Single Dad Returned to Uncle's Abandoned Foundry After 15 Years in Military, Someone Wanted Him Gone

Описание: The first rock came through the window at three in the morning, shattering glass across the bedroom floor where Connor Hayes and his daughter had been sleeping for exactly two nights. The second followed before he could even process the first, carrying a note wrapped around it with rubber bands that landed on the mattress between them. By the time Connor reached the window, the truck that had idled in the foundry's gravel lot was already tearing down the access road, its taillights disappearing into the Kentucky darkness like coals cooling in water.

His daughter Sophie sat up in the sleeping bag they'd zipped together for warmth, her eleven-year-old face pale in the moonlight. She didn't scream, didn't cry, just watched her father with the kind of calm that came from a childhood spent on military bases where security alerts were routine. Connor had taught her not to panic, though he'd never imagined he'd need to deploy that training in his dead uncle's foundry.

"Stay there," he said, his voice carrying the automatic authority of fifteen years as an Army combat engineer. He moved to the broken window carefully, boots crunching on glass, scanning the darkness beyond for movement, for the glint of metal, for anything that suggested this was more than intimidation.

The note was simple, block letters written in black marker on torn cardboard. LEAVE NOW OR IT GETS WORSE. No signature, no explanation, just the kind of threat that was meant to be taken seriously because it came in the middle of the night wrapped around a rock thrown at a child's window.

Connor stood there holding the note, his jaw tight, thinking about the six hundred dollars in his bank account, the truck with two hundred thousand miles that had barely made the drive from North Carolina, and the fact that this abandoned foundry was the only property he had any claim to after his uncle Raymond died three months ago. The lawyer's letter had been clear. Raymond Hayes had left the foundry and its three acres to Connor, his only living relative, along with a handwritten note that said simply, "It's yours if you want it. Don't let them take it."

He'd assumed "them" meant developers or the county trying to seize it for unpaid taxes. He hadn't expected someone to start throwing rocks through windows forty-eight hours after arrival.

Sophie appeared beside him despite his instruction to stay put, her small hand taking his. "Is it about the foundry?" she asked, her voice steady.