The Unkillable Warlord

Warehouse Fourteen

"How many men," Dom asked, jogging to keep pace with Grant across the parking lot.

"I don't know yet," Grant said. "Doesn't matter."

"It matters plenty if it's fifteen against four."

"It matters less than you think." Grant reached the truck and climbed in. "A hundred against one only works if the one doesn't know the warehouse better than they do. I've read every shipment that's ever moved through fourteen. I know where the blind spots are. Marchetti's men don't."

Reggie swung into the passenger seat, a tire iron across his lap he hadn't bothered to hide. "I called six guys. Three are already headed there. Rest couldn't make it in time."

"Three's enough," Grant said. "We're not storming the place. We're outthinking it."

Piper's voice came through the phone on speaker, tight with fear she was trying not to let show. "Tasha's not answering. Neither is Brannigan."

"Keep trying both," Grant said. "If either calls back, patch them straight to me."

The drive to the docks took eleven minutes. Grant used every one of them running the layout of warehouse fourteen through his head, container by container, exactly the way he'd once memorized the terrain of a hundred battlefields the night before a war.

They parked two blocks out, in the shadow of a container stack tall enough to hide the truck completely.

"Wait here," Grant told Reggie.

"Not a chance," Reggie said.

"I need you outside," Grant said. "If this goes wrong, somebody has to be the one who calls for help instead of the one who needs it."

Reggie's jaw tightened, but he nodded.

Dom followed Grant toward the warehouse, close enough that Grant could hear his brother's breathing go quick and shallow.

"You scared?" Grant asked quietly.

"Terrified," Dom admitted. "You?"

Grant thought about it honestly, the way he hadn't let himself in front of anyone else.

"No," he said. "And that used to bother me more than it does now."

They slipped through a side door Grant had clocked from his last visit, one Marchetti's men hadn't bothered guarding because it opened onto a drop of six feet with nothing to break a fall. Grant had noticed it the first time. He'd also noticed the stack of pallets directly beneath it that would.

Inside, voices carried from the center of the warehouse, the same open space where Grant had faced Marchetti two nights before. He crept along the container corridor, Dom silent behind him, until he could see his father seated in a folding chair, hands zip tied, a cut above his eyebrow that made something in Grant's chest go dangerously quiet.

Kessler stood over him, phone in hand.

"He's here," Kessler was saying into it. "Showed up right on schedule. You were right about him."

Grant felt every instinct from another life align at once, cold and precise. He counted heads. Four men, not fifteen. Kessler and three others, none of them expecting a side entrance.

He caught Dom's eye and held up four fingers, then pointed toward the pallets stacked near the loading door, then mimed pulling something.

Dom's eyes widened as he understood.

Grant stepped out into the open, hands loose at his sides, and let his voice carry across the warehouse floor.

"You should've guarded the side door," he said.

Every head turned. Kessler's phone dropped from his hand.

"Grant," Walter said, voice cracking. "You shouldn't have come."

"I know," Grant said. "I came anyway."

"Touching," Kessler said, stepping between Grant and his father. "Real touching. You want to know something funny, kid? I told Marchetti you wouldn't come alone. He bet me two hundred bucks you would."

"You lost that bet," Grant said, "before you finished making it."

Kessler's eyes flicked past Grant, scanning the shadows behind him. "Where's the rest of your little crew? Or is this really it? A kid and his brother?"

"You're looking for the wrong thing," Grant said. "You should be counting exits, not people."

Kessler recovered fast, waving two of his men forward. "Grab him."

"Before you do that," Grant said, not moving, "you should know my brother just pulled the safety pin on eight hundred pounds of stacked pallets sitting directly above your exit."

Every man in the room looked up at once.

The pallets came down with a crash that shook dust from the rafters, blocking the loading door completely, and in the half second of chaos that followed, Grant moved.

He'd counted on that half second. In another life he'd won entire campaigns on less. Men trained to fight other men rarely trained to think past the first three seconds of a surprise, and three seconds was all he needed.

One of Marchetti's men lunged toward him, more instinct than strategy. Grant sidestepped, let the man's own momentum carry him into a stack of crates, and kept moving toward his father without breaking stride.

Behind him, he heard Dom shout something, heard Reggie's voice join the chaos from the doorway, heard the particular scrape of a tire iron meeting something that wasn't concrete.

None of it slowed him down. His whole world had narrowed to the folding chair, the zip ties, and the cut above his father's eyebrow that hadn't stopped bleeding.