Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 06

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 06 – Twelve Minutes to Kill a Mountain

I didn’t ask him.

I know. I know. But you try looking at a man who slept eight years on a concrete floor and asking him if a

nine-thousand-year-old snake thinks he’s lying to you.

So instead I said, “We need money.”

Because we did. I had three hundred thousand left and six days to produce another nine hundred grand for the Pits, and if I defaulted, they had legal claim to drag Rhys back.

That was never happening.

“How much?” he asked.

“Nine hundred thousand.”

“In six days.”

“In six days.”

He nodded slowly, like I’d asked him to pick up milk. “Fine. What are we killing?”

I love him a little bit for that, actually. That’s the moment. Not the diner, not the cage. That.

Stonehide bears aren’t bears. They’re what happens when something crawls out of a rift and eats a mountain on the

way. Ten feet at the shoulder, hide like granite, and a regeneration factor that means a full war-band of trained wolves

needs an hour and about six casualties to bring one down.

Nobody hunts them, because nobody can. There’s a hoard of raid-grade steel and old coin sitting in a warded cairn at

the center of their territory and it’s been sitting there for two centuries because every crew that’s gone in has come out

as paste.

They have exactly one weakness, and in my old life it took the realm eight months to find it.

They’re slow.

“Two rules,” I told Rhys at the tree line. “One, you don’t take a hit. Ever. Not one. Two, when I say run, you run toward

the cairn, not away.”

His mouth curved. “You’ve done this before.”

“I’ve watched it done. Badly.”

Then I walked into that clearing alone with a hunting knife and let the biggest one see me.

It came like a landslide.

I sidestepped, spun in behind it, and opened a shallow line across its hock.

ROT APPLIED. 1/3.

Second cut. 2/3.

Third. 3/3.

The Stonehide staggered. Its skin went grey-green along the wound. It tried to heal – I watched it try – and the rot

just ate the healing like acid on paper, and its speed dropped by half.

“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, that’s nasty.”

Then I pulled four more.

Twelve minutes, that’s what it takes. Twelve minutes of sprinting a shrinking circle with two tons of screaming granite

behind you, threading between five sets of jaws, timing every charge, never stopping, never breathing, while poison

does the work your muscles can’t.

Rhys ran the outside line, drawing off strays, and I have never in my life seen anything move like that. No wolf form. He hadn’t shifted in eight years – the silver had seen to that. He did it in a human body with a length of rebar.

The first Stonehide dropped at eleven minutes fifty.

The other four went down within ninety seconds of each other.

I fell onto my knees in the wet grass, laughing like a lunatic, shaking so hard I couldn’t hold the knife.

Five kills.

And a warded cairn, sealed for two hundred years, glowing faintly at the center of the clearing.

I limped over and put my palm flat against the seal.

BREAKER.

It opened like a door with no lock at all.

Inside: forty thousand in old realm coin. Six pieces of pre-war raid steel. And, wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom, a set

of matched silver-veined daggers with a name etched down the blades.

WIDOWMAKERS. Bonded: the first hand that bleeds on them.

I bled on them.

They warmed like something alive.

Rhys crouched beside me, breathing hard, blood on his knuckles, that terrible slow smile spreading. “How much is all

this worth?”

“Two million,” I said. “Maybe three, if I list the raid steel while the market’s starving.”

“Then we’re done.”

“No.” I stood and looked south, toward the lights of Silverpine on the horizon, where my sister was picking a wedding

dress in a house I paid for. “Now we’re funded.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Fourteen missed calls.

And one text, from a number I’d deleted a lifetime ago.

Damien: Come home. NOW. Something’s wrong with Cassie and she’s saying your name.