

Within ten minutes, over a dozen micro-needles were anchored along Lily’s neck and forearms. Sweat beaded on Cole’s forehead as his fingers worked the needles with rapid, high-frequency micro-tremors.

Behind him, Nathan paced the carpet in agony, his heart hammering against his ribs. He was terrified for his daughter, and just as terrified for his brother. He knew Cole was a man of absolute word—if Lily didn’t make it, nobody would be able to stop Cole from taking his own life. Silently, Nathan swore to himself that even if the worst happened tonight, he would never blame his brother.

On the sofa, Lily’s long eyelashes fluttered. A moment later, her eyes slowly opened.

Nathan’s breath caught in a sob of pure joy. “Victoria, look! She’s awake! Lily’s awake!”

Victoria rushed to the edge of the sofa, dropping to her knees and stroking the little girl’s damp hair. “Lily? Baby, can you hear Mommy? How do you feel?”

“Mommy…” Lily’s voice was barely a whisper. “I’m so tired… I can’t feel my arms or legs.”

Victoria’s head snapped toward Cole, her guard instantly back up, though the shrillness was gone from her voice. “What did you do to her? Why can’t she feel anything?”

“The numbness is from a temporary motor-nerve block I used to stop the seizures,” Cole said calmly. “The exhaustion is because the parasite has been feeding on her red blood cells and nutrients for three months. Keep her on a rich, high-protein diet for the next few days, and her strength will bounce right back.”

Before he could finish speaking, Lily suddenly gagged, lurched forward, and vomited a mouthful of pitch-black blood.