"You got shot, Dec."
"Grazed."
"You gotgrazed by a bullet, which is a distinction that only matters to the person who didn't watch it happen." He smoothed the final strip of tape and his hand stayed on my side—palm flat over the dressing, warm through the gauze. His eyes met mine. Green and bright and carrying a frequency I recognized because I'd been carrying it myself since I'd heard him fighting through a wall and a window breaking behind me in the same terrible minute.
The fear of losing the person you can't lose.
I put my hand over his. Held it. Two seconds. His forehead dropped against my shoulder, and for a moment the man who never stopped talking said nothing at all.
Nolan appeared with water and a clean shirt. He moved with the careful deliberation of a man managing his own adrenaline comedown—each step precise, hands occupied because empty hands would shake. He set the water on the floor beside us. Held out the shirt.
His hand landed on my shoulder. Light. Brief. The touch of someone who didn't know where the boundaries were but needed contact badly enough to risk crossing them.
My breath caught.
Small. Involuntary. A reaction that bypassed the mind entirely.
Sean lifted his head. He'd felt the catch. His eyes moved from Nolan's hand to my face to Nolan's face, reading the three-point geometry of a moment that had just shifted. His expression didn't close. Didn't harden. It softened—quick, unguarded, gone in a blink. But I'd seen it. And what I'd seen was not jealousy.
Axel's voice cut through from the front door. "Dec. We need to move. If any of them transmitted before we dropped comms, Holt's people know the strike team was hit. Second wave could be inside the hour."
He was right. The hostiles carried encrypted radios. No way to know if one had gotten a call out during the initial ambush.
I got to my feet. The graze pulled. I ignored it.
"Kai—everyone mobile?"
"Ghost and Blade are good to move. Dec, I want to look at that graze properly when we stop."
"You'll get your chance. Everyone—vehicles in five. Evidence, weapons, medical supplies. Leave everything else."
The cabin emptied in minutes. Nolan already had the evidence backpack strapped tight—he'd been wearing it since before the first shot. Sean limped slightly on the bad leg but his hands were steady on the rifle he carried, and his eyes were hard, and when he passed me in the hallway he squeezed my arm once—brief, fierce, saying everything his mouth wouldn't.
Outside, the desert was silent. The hostiles' vehicles sat dark and empty at the base of the ridge, glass shattered, tires shot out. Bodies lay in the scrubland where the crossfire had caught them. No survivors. Sixteen men had come to kill Nolan Mercer, and sixteen men had failed. Holt would feel the loss—not just the manpower, but the message. His hired army had met resistance it wasn't built for, and the men who'd delivered it were already gone.
Tank and Blade brought the trucks around from behind the rock formations where they'd been hidden since noon. Two vehicles, engines running, headlights off.
I climbed into the driver's seat of the lead truck. Sean beside me, his head tipped back, eyes closed but not sleeping. Nolan in the back seat, the evidence backpack between his knees, his hands finally still.
Axel's truck fell in behind us. Tank, Tyler, Kai, Blade, Ghost—six men from a brotherhood of thirty, the ones Hawk could spare while the rest held the clubhouse and ran operations that didn't stop because one safehouse had gone loud.
I pulled onto the highway. The desert stretched flat in every direction, the headlights carving a tunnel through the dark. In the rearview mirror, Nolan's eyes were already there. Watching me through the glass. Steady. Calm. Present.
He didn't look away when I caught him. Neither did I.
Sean's hand found the center console, palm up. I put my hand over it without looking. His fingers closed around mine.
The graze throbbed under its dressing. The adrenaline was fading, and what it left behind was the thought I'd been carrying since I'd run down that hallway toward the sound of breaking glass.
The fear I'd felt for Nolan was the same fear. The same frequency. The same location in my chest.
If Sean was feeling what I was feeling, we needed to talk about it.
If he wasn't, the conversation would break something I couldn't repair.
But that was a problem for daylight. Right now there was a highway and a hand in mine and a pair of eyes in the mirror, and the distance between one safehouse and the next was measured not in miles but in the things we hadn't said.
The sun came up behind us. The cabin was gone.
