I found him in the gym one morning, beating the heavy bag with bare knuckles, his healing leg planted and braced, his fists leaving red smears on the canvas with each impact. Declan stood three feet away, arms crossed, watching with the patient silence of a man who'd learned that trying to stop Irish when he was like this was about as effective as trying to stop a brushfire with a garden hose.
"He shouldn't be doing that." My voice was flat, exhausted, directed at Declan more than Irish.
Declan's eyes didn't leave Irish. "I know." A pause, measured and careful. "He knows too. But if I try to pull him off that bag, he'll swing at me instead, and that won't help anyone."
Irish heard us. Didn't stop. The bag swung and shuddered under his assault, the chain creaking with each impact, and I watched the way his jaw clenched every time his weight shifted to the injured leg—absorbing the pain, converting it to fuel, refusing to acknowledge the limitation.
I understood. More than I wanted to admit, I understood. We were both men whose bodies couldn't keep pace with their fury, and the gap between what we felt and what we could do about it was a kind of torture all its own.
Scouts went out that afternoon—Vega and Santos to the Nevada locations, Declan and one of the other patched members to the Primm property. They moved fast, traveling light, communicating in bursts of encrypted radio that Hawk monitored from the chapel like a spider at the center of a web.
The Nevada locations came back empty. Dusty, unused, no sign of recent activity. Exactly what Sarah had predicted.
Primm was different.
Declan's voice came through the radio just after midnight, low and tight with controlled urgency: "Activity confirmed. Armed guards on rotation—I'm counting eight visible, probably more inside. Three vehicles, two SUVs and a van. Heat signatures underground—multiple, hard to get an exact count through the rock, but at least six or seven bodies below ground level."
My heart slammed against my ribs.
"Any sign of the target?" Hawk's voice, steady as a metronome.
A pause. Static. Then Declan, quieter: "Negative visual on Tyler. But the underground sections are extensive. If he's there, he's deep."
Hawk acknowledged with two clicks of the radio. Then silence.
I stood in the chapel, staring at the map Sarahhad drawn, and calculated distances, angles, fields of fire. The approach from the northeast ridge. The guard rotations Declan had clocked. The number of men we could field—fewer than the warehouse, but we'd be hitting a smaller target with better intel and no trap waiting on the other side.
This time, we knew what we were walking into.
Rosa came to the chapel the next afternoon. She moved differently than she had the past few days—the exhaustion was still there, carved into the lines around her eyes, but the rigid tension had broken. She stripped off her surgical gloves, dropped them in the waste bin by the door, and stood in the entrance with her arms folded.
"He's awake."
Two words. The room shifted. Hawk looked up from the map. Axel straightened in his chair. Santos, who'd been cleaning his weapon at the far end of the table, went still.
"Lucid," Rosa continued, her voice carrying the exhausted satisfaction of a woman who'd spent days wrestling with death and won. "Weak. Pissed off about it. But he's conscious and he's talking, which means the brain got enough oxygen and the chest tubes did their job." She paused, something softening in her expression. "He's going to make it."
The relief that moved through the room was physical—shoulders dropping, breath releasing, thecreak of chairs as men shifted and let go of tension they'd been carrying since Reno. Vega crossed himself. Even Hawk's granite expression cracked, just a fraction, before he sealed it back up.
I pushed back from the table and walked to the infirmary. The hallway outside smelled like antiseptic and stale coffee and something underneath that was purely medical—the sterile, slightly sweet scent of surgical supplies and IV fluids. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
Blade looked like something the desert had chewed up and spat back out—his face gaunt and hollowed, skin carrying the waxy gray pallor of a man whose blood had spent too long outside his body. Bandages wrapped his chest from collarbone to navel, stiff and white against the bruising that spread out from beneath them in mottled shades of purple and yellow. IV lines snaked into both arms—one for fluids, one for antibiotics, the tubing catching the light as it looped from the bags hanging above his bed.
But his eyes were open. Clear. Sharp. Tracking me as I pulled up a chair beside his bed with the same intensity he brought to everything—as if being shot twice in the chest was an inconvenience, not a near-death experience.
"You look like shit." His voice was a rasp, barely audible, each word costing him visible effort. The ventilator had been removed, but the rawness in his throat lingered.
"You got shot three times in the chest." I sat down. The chair creaked under my weight.
"Only twice." A ghost of a grin flickered across his face, there and gone. "The third one bounced off my vest. Rosa told me. She also told me I'm not allowed to die because she spent sixty hours putting me back together and she'll kill me herself if I waste her work."
The grin faded. His eyes searched my face, reading whatever he found there with the directness that made Blade who he was—a man who never looked away from hard truths, even when he was lying in a hospital bed with holes in his chest.
"Rosa tells me you're going after Cross."
"Tomorrow."
Blade's hand found my arm. His grip was weak, trembling with the effort, but deliberate—the kind of touch that saidlisten to melouder than any shout. Sweat beaded along his forehead from the simple act of reaching out.
