The house answered.
Automated defenses came online with a low mechanical hum, controlled bursts forcing the attackers to scatter.Someone screamed.Someone else kept moving.
"Damn Kol, your house is scary," Luca murmured.
“They know she’s there,” Mateo said a moment later, voice tighter now as predictive models updated.“This isn’t a snatch-and-grab.It’s punishment.They came loud on purpose, and they fucking know she’s there.”
Kol’s jaw locked.
The buyer was furious.
Good.That meant they’d hurt him.
A third man breached the outer wall and made it three steps inside before Kol put him down.Blood sprayed the pale stone.The smell of cordite and salt filled the air.
“Eliza,” Kol said without turning.“Look at me.”
She did.
Her face was pale but steady, eyes locked on his like an anchor point in a storm.
“Breathe,” he told her.“You’re doing fine.”
Another explosion rocked the far side of the property.
“This is escalating,” Mateo warned.“They’re not pulling back.”
“They won’t,” Kol said.“Not yet.They haven’t achieved what they came for.”
Because this wasn’t about retrieval anymore.
It was about terror.
The buyer wanted her afraid.
Kol felt something inside him snap cleanly in half.
He moved.
Not forward in a rush—laterally first, one precise step, then another, breaking the line they’d just sighted.He fired, relocated, and fired again.Two shots, shift.One controlled burst, pivot.He used the corridor the way it had been designed to be used, moving between firing slits, never staying long enough to return fire to bracket him.
“Left tree line, seventy meters,” Mateo said, voice clipped and fast.“Wind quartering.He’s crouched.”
Kol leaned into the angle, adjusted half a degree, and squeezed the trigger.The man folded without a sound.
Kol fell back three steps as incoming rounds chewed into the outer wall, then advanced again through a secondary lane, drawing fire away from the main structure.He let them see him just long enough to commit, then disappeared as the house’s defenses rerouted and flared.
A drone screamed overhead.Kol waited until it dipped to re-acquire, then fired once.It detonated mid-air, shrapnel hissing into the water beyond.
“Two moving right,” Mateo said.“They’re trying to rush.”
“Let them,” Kol replied.
He retreated deliberately, boots sliding on stone dust and blood, pulling them deeper into the approach corridor.The moment they crossed the invisible threshold, the house answered—automated fire forcing them into the open.Kol stepped back into view and dropped both men before they understood the trap.
Bodies fell.
Not randomly.Not chaotically.