"So we don't go?"
"We have to go." I shook my head slowly. "Thatshipment is real—thousands of contaminated pills that will kill people if they reach distribution. Cross knows we can't let that happen. He's counting on us being too moral to walk away." A bitter smile twisted my lips. "That was always his blind spot. He thinks compassion is weakness. He doesn't understand that it's exactly what makes people dangerous."
Silence held the room. Then Hawk nodded once, something like approval flickering in his expression.
"You heard him. We go, but we go prepared for the worst." His hand came down on the table, firm and final. "Tank, Tyler—wheels up in twenty. Don't get spotted, don't engage, don't do anything stupid. Just watch and report."
"Understood."
Tank's hand brushed mine under the table—brief, hidden, a reminder that we were in this together. Then we were moving, the church dispersing around us, everyone splitting off to their assigned tasks.
The ride to Reno took a lifetime.
We avoided the highways, sticking to back roads that wound through the Nevada desert like veins of cracked asphalt. The landscape shifted around us—red rock giving way to scrubland, scrubland to distant mountains hazed with morning light, mountains to flat expanses of nothing that stretched to the horizon in every direction. MySportster hummed beneath me, the engine's rhythm settling into my bones in a way that had become familiar.
Tank rode beside me, his Harley a low thunder that I felt even over my own engine. The miles unspooled beneath our wheels, and I found myself falling into a kind of meditation—the road, the machine, the man beside me, nothing else.
We didn't speak—couldn't, really, over the wind and the noise—but there was a communication in the way we moved. When he accelerated, I matched him without thinking. When I drifted left to avoid a pothole, he adjusted his line without looking. Two bikes moving as one, the way I'd seen the other Phoenix members ride. Like a flock of birds, or a pack of wolves—something instinctive, something beyond words.
I belonged here. The realization hit me somewhere around the second hour, sliding into place with a certainty that surprised me. Not just with Tank, though that was part of it. With this. The road, the machine, the club at my back. I'd spent three years feeling like I didn't belong anywhere, like Cross had hollowed me out until there was nothing left worth keeping.
He'd been wrong. I was still here. Still fighting. Still capable of wanting things, of reaching for them, of refusing to let fear make my choices for me.
The wind tore at my jacket, tried to rip the breath from my lungs, and I leaned into it. Let it scour away the last traces of who I'd been when Cross owned me. Out here, on this road, with this man—I wasbecoming someone new. Someone I actually wanted to be.
We stopped once for gas at a station so small it didn't have a name, just a weathered sign that said FUEL in faded red letters. The pumps were ancient, the kind that still had analog dials, and the attendant was a woman in her sixties with sun-weathered skin and a cigarette permanently attached to her lower lip. She didn't ask questions, just took our cash and went back to her magazine like two bikers on a desert road was the most normal thing in the world.
Maybe, out here, it was.
"You're thinking loud." Tank leaned against his bike, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Just processing."
"Processing what?"
I looked out at the desert stretching toward the horizon, heat already shimmering off the asphalt even though it wasn't yet noon. The sky was a blue so bright it hurt to look at, not a single cloud to break the expanse. Somewhere out there, Cross was waiting. Planning. Anticipating our every move.
"How different everything is. A month ago I was terrified to get on a bike. Terrified of Cross, of the club, of what would happen if anyone found out about my past." I turned to face him, squinting against the glare. "Now I'm riding recon into enemy territory with the man I'm sleeping with, and the thing I'm most afraid of is that something happens to you."
Tank's expression softened. He crossed the spacebetween us, three steps that felt like a lifetime, and cupped my face in his hands. His palms were rough, calloused from years of working on engines, but his touch was gentle.
"Nothing's going to happen to me. Or to you. We do the job, we get the intel, we go home." His thumb traced my cheekbone, wiping away a smudge of road dust. "Then we end Cross. Together."
"Together," I echoed.
He kissed me—right there in the gas station parking lot, in full view of anyone who might be watching. The old woman at the counter didn't even look up from her magazine. When Tank pulled back, his eyes were fierce with something that might have been a promise, might have been a vow.
The warehouse sat alone in a valley of brown scrub and silence.
We'd parked the bikes a mile out, hidden in a dry wash behind a stand of scraggly mesquite, and hiked the rest of the way on foot. The sun was brutal—Nevada summer, no clouds, nothing between us and the sky but shimmering heat that rose off the sand in waves. By the time we reached the ridge overlooking the target, my shirt was soaked through and my throat was thick with dust. But the position was worth it.
Tank had produced binoculars from his pack—military grade, the kind that could pick out details ata thousand yards—and we'd been lying prone on the ridge for two hours now, trading the glasses back and forth, cataloging everything we saw.
Which wasn't much.
"Two guards on the perimeter," I murmured, keeping my voice low even though no one could possibly hear us from this distance. "One at the front entrance, one walking a circuit every fifteen minutes. Chain-link fence, razor wire on top. Single road in and out."
Tank took the binoculars, swept them across the property. The warehouse itself was unremarkable—corrugated metal siding gone rusty in the desert air, a flat roof, no windows on the ground floor. It could have been any industrial building anywhere, the kind of place you'd drive past without a second thought.
