Chapter 5 - The Ambush in the Kitchen
At four o'clock, the pantry was sealed, the leaking gable was patched, and the rotting wood behind the kitchen sink had been replaced with fresh cedar boards Adrian had hauled from his SUV.
Adrian stood in the small, outdated kitchen, washing the dark roof tar from his hands with bar soap at the porcelain sink.
Claire sat at the small laminate kitchen table, peeling potatoes into a plastic bowl. The house was quiet; the three girls were upstairs in their shared bedroom, playing with the balsa wood blocks.
"I left two thousand dollars in cash inside the pantry drawer," Adrian said, turning off the tap and wiping his hands on a paper towel. "It's for groceries and heating oil. Don't throw it in the river, Claire. Use it for the girls."
Claire didn't look up from her potatoes. "I don't want your charity, Adrian."
"It's not charity! It's child support!" Adrian snapped, his patience finally snapping after hours of suppressed emotion. "I am their father! I have a legal and moral obligation to provide for them!"
"You lost the right to talk about obligation seven years ago!" Claire shouted back, dropping her paring knife into the bowl with a loud splash of starch water. She stood up, her thin chest heaving. "You think you can show up with a hammer and two grand and wipe away the nights Lara spent crying because she couldn't afford brand-name formula for three babies at once? You think you can fix seven years of abandonment with a sheet of zinc?"
"No!" Adrian roared, taking two fast steps toward the table. "I know I can't! I know I am damned for what I did to Lara! But she is dead, Claire! She is gone! And those three girls are living in a house with a sagging porch, wearing clothes that don't fit, eating cheap cereal because you're too proud to accept help from the man who caused the pain!"
Claire stared at him, her face turning pale, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
Before either of them could speak another word, the heavy front door of the house crashed open against the entryway wall with a violent, splintering thunder.
"CLAIRE!" a harsh, raspy male voice boomed through the hallway.
Claire's face went completely ghostly white. The paring knife slipped from her fingers onto the floorboards.
Two men walked straight into the kitchen.
The first was a tall, burly man in his late forty, wearing a grease-stained leather jacket, heavy work boots, and a baseball cap pulled low over dark, predatory eyes. His name was Wayne Mercer—the black-sheep brother of the Mercer Steel family, a man notorious in Westmoreland County for loan-sharking, illegal gambling, and aggressive debt collection.
Beside him stood a smaller, lean man with a scar running through his left eyebrow, his hand tucked suspiciously inside his denim jacket.
"Wayne," Claire breathed, her voice trembling violently as she stepped between the men and the stairs leading to the girls' room. "I told you I'd have the payment by Monday."
"Monday was three days ago, Claire," Wayne Mercer sneered, stepping further into the small kitchen, his muddy boots leaving dark tracks on the clean floorboards. "Your dead daughter took out a fifteen-thousand-dollar personal loan from my firm two years ago to pay for her trial cancer treatments in Baltimore. The interest accrued. You owe twenty-eight thousand dollars."
"I don't have twenty-eight thousand dollars!" Claire wept, holding her hands up in surrender. "I gave you Lara’s car last month!"
"The car was junk!" Wayne barked, stepping right into Claire's personal space. "My investors want their capital. Now, I hear you got three pretty little girls upstairs—"
Before Wayne could finish his sentence, a massive, unyielding hand clamped onto his leather collar like an iron vice.
May you like
Adrian pulled Wayne backward with terrifying, effortless strength, slamming the two-hundred-pound man violently against the refrigerator. The metal appliance let out a loud, hollow boom, sending souvenir magnets flying across the linoleum floor.
"If you finish that sentence," Adrian whispered, his voice dropping into a lethal, terrifying register that made the room temperature feel like absolute zero, "I will make sure your family's firm is liquidated by noon tomorrow, and you spend the rest of your life eating through a straw in a state penitentiary."
