My headlight caught him full in the face. He squinted against the glare, and I saw the moment recognition hit—the moment he understood there was no easy way out.
He gunned the Honda straight at me.
The engine screamed, the gap between us shrinking fast—fifty feet, forty, thirty. I held my ground, feeling the vibration of my own idlingHarley beneath me, watching him accelerate, calculating the narrowing distance. At the last possible second, I twisted my handlebars and hit the throttle—not running, just shifting, creating a gap too small for his bike but forcing him to correct his line.
The Honda swerved. Lost traction. The rear end fishtailed wildly, kicking up a spray of gravel that peppered my legs like buckshot. Vince dropped a foot, boot scraping against rock, fighting to keep the bike from sliding out from under him.
Tyler was there before he could recover. The Sportster screamed in from his blind side, engine wailing at redline, close enough that Vince had to swerve again or be clipped. The prospect's face was a mask of concentration and mounting desperation, sweat gleaming on his forehead despite the cold night air.
We herded him. Every time he found a gap, one of us was there to close it—engines roaring, headlights slashing through the darkness, the smell of burning rubber and hot exhaust thick in my throat. Every time he tried to build speed, we cut him off, forced him to brake, eroded his advantage inch by inch. Three motorcycles weaving between boulders and ruts, the track barely wide enough for the dance we were performing. My thighs burned from gripping the tank. My heart hammered against my ribs. The vibration of the Harley traveled up through my spine until my teeth ached with it.
Vince pulled his gun.
The muzzle flash was blinding in the darkness,the crack of the shot echoing off the ridge walls like a physical blow. I felt the bullet pass close enough to stir the air near my shoulder, heard it whine off a boulder somewhere behind me. Something cold and furious crystallized in my chest.
He was shooting at us. At Tyler.
My hand went to my own weapon, instinct overriding rational thought. One shot, center mass, and this would be over?—
"Don't!" Tyler's voice cut through the roar of engines, sharp as a blade. "We need him breathing!"
He was right. Goddamn it, he was right. We needed to know what Vince had told Cross, what Cross was planning, where the next attack would come from. A dead informant was useless. My fingers uncurled from the grip, and I forced my attention back to the chase.
Vince fired twice more—wild shots, panic shots, the aim of a man whose attention was divided between shooting and riding. The first went wide by ten feet. The second sparked off a boulder near Tyler's front wheel. Tyler ducked low over his handlebars, presenting less of a target, his Sportster eating up the distance between them.
The track narrowed ahead, funneling between two rock formations into a passage barely wide enough for a single bike. Vince saw it, recognized it as his escape route—through there, and we'd have to pursue single file, losing our advantage of numbers. He leaned forward over the Honda's tank and opened the throttle.
Tyler peeled off without warning.
I saw what he was going to do a split second before he did it—a shortcut I hadn't even noticed, a narrow channel between two boulders that would spit him out ahead of the passage. Dangerous as hell, barely room for the Sportster's handlebars, the kind of risk that would have made him freeze with terror a month ago.
The Sportster's taillight vanished into the gap. For three endless seconds, I couldn't see him, couldn't hear anything over the roar of my own engine, could only imagine his bike going down in that narrow space, metal scraping against rock, his body crushed?—
Then his headlight blazed out on the other side, directly in Vince's path.
The Honda's brakes screamed. Vince laid the bike down rather than collide—a controlled slide that sent sparks showering across the rock as the Honda scraped to a halt. He was off before it stopped moving, gun still in hand, swinging toward Tyler.
"Don't." The word came out of me low and dangerous, barely recognizable as my own voice. My Harley rolled to a stop, blocking the only remaining exit. "You twitch that barrel one more inch, and I'll put three rounds in your spine before you can blink."
Vince's gun hand trembled. The barrel wavered between Tyler and me, then slowly—agonizingly slowly—lowered toward the ground.
"Smart choice." Tyler's voice was ice wrapped in velvet, the FBI agent fully surfaced now. "We don't need you fully intact. Just alive enough to talk."
Something cracked behind Vince's eyes—thefirst real fracture in his composure. He looked at Tyler, then at me, at the two headlights pinning him like a specimen on a board. His tongue darted out to wet his lips.
"Off the bike." My boots hit the dirt, and I kept my hand near my weapon. "Slow. Any sudden moves and we find out how much blood you can lose and still answer questions."
Vince's leg swung over the downed Honda with the careful deliberation of a man who understood exactly how close he was to dying. The bike's engine sputtered beneath him, coughed once, and fell silent—the sudden absence of sound almost as loud as the roar had been. He straightened slowly, hands visible, palms out.
Tyler stayed mounted on his Sportster, engine idling in a low growl, positioned to cut off any escape attempt. We'd fallen into a rhythm without discussing it—complementary movements, covering each other's blind spots. Like we'd been doing this together for years.
"On your knees. Hands behind your head."
Vince sank into the dirt, gravel crunching beneath his knees, his fingers lacing behind his skull. Up close, he looked even younger than I'd thought—mid-twenties at most, with a forgettable face that had let him blend into the background of compound life for months. Sweat had plastered his hair to his forehead, and I could see a scrape along his jaw from the slide—blood black in the moonlight.
"How long?" I asked.
"How long what?"
