The van lurched to a stop. Doors flew open. The desert air hit me—dry, furnace-hot, carrying the faint smell of sage and motor oil that always hungaround the Phoenix grounds—and for a split second everything felt normal, felt like coming home after a long ride.
Then Rosa's voice cut through the stillness, sharp and commanding: "Get him on the stretcher. Now. Careful with the chest—don't jostle him, don't—yes, like that. Move."
Hands reached in for Blade. Santos and Vega lifted him with the grim precision of men who'd carried wounded brothers before, transferring his weight to the stretcher Rosa had waiting. Ghost stood nearby, leaning hard on his crutch, his healing leg braced at an angle that wouldn't take weight—he reached out to steady the stretcher as they moved past, the only help his body could offer, and his face said he knew it wasn't enough. Blade's head lolled, his face slack, his skin the color of old concrete under the desert sun.
The two remaining vans pulled in behind us. Doors opened. Men climbed out—some walking, some limping, all of them carrying the warehouse in their eyes. The walking wounded lined up at the infirmary door without being told, a grim procession of burns and lacerations and deep bruises that would take weeks to fade.
Kai was already moving between the vans, assessing, triaging, his clipboard forgotten as he used his hands instead—checking pulses, peeling back bandages, murmuring instructions to Ghost who relayed them to the men who could still stand. Then Kai's eyes found Axel stepping down from the passenger seat of our, and something cracked in hisexpression. Relief so raw it looked like pain. He crossed the distance in three steps and had his arms around Axel before either of them could speak, his face pressed against Axel's neck, his body trembling.
Axel held him with his good arm, his injured shoulder hanging limp, and pressed his lips to Kai's hair. A whispered exchange I couldn't hear. Then Kai pulled back, wiped his eyes with the back of his gloved hand, and became a medic again—checking Axel's shoulder, barking instructions about getting the infirmary doors open, already prioritizing the wounded with quick, practiced efficiency.
He was good at this. Better than anyone had expected when he'd first started patching up scraped knuckles and bar-fight bruises. The months since the Chen operation had hardened him, honed him. The softness was still there, but underneath it was something stronger now—a competence born from necessity and love.
Kai turned to me. His eyes swept over the blood on my shirt, my hands, the makeshift bandage on my shoulder, and then past me, scanning the van's interior, the vehicles still unloading, the faces of the men streaming toward the infirmary.
"Where's Tyler?" His voice carried the careful steadiness of someone bracing for impact. "Is he—" The question caught in his throat. He tried again. "Tank, is he alive?"
I opened my mouth. The words came out broken, jagged-edged. "Cross took him. They put a hood over his head and—" I stopped. Swallowed. "He's alive.Cross wants him alive. But I don't know where they took him."
Kai's face went through three expressions in two seconds—horror, grief, and then something harder. Something that looked like the same rage I felt burning in my own chest, tempered by the discipline of a man who had patients waiting.
He squeezed my arm once. Then he turned and rushed into the infirmary, and I heard him start issuing orders—the steadiness in his voice held together by willpower alone, ready to shatter the moment he stopped concentrating on keeping it whole.
Rosa had transformed the clinic into something resembling a field hospital—every surface covered with supplies, every light blazing, the sharp smell of antiseptic fighting a losing battle against the smell of blood. She worked on Blade with the focused intensity of a woman who refused to let death walk through her door, her hands moving with a speed and precision that turned surgery into something almost mechanical.
Kai handled the rest. Marco first—the leg wound was bad, a through-and-through that had clipped the femoral artery. Kai packed it, applied a fresh tourniquet, and talked Marco through the pain with the same calm steadiness I'd heard him use on Axel during his worst moments. Ghost sat on a stoolnearby, his crutch propped against the wall, passing instruments and supplies—limited in mobility but steady where it counted.
Hawk sat on a crate by the door, letting Irish clean and wrap his arm. The president's face betrayed nothing—not the pain from the wound, not the weight of what had happened, not the decisions already forming behind his gray eyes. He watched Rosa work on Blade the way a general watches the field after a battle: assessing losses, calculating what remained, planning the next move before the dust had settled.
Irish worked on Hawk's arm with grim efficiency, his own movements stiff. Frustration radiated off him like heat from asphalt. Every few seconds his jaw tightened, the muscles in his neck cording as he glanced at the wounded men filling the room. He should have been there. The thought was written across his face as clearly as his scars.
Declan lingered near the doorway, cleaned up but still carrying the warehouse in his eyes. He watched Irish with quiet attentiveness—tracking the way Irish favored his healing leg, noting the tension in his shoulders, ready to step in if the stubborn bastard pushed himself too far.
"Sit down." Kai appeared at my side, a suture kit in one hand, his voice carrying the firm authority of someone who wouldn't take no for an answer. "Shoulder. Now."
I dropped onto a stool. Kai peeled the bandage away, and the pain flared—white and sharp, cutting through the fog I'd been wrapped in since thewarehouse. The bullet had grazed the muscle, carving a furrow along the top of my shoulder without hitting bone. Lucky, Kai murmured, threading the needle. I didn't feel lucky.
He stitched me in silence. Twenty-two sutures, each one a small bright point of pain that I welcomed because it gave me something to focus on besides the emptiness where Tyler should have been.
When he finished, Kai taped a clean bandage over the wound and rested his hand on my arm. Not a medical touch—a human one.
"We'll get him back." His voice was barely above a whisper, rough with emotion he was trying to contain. "We will."
I nodded. Couldn't speak. If I opened my mouth, something would come out that I couldn't take back—a sound, a scream, the kind of raw animal noise that lived in the place where grief and rage collided.
I stood, walked out of the infirmary, and crossed the grounds to my room.
Tyler's jacket hung on the back of the chair. The leather one I'd given him before our first ride—too big in the shoulders, the Phoenix patch on the back that didn't officially belong to him but that no one had questioned. He'd draped it there the night before we left, the night we'd spent tangled together in these sheets, making promises we both knew might break.
I picked it up. Pressed it against my face. Breathed in.
Leather. Gun oil. That clean scent underneath that was just Tyler—soap and skin and something warm that I'd never been able to name but that I'd recognize anywhere, in any room, for the rest of my life.
The sheets still smelled like him. Like us. Like the eternities we'd spent memorizing each other's bodies, learning the geography of scars and calluses and soft places, whispering things in the dark that neither of us had ever spoken out loud before.
I sat on the edge of the bed with his jacket in my hands and Danny's knife on the nightstand and I tried to breathe. The room was quiet. Too quiet. No sound of Tyler's breathing beside me, no warmth radiating from the other side of the mattress, no sleepy mumbled protest when I shifted my weight. Just empty space where he should have been.
I'd watched them take him. The memory played on a loop I couldn't stop—the secondary explosion, the wall of force that separated us, and then Tyler on the ground, dazed, bleeding, reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. The guards closing in. His eyes finding mine across the chaos, wide with fear but stillthere, still present, still fighting. The hood going over his head. His body disappearing into the smoke as hands dragged him backward and I screamed his name until my throat tore.
