Everyone in sight seemed shocked at the revelation, and it was easy to see why. Hunter’s sister wasn’t some victim hiding for all these years… She’d been running one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world!

Hannah was Soroka Sarkonov!

But… HOW?

“What is in that box, Hannah?” Hunter asked, his face still stricken with a confused and angry look.

“Pure vengeance, Hunter… A Dong Feng 31A. China’s finest three-stage ballistic missile. Three hundred kilotons of nuclear hellfire. This weapon is going to allow me to put an end to my competition once and for all…”

“What in the hell are you going to do, Hannah? Blow them all up? These kinds of people don’t live in the middle of fucking nowhere. You’re talking about detonating a nuclear bomb in a fucking city!” Hunter replied angrily.

“I’m talking about sacrifice! You have no idea what this man is planning. You have no idea what he is capable of. A few innocent lives are a price I’m willing to pay.”

Hannah almost looked as if she had a spark of happiness beneath her restrained exterior, but she managed to keep it contained.

I felt sick. My stomach was turning as I struggled against my bindings. I needed to get free. Hunter had a gun, but I had a feeling he wasn’t going to get to use it…

Hannah seemed to notice this.

“Relax, Sarah. Take it easy,” she said, moving closer. The gun was still trained straight at my head as Hannah pulled a knife from her belt with her free hand. I gasped as she brought it up between my hands, cutting them free before bending down and doing the same to the tape wrapped around my ankles.

“She’s lucky to be alive, you know… I could have left her with Talon, and I don’t think she’d still be in one piece, little brother…”

As Sarah stood back up, she wasn’t aiming her gun at me anymore. She was aiming it squarely at Hunter. In the distance, the thrumming sounds of a helicopter began to reach my ears.

“I’m willing to let you have your precious girlfriend back,” she laughed wickedly. “And I’m not even going to make her beg for her life anymore.”

I fought the swirling nausea inside.

“Think about Sarah,” our enemy told him darkly, smiling viciously. “Think about your unborn baby.”

“There’s nowhere to go, Hannah. You’re not driving out of here,” Hunter shouted, the low thump of the helicopter slowly building in intensity.

“I have no intent of driving,” she replied, casting her eyes to the sky. The faint outline of something big was moving our way. It didn’t take me long to realize it was some kind of heavy lifter.

“You can’t let her do this!” I shouted, but I was immediately silenced as Hannah smacked me hard across the face. Pain seared my cheek, and the uncoiling nausea rose. I knew the rosy outline of her hand would be visible for hours.

“You have no choice, Hunter. You ruined my life once, and I won’t let you do it again,” Hannah said, returning the knife to her belt and pulling a different object from her pocket. This one was a small grey lump of plastic. I recognized it immediately as some kind of old style cellphone, and I watched in horror as she flipped it open.

“One press of this button, and I send us all to hell – you, me, your woman, your baby, and all of your fucking Dragons hiding around us.

“One tiny little slip of my thumb, and everything you’ve worked for is gone, just like what you did to me in Mexico. My only regret is that you wouldn’t live to see it.

“Now back the fuck off!”

My eyes were locked on the phone as I hyperventilated. Maybe it was a mother’s instinct to protect her child… Maybe it was just being a goddamned idiot. With my hands and feet free, I quickly thrust myself forward, smashing into Hannah’s arm and sending the phone flying.

“H-Hunter,” I gasped as Hannah spun, letting my own momentum send me sprawling to the ground. She followed me down, grasping at my hair as we tumbled.

She was trying to bring the gun up against me, but I struggled with strength only adrenaline could provide.

My hands were clawing and grasping, pushing her wrist aside just in time to hear a shot ringing out just inches away from my face. A piercing, ringing deafness hit my ears. Dirt scattered against my cheek as she fired again, my whole body rolling and bringing her gun hand awkwardly down against the ground.

The gun twisted from her grasp, and I could barely make out the distant, sickening crack of her finger as the trigger guard bent it backward and sideways.

“You fucking bitch!” she screamed, pulling her hand free, her index finger pointing in the completely wrong direction. Seconds seemed like eternity as the sound of Hunter’s boots on the ground became distantly louder.

Hannah was bringing an elbow down hard against my face, a scream of pure vicious anger coming from her mouth… only to be cut off suddenly as the darkness became blindingly bright.

I rolled, my eyes trying to adjust to the blinding light that was sweeping across the ground. The roar of the helicopter throbbed over the ringing sound in my ears.

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Machine gun fire rang out in the night, and I watched in horror as bullets began slamming into the earth, cutting me off from Hunter and the rest of the Devil’s Dragons. Return fire exploded from all around us. With no shadows left to hide in, Hunter’s club was firing wildly at the huge machine hovering above us.

I was in a battle for my life, and the whole world was exploding around me.

I couldn’t stop.

I head to survive for the sake of my baby.

Fueled by endorphins, I drove a fist into Hannah’s side, my hands moving to block her return blows. I had some self-defense training from the police academy, but this woman was on a completely different level. She expertly picked apart my attack, blocking three punches before smashing my head straight back down into the earth.

Dizziness washed over me as my eyes went blurry.

Hannah’s grip loosened as she pulled herself away from me. She was scrambling against the dirt, her knee driving painfully into my chest as a parting gift. I didn’t have time to react as the blinding light that bathed us suddenly rolled away. I gazed to the sky again, watching as the spotlight spun upward, the huge beast of a flying machine rolling unnaturally toward the hillside.

“It’s going down!” I heard one of the Dragons shout as I spun back around toward Hannah. She was pulling herself to her feet, and even with the world spinning around me, I could spot the telltale grey lump held tightly in her hand.

The phone!

THE BOMB!

My body was on autopilot, fingers clawing the ground and desperately trying to put distance between the container and myself…

Coming to rest against something that didn’t belong…

Something hard, something metal, something my mind had been intimately conditioned to recognize and use on instinct from my time served on the force…

“It’s over, little brother! Tell your men to stand down!” Hannah screamed, her voice punctuated by the horrific sound of the huge helicopter slamming into the ground a few hundred yards away.

The mighty blades swung and obliterated themselves against the mountainside, before being consumed by an explosion that lit the night sky.

The gunfire had ceased, but my ears were still ringing loudly. Hannah crossed the distance between us, reaching down and grasping me by the hair with her still intact left hand. My fingertips curled around the small but remarkably heavy object beneath me, the dangerous lines of the weapon so very familiar.

I knew the weapon by feel alone.

It was a Glock 19.

The same handgun I was issued when I first joined the force. Efficient. Reliable. Deadly. I’d fired thousands of rounds from a gun just like this one, and as my scalp screamed out in pain, my hand was tingling in anticipation.

“You’re not driving out of here, Hannah. You’re not going anywhere!” Hunter replied, his voice full of obvious pain. My heart screamed out and my body recoiled as Hannah tugged at my hair again, lifting my chest up from the ground and twisting my neck in an unnatural direction.

“My patience is over!” She screamed out. “I am getting in that fucking truck, and now… Now, I’m taking your girlfriend and your unborn goddamn brat with me... You move a muscle and I’ll break her fucking neck. You come near me and I’ll blow us all to fucking hell!”

I felt her anger swell as she yanked my hair a little harder. Furious, animalistic rage had overcome this woman who had seemed so badass at first, so vested in the interest of my pregnancy and my place in Hunter’s life…

“You stupid, goddamn idiots!” She continued to snarl. “I gave you – both of you – a fucking chance to get out of this shit unscathed, and you wasted it! I was going to let all of you goddamn walk away from this!”

“Hannah, you’re my sister!” Hunter shouted out to her over the burning wreckage nearby. “We could have worked together! I would have helped you! I would have went to the ends of the fucking Earth for you!”

“You just don’t get it, do you?” She replied with unhinged laughter. “Hannah is dead, Hunter. Your older sister as you knew her died a long time ago, and you’re just too stupid to see it.

“I won’t let you stop me again. I won’t let any of you stop me. I’m going to save lives. Millions of fucking lives!” Hannah screamed. “I’m going to be a hero! You think I’m dangerous? You don’t know the people I’m fighting! You could never understand the bigger picture of what I’m doing!”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Hannah,” I murmured.

Hannah pulled at my hair a bit harder, looking down and catching my gaze. My hand came up from beneath me, and I pulled the trigger. A gunshot rang out as Hannah’s hand unwove itself from my hair.

And then everything went completely black.