Touch My Daughter, and You Die

Chapter 003

A crack split the air. Wyatt's foot had already caught the heavyset woman and flung her off her feet.

She weighed easily two hundred pounds, yet he sent her flying forty feet as if she weighed nothing. Had the wall not stopped her, there was no telling how far she would have flown.

A choked scream tore from her throat as she vomited a mouthful of blood and collapsed, unconscious before she hit the ground. Her chest had caved in, a deep crater where her sternum used to be.

"Someone actually dares break into Trey's villa? Get in there, now!"

The noise from the basement finally roused the rest of the bodyguards upstairs. Over a hundred men in black uniforms came pouring in, long blades gripped in their fists, eyes bloodshot with fury. Their goal was simple: send the intruder to hell for setting foot in Trey's home.

What they could not possibly have understood was exactly what kind of monster they were about to face.

Wyatt had already become something closer to a reaper than a man, bare handed, charging straight into the crowd. In the time it took to draw one breath, dozens of guards were already on the floor. He moved too fast for the eye to track, a blur that left broken bodies in its wake. Most of the men never even saw the motion that snapped their necks. Wyatt harvested their lives the way a scythe moves through wheat, methodical, merciless, without a flicker of hesitation.

Scarlet stayed close to the young miss through all of it, shielding her small body with her own. She understood exactly what state Wyatt was in. She had seen it before, on a battlefield where an army a hundred thousand strong could not stand against him. A few hundred household thugs in a private villa were nothing.

Within minutes, Wyatt was the only person left standing in the entire building.

"Marshal, come quick, it's the young girl! She's... she's..."

Scarlet's frantic cry cut through the haze of slaughter and pulled Wyatt back to himself. He was at his daughter's side almost before the words finished leaving Scarlet's mouth, lifting the battered little girl into his arms.

"Daddy..."

The faintness of that whisper against his ear felt like a blade twisting in his chest.

"Daddy's here. Daddy's here, Nora."

He said it again and again, and a small, fragile smile touched the corner of her mouth.

"Daddy, you really came back? Nora thought... Nora thought you weren't coming back..."

"Daddy's back now. Daddy's right here beside you."

"That's good, Daddy. Now that you're back, you're not going to leave again, are you?"

Wyatt's eyes burned red, his whole body reeking of blood, yet his voice when he answered her was gentler than anything he had spoken in years.

"No. Daddy's never leaving again."

"That's so good... then nobody's going to hurt Mommy anymore. And nobody's going to hurt Nora anymore, right?"

"That's right. I will never let anyone hurt you or your mother again. Not ever."

He held her close, cradling a body that was nothing but bruises and wounds, and felt her breathing grow weaker with every second.

"Marshal, this is no place to treat her. We need to move."

Wyatt heard Scarlet's words through the red haze of grief and rage clouding his vision. He scooped his daughter up and strode out of the basement without a backward glance, straight to the waiting helicopter.

Feeling her heartbeat grow fainter against his arm, he forced himself to steady his breathing, to think clearly despite the fear clawing at his chest.

"Scarlet, bring me my medical kit."

"Already here, Marshal."

Scarlet handed it over without a word wasted. Wyatt pulled out a needle case and, without an instant of hesitation, began driving the needles into the vital points across his daughter's small body.

Six years ago, Harborcrest had belonged to the Hale family. Back then they were the most powerful name in the entire city, and Wyatt had been their eldest son, young and brilliant, riding the crest of everything life had given him.

It had been a golden age. A doting father, a dutiful son, brothers who looked out for each other without a shadow of resentment between them. Serena Wentworth, the most beautiful woman in Harborcrest and the eldest daughter of the Wentworth family, had been his fiancee. Gideon Ashford, another young man of promise and standing, had been his closest friend.

What Wyatt never could have imagined was that on the eve of his wedding, every certainty he had built his life on would be torn apart.

His best friend betrayed him. Gideon slipped a dose of a powerful aphrodisiac into his wine, then placed him in the bed of Miss Lockridge, a Harborcrest socialite. When Wyatt came to his senses enough to realize something was terribly wrong, he dragged himself out of that room on sheer willpower alone, only to run straight into his fiancee, who had come the moment she heard the rumors. Too ashamed, and too afraid of what he might do if he stayed, he fled before he could say a word.

He ran to the arch under the old canal bridge, and there the drug hit its full force, a fire in his blood that felt like dying by inches. Elena, who happened to be visiting Harborcrest that week, heard his tortured cries and came to check on him out of simple kindness. In his drug addled state, stripped of all reason, he assaulted her.

He woke the next morning to find a pool of blood on the ground and a pendant soaked red beside it.

That same day, the Wentworth, Ashford, and Lockridge families moved together to strip the Hale family of everything it owned. His fiancee, believing he had betrayed her with another woman, broke their engagement and became engaged to his best friend instead.

Everything collapsed before he could even process what had happened. His father and younger brother were dragged out of the old Hale estate and left to beg in the streets. Only Wyatt escaped, fleeing all the way to the North, where he enlisted as a nameless foot soldier in the Nameless Legion.

Six years later, that nameless soldier had become the commander of the Nameless Legion, a name that made entire enemy armies lose their nerve.

In those years he had buried all of his old life. The wealth, the privilege, the easy laughter of a young man who had never known real loss, all of it he had let go. The only thing that never faded was the guilt that gnawed at him over the woman he had wronged that night under the bridge. And now, alongside that guilt, there was something new: a fierce, aching love for the daughter in his arms.

Holding his daughter, feeling the life return to her small body, Wyatt made himself a silent vow. Everyone who had ever hurt his family would pay for it in full. And Elena, the woman he had carried six years of guilt for, would become the richest woman this world had ever seen.

* * *

Julian Calloway stood blocking the bedroom door at Whitlock Manor, intent on forcing her into a marriage she had never agreed to.

Elena had locked herself inside, one hand pressed over her mouth to keep herself from sobbing aloud. Despair had closed in around her like water rising past her chin. The call to Wyatt had been her last hope, and now the phone lay crushed in Julian's fist, that hope gone with it.

"Elena, I'd advise you to stop fighting me on this," Julian called through the door, his voice dripping with smug certainty. "Your Uncle already accepted the Calloway family's payment. You belong to me now, whether you like it or not. There's no running from this."

He stood in the doorway like he already owned the house, and in a sense he did. Her bodyguards lay beaten on the floor outside, and even her own parents hadn't been spared the violence.

"Julian! Elena doesn't want to marry you! You can't just force her into this!"

The door slammed open under his boot. Chloe Barnes stood her ground just inside, trembling but refusing to move, placing her own body between Julian and her friend.

Chloe had been Elena's closest friend since childhood, the one person Elena trusted without reservation. They had grown up together, and now, heedless of the danger to herself, Chloe stood as a shield.

"Chloe, out of respect for your father, I'm only going to warn you once. Step aside now, or I won't be gentle about moving you myself."

"I am not moving."

Chloe set her jaw, refusing to budge an inch, while Julian's smile curdled into something colder as he advanced.

Just as his hand reached toward Elena, a force like a tidal wave tore him away from her and sent him crashing back.

"Touch what's mine, and you die."