All strength left him at once. He dropped straight down, hitting the floor with a heavy, final thud.
I stood in the hallway, breathing hard, my throat burning, my right hand shaking. The ringing in my ears had changed frequency—lower now, pulsing, the flashbang's effects still dragging at my senses. The outside firefight was thinning—fewer shots, longer intervals between exchanges. The ridgeline team was winning.
From the back of the cabin. Glass. The bedroom window.
Everything in my chest went white.
Not adrenaline. I knew adrenaline. This was the frequency I'd felt twice in the last five minutes—once when I'd heard Sean fighting for his life through a wall I couldn't see through, and now again, at the sound of shattering glass from the room where Nolan was alone. The same terror. The same desperate, non-negotiable urgency that had, until recently, belonged to one person only.
I was already running. Down the hallway, over the bodies, through the doorframe—the Sig up, my vision locked on the broken window and the dark shape climbing through it.
A percussive crack. Heavy. Final. Metal meeting skull through fiberglass.
Nolan was standing over the collapsed hostile, fire extinguisher raised in a two-handed overhead grip, arms locked, his entire body vibrating. His glasses sat crooked on his face. The hostile was out cold on the floor, helmet cracked at the temple. The hip rotation I'd drilled him on. Full weight transfer. Textbook.
He looked at me. Wide eyes. Steady. Furious.
"You're okay," I said. Quiet.
"I'm okay." His voice shook. His hands didn't.
I wanted to cross the room. Wanted to put my hands on his shoulders. Wanted to do things that had no place in a firefight and no explanation that fit inside the wordasset.
I turned back to the hallway.
A round caught my left side, low—a streak of white-hot pain that spun me into the doorframe. Graze. I knew it instantly. The bullet had skimmed across the external oblique, opening skin without penetrating the muscle wall. A line of fire from hip to navel.
The hostile who'd fired was already dead—Sean had come out of the kitchen and put two rounds in his chest before the man could fire again.
"Dec!" Sean's face. Close. His hand on my arm. "You're hit."
"Graze. I'm fine."
"You're bleeding."
"I'mfine."
Outside, the firefight was ending. The ridgeline team had torn through the hostiles pinned at the vehicles. Axel's voice came through the radio, steady and commanding: "Northeast clear. All hostiles down."
Tyler: "East clear. Ghost is running final sweep."
The desert fell quiet in stages—the last echoes of gunfire rolling across the basin, then silence, then the sound of boots on gravel as the backup team moved down from the ridges.
Tank appeared at the front door. He filled the doorway the way he filled every doorway—completely, immovably. His eyes found the bodies in the hallway and showed nothing. Then they found the blood on my side.
"Minor," I said.
His expression suggested he'd be verifying that.
Kai was inside within two minutes, headlamp on, medical bag open, moving with the controlled urgency of a man whose ER training made a desert firefight feel like a Tuesday night shift. He went to Blade first—a graze across the forearm from a ricochet, a wound that would have kept a recovering man down if the recovering man had any intention of staying down. Blade didn't. Kai cleaned it, dressed it, and said nothing about the two chest scars visible through the torn shirt, because saying something would have been pointless and they both knew it. Ghost had taken a round to the vest—no penetration, but the bruising would be ugly. Kai checked his breathing, confirmed no fractures, taped him.
Tyler hovered. Not interfering—Tyler never interfered with Kai's work—but present, close, his body angled between Kai and the door.
Sean sat me on the overturned couch and peeled my shirt away from the wound. The graze was eight inches long, shallow, bleeding freely. He irrigated it with bottled water, applied pressure with gauze, and taped the dressing with a focus that had nothing to do with the medical task and everything to do with the fact that his jaw was clenched so tight the muscles jumped under the skin.
"It's shallow," he said. His voice was level. His jaw was not. "Kai will want to check it, but it's shallow."
"I know."
