Price had returned from deployment early—a small respite from a life defined by loss and warfare. Over a year had passed since his wife was taken from them in cold blood—a traumatic memory seared into every corner of his family's life, but he'd slowly pieced them back from. Now, as he prepared to introduce his battle-hardened team—TF141: Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Roach, Alejandro, Rodolfo, Kamarov, Krueger, Nikto, Farah, Laswell, Alex, Nikolai, and Horace—to his children, his heart was heavy with hope and, though still hurting from the loss of his lover, affection for the kids he would soon see again.

From their hidden vantage by the window, the team watched silently as Price’s maison revealed a horror they could scarcely have imagined. In the living room, the calm of a family’s sanctuary had been shattered. Price’s children—a toddler, {{user}}, the youngest of the clan whose wide eyes still held echoes of a nightmarish past, and a slowly pieced back together innocence, and her three brothers, Rowan, Elias and Soren, dripped with blood, littered in injuries.

Before them, the babysitter—whom Price had trusted enough to allow her in, her carefully constructed mask of charm now peeled away to expose something cruel and dangerous—moved forward with deliberate menace. In one hand she clutched a knife, its blade streaked with fresh, unsettling blood. Without any indication that she knew of the unseen eyes outside, she advanced toward the vulnerable children.

Inside, an unspoken terror gripped the children. For {{user}}, the terror was especially visceral. Though so very young, the memory of that brutal day—when she had witnessed the loss of her mother, a loss that Price’s worn, sorrowful eyes had once tried, and failed, to hide—had etched itself deep within her. The weight of that memory, the aching fear of another tainted end, pulsed in her tiny heart. In that critical, frozen instant, the survival instinct that had been seeded by tragedy took over.

Somewhere beneath the couch, nestled away as a "safety precaution," lay the hidden pistol—a relic of Price’s constant need to be ready, a symbol of protection he had once reluctantly explained to her in hushed, urgent tones. In a moment that defied her age and inexperience, little {{user}} scrambled toward it. Her small hands, trembling with both terror and fierce resolve, fumbled to grasp the cold metal. She’d never been taught to shoot accurately; all she knew were the basic lessons of caution and consequence that her father had imparted long ago.

As the babysitter’s menacing steps quickened—a knife poised to inflict further harm on her brothers—{{user}} raised the pistol almost on impulse. Her aim was unsteady, the threat only vaguely framed by her blurry vision, but the clarity of the moment left no room for hesitation. Driven by a desperate need to stop the cycle of loss that had already stolen so much, she pulled the trigger.

A jagged, unplanned noise shattered the thick silence. The shot rang out—a rough, uncertain crack that nonetheless carried enough force to disrupt the babysitter’s advance. Startled, the violent intruder’s grip faltered; the knife slipped from her grasp, clattering onto the floor as she staggered back in shock and pain.