The warning from instincts still ringing in Stella's ears when she caught the movement through the window. Down at the tree line, right at the jagged edge of the property, dark silhouettes were shifting through the twilight. The wolves were back.
Stella didn't hesitate. She couldn't risk a gunfight drawing attention to the house—not while Melissa lay fragile and fading in the bedroom upstairs. She needed to handle this with swift, quiet, brutal efficiency.
Silently slipping out the back door into the biting coastal wind, Stella melted into the shadows of the porch. Her HSS training took over completely. She tracked the three men as they spread out, attempting to flank the perimeter. They didn't see her coming.
She caught the first man from behind, her arm sweeping around his throat in a flawless sleeper hold, driving him into the frozen earth before he could even gasp. The second man turned at the sound, but Stella was already moving. She dropped low, sweeping his legs out from under him, then delivered a devastating, precise strike to his jaw that left him dazed and bleeding in the snow.
The third man drew his weapon, but Stella was faster. She slammed her own gun hard against his temple, forcing him to his knees, the cold steel of her barrel pressed unyieldingly under his chin.
"Listen to me very carefully," Stella hissed, her voice dropping into a terrifying, lethal register. "If you, or anyone you work for, so much as breathes near this property again, I will not hesitate to end you. You leave now, and you never show your faces here again. Do you understand?"
Terrified by the sheer, unhinged ferocity of the elite operative, the man nodded frantically. Dragging their injured comrades, the men scrambled backward into the darkness, fleeing the property. They would never return.