"Bring me back a souvenir," I said. "Something tasteful. Maybe a weapons manifest."
"I'll gift-wrap it." He pulled his gloves on, fingers flexing, already restless for the throttle.
Dec looked at me. Held it. The visor was up and his dark eyes caught the light from the clubhouse doorway, and he didn't say anything because we'd already said everything we were going to say and the things we hadn't said would keep until he came back.
He dropped the visor. Kicked the engine over.
The Harley's rumble hit my chest before it reached my ears—a deep, rolling thunder that vibrated through the soles of my boots and up into my sternum. Ghost's bike joined it a half-second later, higher-pitched, sharper. The combined sound filled the lot and bounced off the perimeter walls, and the desert dust stirred beneath the exhaust, fine grains catching the faint light and swirling in the warm air that pulsed from the pipes.
They pulled out through the gate. Side by side. The rumble softened as they hit the access road, thinning from thunder to a low drone, and the red glow of their taillights shrank through the settling dust until the dark swallowed them and the sound faded to nothing and the only thing left was the ringing silence of a desert that had just been full of noise.
The dust drifted down. Settled on my bare arms. Fine and gritty and still warm from the exhaust.
The desert was still. Cold. Pre-dawn cold—the kind that arrives just before sunrise and lasts until the sun crests the ridge and burns it off in minutes. I stood in it and let it press against my skin and felt the absence of Dec settle into the spaces he usually occupied. The space beside me in bed. The space across a room that he filled just by standing in it. The specific, calibrated pull that I'd oriented my life around for eight years, suddenly gone.
Not just worry for his safety. I'd survived deployments and ops and four months of listening through a radio—I could handle a couple of days.
What I wasn't sure I could handle was two days alone with Nolan.
Not physically. I trusted myself. My hands stayed where I told them to stay, and my mouth said only what I allowed it to say. That had never been the problem.
The problem was everything else. The late-night conversations that kept running longer than they should. The way his laugh surprised us both. The way he looked at me sometimes across the storage room, quick and unguarded, before the analytical shields came back up and whatever he was feeling got filed away in whatever internal system he used to keep his emotions in quarantine.
The problem was that I was afraid I'd say something honest. And honesty, in this particular situation, with this particular man, might be the most dangerous weapon in the house.
The sun crested the ridge. The cold burned off in seconds, the desert shifting from blue to gold, the warmth hitting my skin like a hand pressing flat against my chest. Somewhere inside, I heard the coffee maker kick on—the old one, the one that gurgled and spat and took twelve minutes to produce anything drinkable.Nolan would be awake soon. He'd come to the storage room with two cups, one black, one with too much sugar because somehow he'd learned my order without ever asking, and he'd set mine on the table without a word and open his laptop. The room would fill with the silence that existed between two people who had stopped needing to talk to be comfortable. And I would sit across from him and feel the ache in my chest that had nothing to do with my leg and everything to do with the man who'd become essential without asking permission.
I rubbed the dust off my arms. Rolled my bad leg once, testing. Took a breath that tasted like exhaust and desert sage and the fading ghost of Dec's engine.
The clubhouse door was warm when I pushed it open. The hallway smelled like coffee and leather and the particular quiet of a building full of sleeping men. I walked toward the storage room, my footsteps loud in the silence, my pulse doing things I refused to count, and I thought:two days. Two days of being honest might break everything. Two days of not being honest might be worse.
The coffee maker gurgled. The sun climbed. I sat down at the table and waited for the man I was trying not to fall in love with to walk through the door.
9
RECONNAISSANCE
DECLAN
The desert between Henderson and Hawthorne was a different country.
Closer to the clubhouse, the landscape was scrub and rock and the baked geometry of a basin shaped by millennia of drought. Out here—two hundred miles north, climbing through the Gabbs Valley toward Walker Lake—the terrain shifted. The scrubland thinned to nothing. The earth turned pale and alkaline, cracked into plates like dried skin, stretching flat to the horizon in every direction. Heat shimmered off the hardpan in waves that bent the distance, made the mountains ripple and swim, turned solid rock into liquid.
Ghost rode behind me, holding formation at twenty yards. He'd been quiet for the first hour—unusual for him—then started talking through the comms once we hit Highway 95. About the bike, about the road, about a documentary he'd watched on military supply chains that he thought was relevant. The kid talked the way Sean talked, in spirals that circled a pointbefore landing on it, except Ghost's spirals were wider and less controlled, the verbal energy of a young man whose mind ran faster than his experience could organize.
I let him talk. The sound filled the desert the way the engine vibration filled my hands, and both served the same purpose—noise to occupy the surface while the deeper systems ran their calculations.
We reached the coordinates Nolan had provided by early afternoon. The property sat in a shallow basin three miles east of Hawthorne, screened from the highway by a ridge of bleached rock formations that rose thirty feet above the valley floor. I killed the engine a mile and a half south of the ridge, behind a cluster of rock formations far enough from the compound that the engine noise wouldn't carry. Ghost pulled up beside me, his bike ticking as it cooled. The silence that replaced the engines was haunting—no wind, no birds, nothing but the dry mineral smell of alkali dust and the faint sulfur tang of volcanic rock baking in the sun.
"Bikes stay here." I swung off the Harley and surveyed the overhang. A pocket of shadow deep enough to conceal both motorcycles from any angle. "We hike in on foot. Thirty minutes."
Ghost dismounted. Rolled his shoulders. Bounced once on his toes. The restless energy that lived in him like a second heartbeat, always running, always looking for an outlet. He pulled his pack from the saddlebag—binoculars, camera with telephoto, water, protein bars, a compact sleeping roll. His rifle stayed in the scabbard on the bike. This was a camera mission, not a shooting mission.
The hike took thirty-five minutes over rough terrain—loose volcanic rock, dry washes, the scrub thinning to bare ground as we climbed toward the ridge. At the crest, I dropped to my stomach and crawled the last six feet to the observation point—a natural depression between two boulders that gave us an unobstructed view of the basin below.
The depot filled the valley floor.
I'd expected a warehouse. What I was looking at was a compound. A decommissioned military storage facility—concrete bunkers, corrugated steel buildings, a perimeter fence topped with razor wire—reactivated and operational under the cover of a private security contractor whose name was stenciled on the main gate:Ridgeline Industrial Services.The same ghost company that was paying four thousand a month in electricity to keep this place running.
