The next day dawned with a sense of stolen time. A fragile normalcy had been shattered, and the boys of apartment 2B were living on a knife's edge. Every footstep in the hall, every car that slowed on the street below, was a potential threat.
"He's not just going to let it go," Sam said, pacing the small living room. "We lied to a cop. The lead investigator on a murder case. We could go to jail."
"He's not a real cop," Leo countered quietly, looking out the window. "He's a predator. We saw it in his eyes."
"Yeah, well, the predator has a badge and a gun," Mike muttered, for once not having a flippant remark.
They never got to finish the conversation.
The world exploded. Their front door didn't open; it disintegrated, crashing inward in a spray of splinters as the frame was kicked in. Officer Kross stormed into the room, his face a mask of cold fury, flanked by three of his men. They didn't have guns blazing, but they were drawn, held with a chilling professionalism that promised violence.
"I gave you a chance to cooperate," Kross snarled, his eyes locking onto Leo. "I warned you."
Before any of them could react, two of the officers had Sam and Mike pinned against the wall. Kross strode toward Leo, pulling a heavy, wooden stick—a riot baton—from his belt.
"Where is she?" Kross demanded, his voice low and menacing.
"We told you," Leo stammered, backing away. "We don't know."
"Wrong answer."
The first blow of the stick caught Leo across the ribs, forcing the air from his lungs in a pained gasp. He crumpled to the floor. Kross stood over him, raising the baton again. "I'm going to keep asking, and the answers are going to get easier to give." He brought the stick down again, this time on Leo's back. The sound was a sickening thud.
Suddenly, the remains of the front door were blasted open again, this time from the outside. Elara stood there, her silver eyes blazing with a cold, white-hot fury that made the fires of her past look like embers.
She took in the scene in an instant: Sam and Mike restrained, Leo on the floor, Kross standing over him with the baton raised.
One of the cops holding Sam made a fatal mistake. Seeing only a woman, he released Sam and moved to intercept her. "Ma'am, you need to—" he began, reaching out to manhandle her.
He never finished the sentence. Elara's hand shot out, not in a punch, but an open-palmed strike to his chest. It looked almost casual, but the impact sent him flying backward as if hit by a car. He crashed into the far wall with a sound of crunching drywall and bone, then slid to the floor, unconscious.
The other two officers stared in shocked terror. Their brains couldn't process what they had just seen. Instinct and fear took over. They raised their pistols and opened fire.
The noise was deafening in the small room. Elara staggered back as bullets tore into her shoulder and side. She fell back onto one knee, blood—dark and crimson—staining the white dress she was, for some reason, wearing again. For a horrifying second, Leo thought she was down.
But then, as Kross and his men watched in abject horror, the bleeding stopped. They could see the torn fabric of her dress shifting as the wounds beneath sealed themselves. The mangled lead slugs were pushed out of her flesh by regenerating tissue, falling to the floor with soft, metallic clicks.
She rose to her feet, her eyes no longer silver, but the searing, blood-red of a predator that had just been wounded.
She moved. It was not a run; it was a blur. She disarmed the first cop, shattering his wrist with a precise twist before a single, sharp blow to the temple sent him slumping to the ground. The second one tried to back away, fumbling to reload. She was on him in an instant, a knee strike disabling him before he could even register her presence. She had harmed them, but as promised, she had not killed them. She'd merely knocked them out.
Now, only Kross remained. He was frozen, his baton held uselessly, his mind shattered by the impossibility of what he was witnessing. The woman he had come to punish was not a woman at all.
Elara walked toward him slowly, the floorboards creaking under her feet. The rage on her face was ancient and absolute. She stopped directly in front of him, and before he could even flinch, she grabbed him by the throat.
Her grip was iron. She lifted him effortlessly, his feet dangling inches off the floor as he clawed uselessly at her hand.
"You came into the wrong home," she hissed, her voice a low, terrifying growl.
With a roar of pure, concentrated fury, she kicked him. Her foot connected with his chest, and he was launched from the apartment, flying through the shattered doorway to crash in a heap in the hallway outside.
He lay there, gasping for air, the world spinning. He could feel the sharp, grating pain of at least two broken ribs and a shattered collarbone. But the physical agony was nothing, a distant echo compared to the two facts that were screaming in his mind, burning away every shred of his pride and sanity.
The first was that this WOMAN, this thing, was impossibly, unnaturally stronger and more dangerous than him. She was some kind of creature, a monster that had shattered his understanding of the world.
The second, and far more wounding fact, was that this WOMAN had thrown him, a man of authority, a man of power, like a piece of common trash.