Page 145 of Anchor
It was at the change of shift that he noticed it. A new tech checking Claire’s IV carried her shoulders too square and moved too quickly. The second new tech’s gloves were oversized, his fingers clumsy, his touch without the natural dexterity of someone who had done this work a thousand times before. The nurse was worst of all. She stood motionless, not attentive but waiting, her gaze sharpened to a point, her stance braced as if expecting violence.
Claire lay in the custom hospital bed Chase had designed years earlier for Troy Bremen. Her eyes tracked the same details he did, and he knew instantly she felt it too.
He sat beside her. “Claire,” his voice tightened into a command, “scoot down, behind me. Now.”
She obeyed immediately, sliding back against the mattress, flattening her body. There was no argument, no hesitation, and that obedience hit Reid harder than the pain in his chest. She knew this was real.
The overheads cut out, and the emergency strobes snapped alive, pulsing red and white in a jagged rhythm. Reid’s stomach dropped.
A hiss followed—the sound of a magnetic lock disengaging.
The side door unsealed, the one no one else should have been able to access. Reid pivoted toward it, every nerve screaming in warning. A man stepped through—Vos’s number one, his chief assassin. The man whispered of in old dossiers under one name: Scour.
He was tall and dressed in dark civilian clothes. His face had filled out since the old intelligence briefs, but his eyes remained the same—cold, evil, ruthless.
“Reid Hanlon,” Scour’s voice was dry and edged with mockery, “still playing bodyguard?”
Reid did not answer. His gaze cut to the “techs,” who had already dropped their pretense. Their stances shifted, and their hands moved toward weapons. They were predators revealing their teeth.
The first attacker came fast. Reid pivoted, ignoring the burst of agony across his ribs, and drove his elbow into the man’s nose. The crack was brutal, blood spraying as the man folded.
The second lunged, weapon half drawn. Reid caught his wrist, twisted, and tore the weapon free, pain flaring white-hot down his arm. A bone snapped, but not his own.
The nurse came last, a knife flashing. Reid planted his stance, turned, and kicked her so hard, her body crashed against the vitals console. Glass shattered, alarms shrieked from the monitors, and she did not rise again.
Three were down.
Reid staggered, his lungs burning, his vision pulsing black at the edges. His body screamed for collapse, but he remained upright.
Scour had not moved. He stepped over his own fallen people as though they were nothing, and his eyes locked on Reid. His voice remained calm, precise, and certain, as if the outcome had already been written.
“I came for her.” Scour’s gaze flicked to Claire before returning to Reid. “Vos may not be here, but his will is. You think you are enough to stop me?”
The strobes froze the moment in harsh light. Blood was slick across the walls. Glass was scattered on the floor. Reid was unsteady but refused to fall. He grabbed his weapon from the bedside table beside Claire, maintaining his stance as he raised it. “You will not take her.” His voice was carved from stone.
Scour’s mouth curved into a smirk. “Won’t, or can’t? You are nothing more than scar tissue holding a gun, Hanlon. You will fall first. And when you do, she is mine.”
Claire pressed tighter against the side bedrail, her palm locked to her stomach, terror and rage twisting her features. Scour thought he could take her child. He thought he could claim her for Vos.
Reid shifted forward, fully blocking her from Scour’s sight. “Over my dead body.”
Scour tilted his head, studying Reid like a wolf considering prey. “That’s the idea. She was ours before you knew her name. And the child…” his eyes cut to Claire again, cold and claiming, “…will be the future you’ll never touch.”
Reid spoke again, “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me or my child.”
For the first time, Scour faltered. The smirk slipped.
Reid did not wait. The first of two gunshots tore through the room. The recoils ripped fire through his arm, but the roundsstruck true. Scour staggered backward, eyes wide in shock, as if refusing gravity itself. Then his body collapsed to the floor with stone-heavy finality, blood spreading in a dark pool beneath him.
The strobes fracturedthe room into violent flashes. Reid stood at the center of it, a man who looked like he might collapse but refused to.
The gunshots cracked the air open. Smoke curled. The man stumbled, eyes widening with shock, and then his body folded to the ground.
Claire’s scream locked tight in her chest. She clung to the bedrail with white knuckles, her heart hammering so hard, she thought it might split through her ribs. Her breath caught high in her throat, trapped.
Reid stood in front of her, still shielding her, his weapon raised and steady even though his whole frame trembled. He hadn’t hesitated.
She stared past him at the body crumpled in the flickering light.Scour—Vos’s number one.Dead.
