The walls touched me on all sides. Cold concrete against my shoulders, my back, my chest when I inhaled too deeply. If I shifted my weight, I hit something. If I raised my arms, my elbows struck the sides.
The silence was almost worse than the darkness. No sound at all—not the hum of climate control, not the distant murmur of voices, not even the rush of blood in my own ears. Just... nothing. A void so complete it felt like being buried alive.
This is how he broke me before.
The thought came unbidden, rising from some deep place I'd tried to forget. Cross had used a similar room during our years together. When I'd displeased him. When I'd defied him. When I'd done anything that challenged his control.
Hours in the dark. Until I'd beg, until I'd promise anything, until I'd convinced myself that the light and warmth he offered afterward were love instead of manipulation.
I knew the game. I knew the rules. And I knew that if I let the darkness in, if I let the fear consume me, I would break.
I focused on my breathing. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. I counted the seconds, tracked the minutes, gave my mind something to do besides spiral into panic.
I thought about Tank. His hands on my face. His voice in my ear. The way he'd looked at me the night before the assault, like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"I promise you. I promise that whatever happens, I will find my way back to you. And you will find your way back to me."
I held onto those words like a lifeline. Repeated them in my head, over and over, until they became a mantra, a prayer, a shield against the darkness pressing in from all sides.
Tank will come. Tank will find me.
Cross could take away the light. He could take away my sense of time, my connection to the world, my control over my own body. But he couldn't takeaway what I felt for Tank. He couldn't take away the promise we'd made to each other.
I wasn't the same Tyler who'd broken in this darkness before. I was stronger now. I had something worth fighting for, something worth surviving for.
And I would. Whatever it took.
19
FRACTURE
TANK
The ride back took seven hours. Seven hours in the back of a van that smelled like copper and smoke and the sharp chemical sting of field dressings. Seven hours watching Blade's chest rise and fall in shallow, uneven rhythms while Declan held pressure on the wounds and Vega monitored his pulse with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling. Seven hours with blood drying on my hands and a bullet graze burning across my left shoulder, counting the mile markers through the rear window, calculating the distance between Reno and Henderson like the math could somehow bring us home faster.
Tyler wasn't in the van. Tyler wasn't anywhere I could reach, anywhere I could protect, anywhere I could hold onto. Tyler was in the back of a differentvehicle heading the opposite direction, hooded and bound, being carried deeper into the desert by a man who believed he owned him. And I was here, pressing a blood-soaked bandage against my shoulder with hands that shook no matter how hard I clenched my fists, trying not to scream.
We'd left Reno in a ragged convoy. Blade had taken five vehicles into the front assault—three armored vans and two SUVs—and we'd lost two of them: a van gutted by the warehouse fire, abandoned with its armor plating warped and blackened, and an SUV that had taken heavy fire near the front entrance until its tires melted and its windshield shattered.
Two of the less battered brothers—men whose wounds amounted to scrapes and bruises rather than bullet holes and shattered bone—drove back to retrieve the truck our insertion team had abandoned near the drainage pipe, the vehicle sitting where we'd left it in the pre-dawn dark, covered in a fine layer of desert dust like the desert had already started trying to bury what happened there.
The four surviving vehicles carried what was left of Blade's distraction team, packed with men who had burns and shrapnel cuts and the thousand-yard stares of soldiers who'd walked through hell and hadn't fully come out the other side.
We'd moved Blade into the insertion team’s truck, and onto the covered bed, because it had the most space for a man who couldn't sit up.
Declan rode in the back with me, keeping pressure on Blade's chest wounds during the longhours on the road, changing the dressings when they soaked through, monitoring his breathing by the sound of it alone.
Rosa had talked us through the field treatment over a burner phone—pressure here, elevation there, don't let the bleeding restart, keep him warm, keep talking to him even though he can't hear you—but her voice had gone tight when we described the wounds. Chest shots. Two that penetrated, a third stopped by the vest. The body armor had saved his life, but the two rounds that got through had done damage that wouldn't wait seven hours.
Four vehicles crawling through the Nevada dawn. Marco in one of the two vans behind us, with his leg elevated and Santos applying a fresh tourniquet every time the bleeding restarted. Axel behind the wheel of our truck, slotted into the middle of the convoy like a heartbeat between ribs—Hawk's SUV cutting the road ahead, the two surviving vans trailing behind with their wounded cargo and their bullet-scarred armor plates catching the morning sun. Axel’s bandaged shoulder stiffened with every mile.
Hawk drove the SUV in the lead, with one arm. The other hung at his side, blood-soaked from a rifle graze that had torn through muscle. He'd waved off help at the warehouse, barked at Vega to get Blade loaded first, and climbed behind the wheel like a man who'd driven through worse. He probably had.
We drove fast. We drove through the dawn and into the morning, through the flat Nevada desert that stretched endless and indifferent on every side, andDeclan changed Blade's dressings three times, and each time the gauze came away darker, and each time his pulse grew a little weaker.
I sat against the truck’s wall and watched, and felt nothing. Not the pain in my shoulder, not the ache in my bruised ribs, not the cold that seeped through the truck’s metal floor. The nothing was worse than agony would have been. Agony meant I was still connected to the world. The nothing meant I was somewhere else—somewhere dark and hollow, where Tyler's face disappeared behind a hood on an endless loop and I couldn't reach him no matter how far I stretched.
The clubhouse gates appeared in the windshield just past noon—the reinforced chain-link topped with razor wire, the guard towers flanking the entrance, the cluster of low buildings behind the perimeter fence that had become home. Someone must have radioed ahead because the gates were already rolling open, and two figures stood in the wash of midday sun: Kai, with a medical bag slung across his body and latex gloves already on his hands, and Rosa, her silver-streaked hair pulled back, face set in the expression I'd come to recognize as her combat mode.
