The Last Navine

Chapter 3

For several seconds after Bran introduced himself, nobody in the room moved. The thugs had spent years hearing stories about him, yet none of them had expected the man they were hunting to simply walk through the front door. The silence lasted only a moment before the scar-lipped leader threw his head back and laughed.

"Well, this is a surprise," he said as he lowered the club in his hand. "We spend years searching for you and you decide to deliver yourself right to us. I don't know whether that's bravery or stupidity."

One of the other men immediately pulled out his phone and stepped away from the group. His fingers moved rapidly across the screen before he pressed the device against his ear.

"Boss, it's me," he said excitedly. "You're not going to believe this. Bran Navine is here. Yeah, the real one. He just walked into the house by himself."

A grin spread across the man's face as he listened to the response coming from the other side.

"Understood. We'll keep him here until you arrive."

When the call ended, he looked toward the others and nodded.

"The boss says there's a bonus waiting for all of us."

That announcement immediately brightened everyone's mood.

The scar-lipped leader rolled his shoulders and pointed the club toward Bran. "You heard him. The boss wants him alive, but he didn't say anything about keeping him comfortable. Let's soften him up before he gets here."

Several men stepped forward at once.

From where she lay on the floor, Francine's expression changed immediately.

"Bran, run!" she shouted. "Please, just leave! There are too many of them."

Bran finally looked in her direction.

His gaze lingered on her for a brief moment before he spoke.

"You don't have to worry anymore, Aunt Francine."

The certainty in his voice caught everyone off guard.

Even the thugs exchanged confused looks.

The scar-lipped leader snorted.

"Still acting tough? Let's see how long that lasts."

The first attacker charged forward with a shout and swung his weapon toward Bran's head. It was a powerful attack, the kind that would have dropped an ordinary person instantly, but Bran reacted before the strike could connect. He shifted slightly to the side, caught the man's wrist, and redirected the momentum completely. The attacker stumbled past him in confusion, and before he could regain his balance, Bran struck him once in the chest.

The impact sent the man crashing backward into a table.

The room fell silent.

Nobody had expected the fight to end so quickly.

The second attacker immediately rushed in with a knife, clearly hoping to overwhelm Bran before he could recover. Unfortunately for him, Bran moved even faster. He intercepted the attack, twisted the man's arm, and forced the knife from his hand. The weapon clattered across the floor before Bran drove the man backward with a single strike that left him unable to continue fighting.

At that point, the third attacker stopped moving entirely.

The confidence he had shown moments earlier vanished as he looked from his fallen companions to the man standing in front of him.

"What the hell..." he muttered.

Bran twisted.

CRRRACK!

The elbow bent backward with a sound like green wood splitting. The joint dislocated, then the bones fractured completely, the arm hanging at an impossible angle.

The knife clattered to the floor.

The kidnapper let out a shriek of pure agony that made everyone’s skin crawl.

Bran silenced him with a devastating punch to the throat.

The cartilage in the man’s larynx collapsed instantly. His scream cut off mid breath, replaced by a horrible wet gurlgling sound as he tried and failed to draw air through his crushed windpipe.

He collapsed to his knees, both hands cluthing at his throat, his face turning purple, his eyes bulging in terro as he slowly suffocates.

It would take him three minutes to die.

Three minutes of drowning on dry land.

The third kidnapper hesitated for just a fraction of a second, his eyes wide with sudden fear.

That hesitation cost him everything.

Bran closed the distance in a heartbeat, moving so fast he was almost a blur.

He grabbed the man by the front of his shirt with both hands and lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing.

Then he drove his fist into the man’s face.

CRUNCH!

The nose exploded. Blood sprayed and bone fragement’s scattered.

Again.

CRACK!

The cheekbone shattered. The eye socket caved in.

Again.

CRUCNH!

Teeth exploded from the man’s mouth like white shrapnel, scattering across the hardwood floor like dice.

Blood poured from his ruined face in thick streams.

Bran hit him seven more times in rapid succession, each punch delivered with mechanical precision, each one breaking something new.

By the time he dropped the body, the kidnappers’s feet was unrecongnizable.

It looked like raw meat. His jaw was hanging at an impossible angle, completely detached from the skull.

He was still technically alive but he wouldn’t be for long.

The entire fight took less than ten seconds.

The remaining two kidnappers, the fat man and the once with the neck tattoo stood frozen, eyes wide, all their bravado draining away like water through a sieve.

Tha fat man’s hadn trembled. His voice cracked when he spoke. “You don’t know what you’re doing. We already called Marcus Reed. He’s the heir to the Reed family. One of the olderst, most powerful families in all fo Heartless. And he works directly under Elara Quinn herself.”

Bran’s head tilted slightly, like he was considering this new information.

“Marcus Reed,” he repeated slowly.

The fat man seemed to regain a sense of confidence as he noticed Bran’s silence, mistaking it for hesitation.

“That’s right,” he said with growing arrogance. “You should be shaking right now because the Reed family has controlled Heartless for three generations, and Marcus Reed alone oversees half of the underground operations in this city. When he arrives, you will not be walking out of here under your own power, because men like you do not survive encounters with people like him.”

He never finished the rest of his words.

Bran snapped back to attention.

His fist shot forward faster than the fat man could even process, faster than human reflexes should allow.

The sound of a skull shattering echoed through the room like a gunshot.

Bran’s fist had connected with such force that the fat man’s head snapped backward ciolently, his neck hyperexpending past its breaking point. 

His eyes went blank instantly as his brain function ceased before his body even registered the pain.

The back of his skull exploded outward. Brain matter splattered across the wall behind him; a grotesque painting of grey and red white bone fragments.

His body lifted off the ground for a split second, suspended in mid air by the sheer force of the blow, before crashing down onto the blood slicked floor with a wet, heavy thud.

Dead before he hit the ground.

The last kidnapper, the one with the neck tattoo stumbled backward until the one with the neck tattoo, stumbled backward his back hit the wall. His face had gone ghost white. His legs were shaking so badly he could barely stand.

“Oh God.. Oh God… Please…”

“This… this isn’t possible,” he muttered under his breath, his voice cracking as fear finally overtook whatever courage he had been clinging to. “We didn’t know… we didn’t know you were this kind of monster…”

Bran did not answer him.

There was no satisfaction in his expression, no lingering anger, and no interest in prolonging the matter. Instead, he simply turned away from the remaining man and began walking across the room toward Francine.

When Bran reached Francine, he knelt beside her and placed a steady hand on her shoulder. 

“Aunt Francine,” he said quietly.  

Francine’s eyes slowly fluttered open, and for a moment she seemed disoriented, as though she could not immediately separate reality from the pain clouding her senses. When her gaze finally settled on Bran, tears began to stream down her bruised face as she reached up with a trembling hand and touched his cheek as if confirming that he was truly there and not something her mind had created in its final moments.

“Bran… you came back…” she whispered, her voice barely holding together.

Bran held her hand gently, steadying her as he answered in a low, controlled voice. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.”

She tried to shake her head, but even that small movement seemed to take everything she had left. Her grip on his hand tightened weakly as she forced herself to speak.

“Christine… they took her,” Francine said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “They put her in an underground auction, some kind of black market operation. I don’t know exactly where it is. I tried to stop them, I really did, but there were too many of them and I couldn’t hold them off.”

Bran’s expression did not change, but his hold on her hand tightened slightly as he responded in a firm, grounded tone. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

Tears filled Francine’s eyes again as her strength continued to fade. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

Her hand slipped from his grip as her body finally gave in, and her consciousness slipped away completely.

Bran immediately checked her pulse, confirming that she was still alive, even if barely stable, before carefully lowering her hand back to the floor. Only then did he rise to his feet and turn toward the last remaining kidnapper, who was still pressed against the wall, shaking uncontrollably and avoiding eye contact as if hoping he could disappear into it.

“Where is my sister?” Bran asked, his voice calm but carrying a pressure that made the entire room feel smaller.

The man immediately shook his head in panic. “I don’t know, I swear I don’t know anything about that part. They just told us to grab the girl and move her into a van. We were never told where she was going after that. We’re just hired muscle, nothing more than that, I promise you, I don’t have any real information.”

Bran took a single step forward, and that was enough to make the man collapse to his knees, raising his hands as though surrendering to something far beyond his control.

“Please,” he begged quickly, his voice breaking under pressure. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know where she is. If I knew, I would tell you. I don’t want to die for something I wasn’t even part of planning.”

Bran stared down at him in silence, his expression unreadable, his eyes carrying a stillness that made even desperation feel useless in front of him.

Then, before the man could say anything else, the entire front door was violently forced open.

The sound echoed through the house as the remaining structure of control inside the room shifted instantly. Heavy footsteps followed immediately afterward, and a man stepped inside with complete confidence, dressed in an expensive tailored suit that stood in sharp contrast to the chaos around him. He moved like someone who had never once been denied anything he wanted in his life, and behind him came six armed men who spread out quickly and efficiently, securing the room with practiced discipline.

The atmosphere changed again, not with panic this time, but with authority.

Marcus Reed had arrived.

He paused briefly as his eyes took in the scene, from the unconscious Francine to the trembling man on the floor, and finally to Bran standing in the center of it all.

Bran didn’t look away as he spoke under his breath, almost as if confirming something he already knew.

“Now here’s someone who does know.”