“I wear a badge. I swore to protect people. But when wolves came for them, I stood down. She didn’t.” He understood that if he arrested Antonia now, there would be no mercy for her.
But there was still a third one left—Victor Rankin, the ringleader. Nick knew Antonia would not stop. Two heads of the beast were gone. The last one was the main one.
At that same time, the Rankin house had become a fortress. Victor Rankin, the last of the pack, had barricaded himself in his upstairs bedroom. His father, desperate to save him, turned the place into a compound.
Armed police stood watch in the yard. First-floor windows were boarded up. Guard dogs were turned loose in the garden. “She’s coming for me,” Victor kept saying, huddled in the corner of a sofa and drinking straight from the bottle.
“Pull yourself together,” his father snapped, red with shame and fear. “You’re a grown man. Nobody is getting in here.”
But Victor didn’t believe him. Every creak in the house, every branch scraping the siding, sounded to him like the clink of surgical tools. His nerves were coming apart. He hadn’t slept in three days.
He gripped his father’s presentation pistol in sweaty hands and waited. He dreamed of Larry unable to speak and Stan with green words on his forehead. He dreamed of Eleanor holding out rusty scissors. Victor was unraveling.
Antonia, meanwhile, prepared. She knew she could not simply walk up to the Rankin house. It was effectively a guarded target. A frontal approach would be suicide.
But she had no intention of charging the front. War had taught her the first rule of sabotage: if you can’t break through the wall, make the enemy open the gate. Or smoke him out.
She did her reconnaissance. In daylight, disguised as an older groundskeeper tidying leaves, she studied the property line. She noticed what the professionals had missed—an old coal-heating ventilation system still tied into the house.
The air intake sat behind the garage, in a blind spot beyond the sweep of the lights. Feed smoke into that, and the whole house would choke. Antonia went from drugstore to hardware store, buying small amounts at a time: sulfur, potassium permanganate, glycerin.
In her little kitchen, windows covered with blankets, she mixed a nasty chemical blend. Smoke canisters. Strong ones. Enough to trigger panic, tears, coughing, and confusion. “Smoke the rat out,” she said under her breath as she packed the powder down.
That evening someone knocked at her door. Antonia froze, hid the jars, and moved to the door with a kitchen knife in hand. “Who is it?”
