Black car after black car was pulling up.  My security was scrambling to get to defensible positions, but I didn’t have enough men.  The Picollis had followed me.

“Boss!” one of my men called from outside.

“What’s happening, Jace?”

I pulled Kendall to the ground, away from the windows, as the first shots started ringing out.  Soon there were a lot more bullets coming in than going out.

“The Picollis.  Here.”

Reaching inside my jacket, I handed Kendall my gun.  She held it with a look on her face like it was a live snake.

“I don’t know-” she began.

“Listen to me! The safety is off, all you need to do is point the gun and pull the trigger.  I want you to find somewhere to hide.  Don’t come out no matter what! You understand? The walls of this cabin are good and thick, you stay away from the windows and you’ll be OK.  If somebody gets in and finds you, shoot them in the face.”

“I can’t-”

“You can.”

“If I’ve got your gun, what do you have?”

The nearest window to us shattered, razor-sharp shards of glass falling to the floor a few feet away.  I looked over the fireplace at the baseball bat with a lightning symbol burned into it.

“I fucking love baseball.  Now go.  We’re going to be OK.  I love you.  Go! Stay down!”

“I love you!”

Kendall crouched and ran through a doorway into another room.  I blinked away tears.  That was going to be the last time I ever saw the woman I loved.

I prayed that it was, because if I saw her again, it would only be because the Picollis found her and wanted to kill her in front of me.  That thought almost seized me up and froze me to the spot.

Selfish as it was, I couldn’t bring myself to wish she had never come into my life, but I did wish I’d never existed so she could have been safe.  If the Picollis somehow didn’t know she was here then she had a chance, but I was a fucking dead man.

I crawled over to the kitchen area and shrugged off my jacket, leaving it on the floor.  I took off my empty gun holster and put it in a drawer as the one-sided battle raged outside.  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and looked up at the baseball bat ruefully.  I was a fucking dead man.

Chapter 29

Jace

The gunfire quickly petered out to the occasional crack and pop, and then stopped altogether.  I stood beside the door and adjusted my grip on the baseball bat, breathing deep and slow, each breath puffing out my cheeks as I listened to my heart booming in my chest.

I could hear voices out there, swearing, calling out instructions.  They were getting closer.  Then I could hear faint footsteps, people yelling out “clear!” and getting closer still.

A few minutes later, I heard careful footfalls on the steps I myself had walked up only half an hour ago, harsh whispers.  I was gripping the bat so tight that the handle creaked as I held it poised, waiting for my pitch.

Soon, they were gathered on the other side of the door.  Two low-level goons were arguing about who would go first until somebody higher up the food chain told one of them to shut the fuck up and get in there.

A split-second after I heard them count to three, the door burst open and I swung for the fences.  Some asshole Picolli had his face turned to mush by that first hit, but the bat splintered apart just above my hands.

The first guy, already unconscious, fell backwards and became tangled up with the second soldier, who had been rushing forward to follow him.  I jumped in with the broken bat and shoved the sharp end through his throat before he could lift his gun up in my direction again.

Blood spurted everywhere when I pulled my bat-turned-stake out, and he dropped his gun to use both of his hands to try and stem the flow of his life as it gushed out of him.  He was even more of a dead man than I was.

A third soldier shouldered his way past the stabbing victim, and over the crumpled heap of the first one.  He managed to block my first swing, grabbing my wrist to stop himself getting impaled like his friend, as I did the same with his gun hand.

He managed to push me back a step, before I brought my knee up into his nuts with testicle-popping force.  His mouth opened wide as he gasped in air and I sensed a certain limpness in his arms.

Taking a massive risk, I let go of his gun hand and gave him a left hook to his dangling jaw, dislocating or breaking it so it hung off his face at a horrific angle and rocking his head to the side.  His grip on my wrist failed, and I shoved the bat into the back of his throat through his open mouth.

As he fell, I had to admit he’d done his job though, because two more Picollis were through the door before I could block that choke point again.  I charged forward, lashing out with a kick to one of their knees that resulted in a satisfying wet crack and made his leg bend the wrong way, as I blocked the second’s attempt to pistol-whip me.

It seemed the fucking idiots were under instructions to take me alive, or they would have got a shot off by now.  Three more came through the door as I stomped on Mister-Broken-Leg’s head and turned his lights out for the time being.

One of them flew in and tackled me, putting me off balance as I brought the wooden stake down into his kidney area.  He sank towards the ground, whimpering, but somebody else punched me just below the eye before I could retrieve my weapon.

I grunted and lashed out blindly in that direction, feeling teeth break and cut my knuckles.  While I was blinking to clear my vision, somebody else tackled me, managing to bring me to the ground but also dislodging the splintered bat.

Whoever tackled me ended up falling into my guard, and I used my legs to put him off balance as he tried to rain punches down on me.  Twisting to the side, I struck out at somebody else’s knee with the heel of my hand and heard a satisfying, if girly, scream from somewhere above.

On the backswing, I knocked out the person on top of me with a lucky elbow strike and then drove the stake into somebody else’s leg on the other side.  Putting my feet on the hips of the unconscious sandbag on top of me, I kicked out, pushing both of us backwards in opposite directions.

As I was getting up, something heavy hit me on the back of the head hard enough to make me see stars, robbing me of the vision I’d only just managed to clear.  In a daze, I bunched my fist and lashed out, hitting something.  Maybe it was a skull, maybe it was one of the log-walls of the cabin.

Either way, it didn’t matter, because that heavy thing hit me on the head again and I went down like a sack of shit.  Blackness and blurry shouting washed over me and a few stray boots found the time to kick me in the ribs, but I was drifting far enough away that I could barely feel them.

Rough hands picked me up and dragged me to the other side of the room before dumping me on to a small chair, where they held me still and others tied me down.  The ropes dug in and burned my wrists, bringing voices back into focus.

“Al, Tony, search this joint.  Kill anybody you find.  The Kung Fu Fighter over here’s gonna learn a lesson when he wakes up.  I’ve been waitin’ to talk to this motherfucker for a long time now.”

That could only be Santino Picolli, the Italian Ninja himself.

Chapter 30

Jace

The water felt freezing when it hit me, and I gasped for air, hallucinating for a moment that I’d fallen off a ship somewhere in the Arctic Circle.  The reality was much worse.

I didn’t know how long I’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for, but it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes because the first thing I heard after “wakey, wakey, motherfucker” was Tony, or Al, telling Santino that there was nobody else in the cabin.