Chapter 5 - The Anatomy of Rage
Jax turns to face the staircase. He stands in the center of the grand foyer, bare-armed in his thermal shirt, his hands hanging loose at his sides, his chest rising and falling in deep, rhythmic breaths. The heat of the house instantly thaws the frost in his dark beard, turning it into tiny drops of water that glisten under the chandelier light.
"Where is the woman?" Jax asks. His voice is eerily calm, a flat, monotone whisper that carries far more danger than a scream. "The mother of these children."
The lead security guard reaches the foot of the stairs, a condescending sneer curling his upper lip. He snaps his stun gun, blue electrical arcs crackling viciously between the prongs with a loud, metallic SNAP-SNAP-SNAP.
"The doctor is conducting a private procedure," the guard says, taking a aggressive step forward. "The woman belongs to him now. Her family signed the release forms three hours ago in exchange for their land debts being cleared. Now take your filthy hillbilly ass out of this house before I put fifty thousand volts through your spine."
Jax doesn't argue. He doesn't ask to see the release forms.
In a fraction of a second, Jax closes the distance between them. The guard barely has time to raise the stun gun before Jax’s left hand shoots out like a striking viper, grabbing the guard’s wrist with a grip so crushing that the plastic housing of the weapon shatters under the pressure.
The guard lets out a strangled yelp of pain as his fingers involuntarily open, dropping the crackling weapon onto the Oriental rug.
Jax twists the man’s arm viciously behind his back, driving his own knee straight into the guard’s solar plexus. The air erupts from the guard’s lungs in a wet, gagging cough. Before the man can collapse, Jax grabs him by the tactical vest and heaves his entire two-hundred-pound frame through the air, crashing him straight into the secondary guard who was rushing down the stairs behind him.
Both men go tumbling backward down the hard oak steps in a chaotic mess of flailing limbs, heavy boots, and groans of pain, coming to a rest at the base of the staircase.
The secondary guard scrambled frantically to his feet, pulling a heavy collapsible steel baton from his belt and snapping it open with a sharp flick of his wrist. He lunges at Jax with a wild, downward strike aimed straight at Jax’s neck.
Jax doesn't even duck. He steps inside the arc of the strike, taking the blow on his reinforced leather forearm guard, and drives a devastating, short-range right hook straight into the guard's jawline.
CRACK.
The sound of shattering bone echoes through the vaulted foyer. The guard’s eyes roll back into his head instantly, his knees buckling as he drops like a sack of wet cement onto the polished floorboards, completely unconscious before he even hits the ground.
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Jax stands over the two fallen men, his breath steady, his knuckles split and bleeding slightly onto the white marble inlay of the floor. He looks up at the top of the sweeping staircase, where a long, dark corridor stretches deep into the upper wing of the manor.
From the far end of that corridor, behind a set of heavy, soundproofed double doors, comes a faint, muffled sound—a low, rhythmic electronic beep, followed by the sharp, desperate scream of a terrified woman.
