I stopped. Danny's name stuck in my throat.
Hawk's jaw tightened. Something moved behind his eyes—old pain, old memory, the kind that never fully healed. For a moment he looked less like a club president and more like a man carrying scars that no one ever saw.
"I've been where you are." His voice dropped, losing its command tone, becoming something quieter and more personal. "The details are different, but the feeling—that certainty that if they don't come back, you won't survive it. I know that feeling."
He didn't elaborate. I didn't ask. Whatever Hawk's story was, it lived behind a locked door, and he'd share it when he was ready—or never. That was his right.
"Keep your head." His hand tightened on my arm, firm enough to ground me. "Tyler needs you sharp, not broken. You fall apart now, you're no use to him when it counts."
I met his eyes. The gray was steady, certain—the eyes of a man who'd clawed his way through his own darkness and come out the other side.
"Forty-eight hours," I repeated.
"Forty-eight hours." Hawk released my arm. "And then we bring him home."
Sarah met with us that afternoon in the chapel. She looked better than she had in the days after the extraction—the hollow cheeks had filled out slightly, the bruises from her imprisonment faded to yellow shadows, and her eyes had regained the sharp, calculating quality of a woman who'd survived Cross's world by seeing everything and forgetting nothing. She'd been recovering at the clubhouse since Phoenix had pulled her from that transport van, and the weeks of rest and Rosa's care had put steel back into her spine.
She sat across from us with a hand-drawn map already spread on the table, her fingers tracing routes with the precision of someone who'd been preparing for this conversation.
"Three properties." Her voice was clipped, efficient, wasting no words. "Cross keeps bolt-holes, places he can disappear to when things go wrong. Two in Nevada, one just across the California border near Primm."
"The Nevada locations are older. A ranch outside Pahrump and a storage facility near Indian Springs." Her finger traced the routes. "He used them for product storage mostly. Light security, no underground infrastructure."
"And the third?" Hawk's voice was quiet, focused.
Sarah's finger stopped on the California location. Her hand trembled, just slightly, before she steadied it against the table. "The Primm property is different. He bought it two years ago through a shell company. Spent a fortune renovating it—especially underground. Reinforced rooms, climate control,independent power supply." Her jaw tightened. "He called it his insurance policy. I always knew what it was really for. Who it was for."
The room went cold. Underground. Reinforced rooms. A place designed to hold someone long-term, to keep them hidden, to make them disappear.
Cross hadn't improvised Tyler's capture. He'd been planning it for years—ever since Tyler had slipped through his fingers with Sarah's help.
"That's where he is." My voice didn't sound like my own—flat, mechanical, stripped of everything except certainty.
Sarah's eyes met mine, and the look in them wasn't pity—it was recognition. She'd helped Tyler escape Cross once. She knew exactly what kind of man had him now, what that man was capable of, what was happening in that underground room while we sat here planning.
"I helped Tyler get away from Cross three years ago," she continued, her gaze holding mine. "I knew what Cross was doing to him. I saw the bruises, the fear, the way Tyler flinched when anyone raised their voice. I couldn't stop it from the inside, but I could get him out. And when I did, Cross never forgave either of us." She looked down at the map. "That property in Primm—I believe he built it in case he ever got Tyler back. I assume only his most trusted men know the inner layout, paranoid as he is. If he has Tyler somewhere, that's the place."
"Guard complement?" Axel leaned forward, already in planning mode, his mind mapping the assault before the intel was even complete.
"I don't know exact numbers. But Cross's inner circle was small—maybe fifteen, twenty men total, and you killed or wounded a good portion of them at the warehouse, and during my rescue." Sarah paused, her eyes flickering with something between calculation and resolve. "He'll be running lean. Paranoid, but lean."
What had felt like devastation at the warehouse looked different through the cold lens of strategy: Cross had sprung his trap, but the theatrics had cost him. The stage lights, the elaborate choreography of Tyler's capture—all of it had demanded manpower and positioning that left his forces stretched thin and exposed. He'd traded soldiers for spectacle, and the men he'd lost in that burning warehouse weren't coming back. For all his cunning, Cross had bled himself dry putting on a show, and now he was holed up somewhere in the desert with a skeleton crew and a hostage he couldn't afford to lose.
Hawk absorbed this with the stillness of a man assembling a puzzle. Then he turned to Axel, and something passed between them—a conversation conducted entirely in glances, the shorthand of men who'd fought together long enough to read each other without words.
"We scout all three." Hawk's decision carried the finality of a gavel strike. "Confirm the Primm location, verify the others are empty. I want eyes on the target within twenty-four hours."
"I can draw you the approach routes." Sarah pulled the map closer, her hand steadier now, the feargiving way to the grim determination of someone who'd already decided to burn every bridge behind her. "The terrain around Primm is open desert, but there's a ridge line to the northeast that provides cover. Cross's cameras are focused on the road access—he wasn't expecting an approach from the hills."
I memorized every word. Every distance, every landmark, every detail of the terrain. While Sarah talked and Hawk questioned and Axel planned, I built the map in my head, walked the approach in my mind, rehearsed the assault until I could do it blind.
Forty-eight hours. Tyler had already been in that hole for a day and a half.
I hadn’t slept. Not the first night, not the second. An hour here, thirty minutes there—fitful stretches that ended the same way every time: Tyler's face behind a hood, Tyler's voice calling my name, Tyler disappearing into smoke while my hands grabbed nothing but air. I'd jolt awake with my heart hammering and my fists clenched and the sheets twisted around me like restraints, and I'd lie there in the dark, breathing, counting, waiting for a dawn that never came fast enough.
The clubhouse moved around me in a state of grim purpose. Everyone had a job. Everyone had something to do besides sit still and think aboutwhat was happening to Tyler in some underground room while we planned and prepped and waited.
Irish was the worst of us—worse even than me, in some ways, because his rage had nowhere to go. He stalked the grounds on his healing leg, pushing himself through laps of the perimeter fence that left him white-faced and sweating, his limp more pronounced with each pass. He'd been sidelined for the warehouse assault. Sidelined again for clubhouse security. And now another operation was being planned that his body wasn't ready for, and the frustration was eating him alive from the inside out.
