"Bring him home." Not a request. An order, delivered with the quiet ferocity of a man who'd nearly died and refused to waste his remaining words on anything less than what mattered. "And bringyourselfhome. Tyler needs you alive, not heroic."
I covered his hand with mine. His fingers were cold, the IV fluid chilling his bloodstream. The heart monitor beeped steadily beside us, each pulse a small defiance against the bullets that had tried to stop it.
"Get some rest."
"Get some rest, he tells me." Blade's eyes drifted closed, the exhaustion pulling him under despite his stubbornness. His grip on my arm loosened but didn't release—even sliding toward sleep, the man held on. "I'm the one who got shot. Go plan your war and let a man sleep..."
His breathing evened out. The monitor beeped on. I sat there for another minute, my hand over his, listening to the machine confirm what Rosa had promised: that Blade was still here, still fighting, still too stubborn to die.
Then I eased his hand back onto the bed, stood, and walked out into the fading light of the desert afternoon.
The garage was quiet. I went there because I always went there—because the smell of oil and metal and old grease was the closest thing I had to a church, because the bikes lined up in their stalls were the closest thing I had to prayer. Because Danny's Shovelhead sat in the corner, half-finished, waiting for hands that would never come back to complete the work.
I ran my fingers over the frame. Cold steel under my calloused fingertips, the skeleton of something beautiful that hadn't fully been born yet. The cherry red paint, chrome accents, a rebuilt engine thatwould rumble like thunder on an open highway. He'd sketched the design on a napkin at a diner three weeks before he died—the last creative act of a man who built things instead of breaking them.
I pulled a stool up to the workbench and started laying out weapons. My Glock, field-stripped and cleaned. A backup piece, smaller, ankle-holstered. Spare magazines, loaded and checked. Danny's knife, its blade honed to a razor edge that caught the overhead light and threw it back in sharp lines.
Tyler's jacket sat folded on the workbench beside the ammunition. I'd brought it from the room, carried it across the grounds in the dark, set it down where I could see it while I worked. A reminder. A promise.
I'm coming for you. I'm coming, and I'm bringing you home, and God help anyone who stands between us.
I picked up Danny's knife, turned it over, felt the weight settle into my palm like it always did—familiar, grounding, carrying the ghost of my brother's hand alongside my own.
You'd understand, Danny. You always understood. You'd tell me to go get him, to stop sitting here feeling sorry for myself, to do what needed doing.
I slid the knife into the sheath on my belt. Holstered the Glock. Stacked the magazines in a neat row and covered them with a cloth.
Then I picked up Tyler's jacket, pressed it against my face one more time—leather, gun oil, that warm clean scent underneath—and set it back on the bench.
Tomorrow, I'd put it in a saddlebag and bring it with me. Tomorrow, I'd hand it back to the man it belonged to.
Tomorrow, I'd bring him home. Or I'd die trying. And I was at peace with both outcomes.
20
ASHES
TYLER
Icounted to stay alive. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-two. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-three. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-four. Each number was a heartbeat, a breath, a tiny defiance against the darkness pressing in from every side. I'd lost track of the hours somewhere around three thousand—the math breaking down, the numbers blurring together—but I'd started over and kept going, because counting meant thinking and thinking meant I was still here, still present, still me.
The box was a coffin built for a living man. Concrete walls so close they touched my shoulders when I breathed too deep. No light—not a crack, not a seam, not even the faintest suggestion that light existed anywhere in the universe. The air was staleand thin, recycled through some vent I couldn't see, carrying the faint chemical tang of cleaning solution and the sharper smell of my own sweat.
My legs had stopped hurting hours ago. They'd passed through burning, through cramping, through the white-hot agony of muscles forced to hold weight without rest, and arrived somewhere beyond pain—a dull, distant numbness that I knew was dangerous. I'd shifted my weight constantly in the beginning, alternating between feet, leaning against the walls, trying to give each leg a reprieve. Now I stood braced, shoulders against one wall, back against the other, my body forming a rigid bridge that kept me upright through geometry when my muscles could no longer do the job.
Dehydration headache pulsed behind my eyes. My tongue was thick, my lips cracked, the inside of my mouth coated with a paste that tasted like copper and old spit. I'd stopped producing saliva sometime during the second thousand count.
Four thousand three hundred and forty-one.
The latch was three inches above my right hip. I'd mapped it during the first few hours—pressing my fingertips along the seam of the door in the absolute dark, feeling for the mechanism the guard had triggered from outside. The latch extended through the door, a steel pin that slotted into a receiver in the frame. From the outside, you pressed a hidden catch and the pin retracted. From the inside, the pin's housing was flush with the door's surface—no handle, no purchase, nothing designed to be operated from this side.
But the housing wasn't solid. I'd felt a seam—tiny, maybe a millimeter wide—where the latch mechanism met the surrounding steel. And when I pressed against the door at exactly the right angle, putting all my weight into a focused point just below the latch, I felt the pin shift. Barely. A fraction of a centimeter. But it moved.
I'd been working it for hours. Press, hold, release. Press, hold, release. The monotony of it blended with the counting, became part of the rhythm that kept my mind anchored. Most of the time nothing happened. Twice, I'd felt the pin grind sideways, resistance giving way to the suggestion of movement before snapping back.
Four thousand three hundred and fifty-eight.
A sound.
