You Can't Half Ass Slaughter

You Can't Half Ass Slaughter
Cyrus

The thing about slaughter is you can’t half-ass it.
You’ve either committed, or you’re wasting a perfectly good massacre.
We hit the main hall like a knife to the throat.
Bullets chew up plaster. Wolves snarl. Someone screams, “INTRU—” and Raven shoots him in the mouth before he finishes the word.
He hits the floor, twitching, teeth scattered like rice.
“Inside voice,” she mutters, racking the slide without looking.
Fates, I love her.
“Left,” Thane barks, voice like a blade. “Raven.”
She peels off without hesitation, boots pounding down the corridor, a blur of red hair and murder.
I barrel forward with my squad at my back, boots slipping in the fresh blood on the tile. The main corridor explodes into chaos the second we clear the entryway.
Stevens’ guards pour out of doorways, clutching rifles and machetes and kitchen knives like that’s going to help them. They’re shouting, tripping over each other, firing in panic.
“DOWN!” someone bellows.
I don’t.
I go up.
I launch off a toppled chair, plant one hand against the wall, and flip over the first spray of bullets. They stitch the air where I was a half-second ago and chew through one of their own men instead.
He gurgles and drops.
I land on another guard, knees slamming into his shoulders, and drive my combat knife into his throat. He collapses like a puppet whose strings have been cut.
Someone grabs for my ankle.
I stomp his face in.
Bone gives with a wet crack, and my boot sinks halfway through his teeth.
“COVER!” one of Stevens’ guards screams.
We oblige him—with bullets.
Three rifles open up behind me, firing controlled bursts that stitch through doorframes and cheap drywall. Wolves jerk and fall, blood splattering across the walls like they’re trying to repaint.
A big male charges me from the side, swinging a crowbar at my ribs.
I sidestep, catch the bar, and yank him into my fist. My knuckles meet his nose with enough force to snap cartilage and send him spinning. Before he hits the ground, I hook an arm around his neck and twist.
His spine pops.
“Next!” I shout, laughing.
A woman lunges from a side room with a kitchen knife, aiming for my liver. Points for effort.
I slap her wrist away, grab a handful of her hair, and slam her skull into the doorframe.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
She goes limp.
“Raven!” Theo calls. “Right side!”
I turn just in time to see someone trying to level a shotgun at my mate’s head.
My world narrows to the barrel and the twitch of his finger.
Bad move.
Fireball’s already moving as he fires—speed gift kicking in, the world stretching out in slow frames. The blast rips through where her chest was, and she’s behind him before he finishes the recoil.
Raven seizes the back of his head, wrenches hard, and slams his face into the wall. Plaster cracks. Blood blooms. His body slides down, boneless.
I take the shotgun.
“Sharing is caring,” I say, and fire point-blank into the next fool dumb enough to charge me.
He flies backward, slams into another wolf, and they both collapse in a heap of shredded meat.
Raven’s laughter echoes faintly from the left wing—sharp and feral. She’s enjoying herself, which is important.
Self-care.
A man tries to rush past me to get to the main entrance.
He takes two steps.
My knife takes his Achilles.
He shrieks and drops.
I walk past him and put a bullet in the back of his skull without breaking stride.
“Keep pressure on the side halls!” I mind-link. “Nobody flanks us. Nobody runs. Permission to maim and dismember is enthusiastically granted.”
Then there are more gunshots, more screaming, more beautiful sounds of bones giving up.
We clear the first main stretch fast. Bodies are everywhere—slumped against walls, sprawled across the floor, stacked in doorways like they tried to plug the tide with their own flesh.
It didn’t work.
“Fucking pathetic,” I mutter, stepping over a corpse with a half-torn pack tattoo.
“You’re disappointed?” Theo asks.
“I wanted a workout,” I say. “This feels like warm-up stretches.”
A bullet punches into the wall next to my head.
I tilt my face toward the source.
Sniper. Upper balcony. Far end of the hall.
He ducks back too slowly.
“Mine,” I tell the others, already sprinting.
“Cyrus—” someone starts, but I’m gone.
I hit the broken railing, vault up, fingers snagging splintered wood. Momentum carries me to the upper level in one fluid swing. My boots hit the balcony, and I’m already moving.
The sniper spins, eyes wide, trying to bring the rifle up.
Too late.
I slam into him, shoulder first, driving him into the wall. His skull bounces off plaster. He swings the butt of the rifle at my face.
I let it hit.
Pain flares. My wolf roars.
I smile with blood in my teeth.
“Cute,” I say, and wrench the rifle away, snapping the strap. I flip it around and jam the muzzle under his chin.
“Last words?” I ask.
He spits blood in my face.
So I pull the trigger.
The back of his head decorates the ceiling.
I sling the rifle, wipe my cheek with the back of my hand, and look down over the railing.
Thane is a monster in motion below—moving through the chaos like the eye of a storm. When he hits a man, the man stays down. His aura is a pressure in my bones, in my teeth, in the air itself, making weaker wolves convulse when they get too close.
Half of Stevens’ pack isn’t dying from bullets.
They’re dying from trying to stay upright in that much dominance.
Good.
He owes them nothing.
I drop back down, landing next to him as another wave tries to clog the corridor. Men shove forward, shouting, firing over each other’s shoulders, panic rolling through them like a disease.
Theo’s knife flashes. One man’s throat opens in a clean red smile.
Thane crushes another’s sternum with a palm strike that lifts him off his feet.
I dart into the middle of them, laughing, moving faster than they can track.
I hit one in the knee with a sideways kick—everything in his leg pops at once. I use his falling body as a launch, grab the shirt of the man behind him, yank him forward, and drive my elbow into his temple.
He drops.
Someone clamps arms around me from behind.
I grin.
I throw my head back, feel my skull crack his nose. His grip loosens. I hook a leg behind his and roll us, flipping him down onto his back, then ram my knife straight down into his throat, pinning him to the floor.
He flails and goes still.
Thane spares me a single blood-splattered glance. “Stay alive.”
“Trying,” I say cheerfully.
We push forward.
Room by room.
Hallway by hallway.
Raven swings back into the corridor from a side passage, splattered in blood up to her elbows, hair wild, eyes bright.
“How’s it going?” I ask her, breathless and thrilled.
“Eight down on the left wing,” she pants. “Three tried to bargain. One pissed himself. I took that personally.”
“I’m so proud of you.”
She smirks, then looks past me toward the thicker double doors at the end of the hall. Heavy steel, reinforced, like they were expecting a siege.
Cowards always build fortresses after they start the fire.
“Basement’s down there,” she says, voice tightening. “I know that layout.”
I feel her rage boil under her skin through the bond.
“Stevens is below,” Thane confirms. His nostrils flare, eyes gone black with Alpha force. “And he’s not alone.”
His aura surges again, and for a second I hear muffled cries from behind the steel—men choking, someone sobbing, boots scrambling as lesser wolves fight the urge to collapse.
He could hold them there with his aura alone if he wanted. Pin them like insects.
He doesn’t.
He wants this done personally.
We reach the door.
Up close, the thing is a joke. Thick steel, reinforced hinges, triple-locked from the inside. It smells like fear, stale air, and trapped wolves.
This is an excellent time for explosives.
My fingers itch for the detonator.
“I’ve got enough C4 to turn that door into confetti and mulch whatever’s behind it,” I tell Thane. “Quick, satisfying, big boom, everybody wins.”
Raven’s fingers flex around her gun. “I vote explosion.”
Thane steps right up to the steel and lays his hand flat against it.
His aura punches through.
On the other side, someone screams.
“No,” he says.
He curls his fingers.
And rips the door off its hinges.
Metal shrieks, warps, and gives. The door yanks free like it’s made of cardboard instead of welded steel. Dust and paint rain down as Thane steps back and throws it aside. It hits the wall with a thunderous crash that reverberates down the corridor.
I stare.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s rude. I had plans for that.”
“You can blow something else up,” he replies, voice a low rumble.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
We step into the basement.
The air is colder here. Damper. It smells like old stone, fear-sweat, and blood that’s been cleaned up too many times to ever really leave.
And there he is.
Stevens.
He’s standing in the center of the room, breathing hard, clothes rumpled as he dressed in a hurry. His hair is damp with sweat. His eyes dart from Thane to Theo to me to Raven.
Behind him, a woman is on her knees.
Gun to her head.
Hands bound in front of her.
Red hair, a tangled curtain falling past her shoulders.
I can’t see her face yet.
I don’t care to.
My gaze is locked on Stevens.
“Alpha of Alphas,” he says, trying for calm, but his voice cracks halfway through the title.
“Stevens,” Thane replies.
Theo moves in behind us, silent and deadly. Raven takes one slow step forward, gaze locked on the woman.
Raven’s jaw clenches.
Stevens notices.
He smiles.
I want to shoot him just for that.
“Careful,” he says, pressing the barrel harder against the woman’s skull. “One wrong move, and she decorates the floor.”
Raven’s fingers tighten around her gun.
“Let her go,” Thane orders, voice threaded with threat.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Stevens laughs, a broken, ugly sound. “You already took my business. My men. My connections. You dragged Nikolai out like a rabid dog on a chain. You expect me to give up my last bargaining chip?”
“Nikolai was a rabid dog,” I say. “You’re the flea on his ass.”
Stevens ignores me, eyes cutting back to Raven.
Raven’s expression doesn’t move.
But the bond between us? It pulses brutally.
It’s not pain.
Not shock.
Acceptance.
Old truth being dragged back into the light.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says calmly.
Stevens licks his lips. “I think it does. Because this—” he digs the barrel into the woman’s temple, making her flinch. “—is what you left behind.”
My brain goes quiet.
Raven’s scent spikes—like lightning hitting dry tinder.
The woman lifts her head just enough for the light to catch her face.
Same eyes.
Same jawline.
Aged. Hunted. Hollowed out.
Raven’s mother.
Still alive.
Barely.
“I kept her,” Stevens says, smug now. “Insurance. Leverage. Imagine it, Raven—what a tidy little story. You crawl back to me on your knees, put the leash back on, become the weapon you were meant to be, and maybe I don’t put a bullet in the only blood you have left.”
He thinks this is going to break her.
He has no idea who he sold.
Raven tilts her head.
Her aura doesn’t flash like Thane’s.
Doesn’t thunder like mine.
It sharpens.
Everything about her condenses into one needlepoint of lethal intent.
“You want me to beg?” she asks softly.
Stevens smiles. “I think you will.”
She moves.
He doesn’t even see it.
One second, she’s standing at my side, shoulders squared, gun at her thigh.
The next, she’s gone in a blur of motion—the gift slamming into my senses like a shockwave. The world around her slows, edges stretching. Her outline becomes a smear of shadow and speed.
In that slowed-down sliver of time, I watch it happen like a frame-by-frame playback.
She’s in front of Stevens.
Her hand is on his wrist, knocking the barrel off its target before he even registers contact.
Her other hand lifts her gun.
She doesn’t look at him.
She looks at her mother.
Her finger tightens on the trigger.
The bullet hits between the woman’s eyes.
Clean. Precise. Instant.
Her mother’s body jerks once, then goes slack, falling sideways out of Stevens’ grip, blood blooming in a dark halo on the concrete.
Time snaps back.
The shot still echoes when Stevens screams, “WHAT DID YOU—”
Raven’s gun is already pointed at his face.
The look on his face—shock, fury, disbelief—almost makes up for the fact I didn’t get to blow the door.
Almost.
I bare my teeth at him.
“Oh, good,” I murmur. “One more thing scratched off the to-do list.”