Tyler pulled back first. His eyes were red but dry, his face pale, his expression already reassembling itself into something more controlled. He looked at me, opened his mouth, closed it again.
"Later. We'll talk later."
He nodded, and we walked toward the clubhouse together, close enough that our shoulders touched with every step.
The next three hours were chaos.
Fire department. Police—the legitimate kind, responding to reports of an explosion. Hawk talked to them, his face a mask of cooperative concern, spinning a story about a fuel leak and a spark that anyone who knew bikes would see through instantlybut that played well enough for cops who wanted an easy explanation.
Paramedics checked everyone for injuries. I sat on a crate near the garage while a woman with steady hands cleaned the shrapnel wounds across my back and shoulder. The largest piece had gone deep—she had to dig for it, her forceps scraping against something that might have been bone, and I held perfectly still while she worked, my jaw locked against the pain.
Tyler sat nearby, a blanket around his shoulders that he didn't seem to notice, watching the medic work on me with an expression I couldn't read. He had a few scrapes from our roll across the asphalt, nothing that required more than antiseptic and bandages. The explosion had been designed to kill a man on a bike, not two men behind a concrete barrier.
Ghost had caught a piece of debris on his arm when he'd been running toward the blast instead of away from it, because apparently the kid had no survival instincts whatsoever. Irish had a cut above his eye from flying glass. Minor injuries, all told. We'd been lucky.
Lucky that I'd smelled the fuel. Lucky that the device had been poorly made. Lucky that Cross wasn't as good at killing as he was at intimidation.
The real work started after the officials left.
Rosa found me in the common room, still wearing the paramedic's field dressing, trying to pretend the shrapnel wound wasn't throbbing like a second heartbeat. She was a compact woman in herfifties, silver-streaked hair pulled back in a no-nonsense braid, with the kind of steady hands and unflappable demeanor that came from twenty years as an Army medic. She'd seen worse than this—had told me stories about field hospitals in Afghanistan that made motorcycle club violence seem almost quaint.
"Sit." She pointed at a chair she'd already draped with a clean sheet. "Paramedics are fine for the easy stuff, but I want to look at that shoulder myself."
I sat. Arguing with Rosa was pointless; she'd patched up every member of this club at one time or another, and she'd learned early that bikers were worse than soldiers when it came to admitting they needed help.
She peeled away the dressing with practiced efficiency, examining the wound with a penlight. "Deeper than I'd like. The largest fragment's out, but there's still debris in here. I need to clean this properly or you'll get an infection that'll make the shrapnel seem like a paper cut."
"Do what you need to do."
"I always do." She laid out her tools on a sterile tray—forceps, irrigation syringe, suture kit. "This is going to hurt. You want something for it?"
"No."
Rosa didn't argue. She just started working, her fingers quick and sure, and I held perfectly still while she dug fragments of motorcycle out of my back. The pain was sharp and clean, easier to focus on than the memory of Tyler shaking in my arms, easier than theknowledge that Cross had reached into our home and almost killed someone I?—
Someone. Just someone.
Church convened with the smell of smoke still thick in the air.
Hawk stood at the head of the table, his face carved from granite, his hands flat on the wood. Around him, the club gathered in their usual seats, but the energy was different—coiled tighter, vibrating with a fury that had no outlet. Not yet.
"This is an act of war. No more scouting. No more messages. No more walking into our garage like he owns the place. Cross just tried to kill one of ours on our own ground."
"He almost succeeded." Blade's voice was ice. "If Tank hadn't spotted the device?—"
"But he did." Hawk's gaze swept the table. "The question now is how we respond."
"We hit them back." Ghost was vibrating with barely contained rage, his bandaged arm cradled against his chest. "We find where they're staging and we burn it to the fucking ground."
"And start an all-out war with federal backing behind them?" Irish shook his head. "They want us to overreact. That bomb was designed to provoke—make us sloppy, make us move without thinking."
"So we just let them try to kill Tyler and do nothing?"
"We don't do nothing." Axel's voice cut through the rising tension, calm and steady, the voice of reason in a room full of rage. "We do something smart. Something that hurts them without giving them the excuse they need to bring the feds down on us."
The room fell silent, waiting.
"Intel suggests the Wolves have a supply operation running out of Henderson." Axel continued, laying it out. "They're moving product—we don't know what yet—through our territory every Wednesday night. Same route, same timing. They think they're invisible."
