I was on my feet before I recognized the movement. Muscle memory. The body responding to the sound of an explosion before the mind could catch up. Dec was faster—already in his jeans, his Sig in his hand, the weapon that lived under the pillow.
Nolan sat upright. Eyes wide, chest heaving. Not panic—calculation. His mind already running scenarios behind his eyes.
The alarm klaxon split the air. The clubhouse emergency system—a sound I'd heard twice before, both times followed by blood.
Through the window, smoke. Thick, black, chemical—the acrid stink of burning rubber and gasoline seeping through the walls. From the direction of the garage.
Dec crossed to the door. Opened it. The hallway already full of men—boots on concrete, shouts, organized chaos.
Hawk's voice cut through everything. Deep, absolute, carrying a fury that could have stripped paint from the walls.
"Garage! Now! Every man armed!"
Dec looked back at us. His face was the mask—tactical, locked, every trace of the man who'd been in our bed erased behind a discipline so total it was like watching a blast door seal shut. But his eyes moved from me to Nolan and back, and in thatfraction of a second before the soldier took over completely, I saw it: fear. Not for himself. For us.
"Get dressed." His voice was low, tight, vibrating with urgency. "Both of you. Now."
We were dressed in twenty seconds. Boots, jeans, shirts pulled over damp skin. Dec handed me the Glock from the drawer. Nolan stood by the door, unarmed, his face pale but steady, his jaw set, every analytical system online.
Dec went first, me a single step behind, Nolan in the rear. Down the hallway into acrid smoke and the sound of men running toward the thing that wanted to kill them.
12
COUNTERMEASURE
DECLAN
The blast wave hit the bedroom wall and I was moving before the sound registered.
Sig from under the pillow. Magazine seated, round chambered. Jeans from the floor, pulled on in a motion that bypassed conscious thought. Behind me, Sean was already up—the same combat reflex, the same muscle memory that didn't need a brain to function. Nolan sat upright in the bed, eyes wide, chest heaving, his mind visibly processing faster than his body could follow.
"Get dressed." My voice came out flat. Operational. Every trace of the man who'd been lying between them sixty seconds ago sealed behind a door that only opened from one side. "Both of you. Now."
Sean had his jeans on in five seconds, boots in eight. Nolan took ten—pulling his T-shirt over his head inside-out, yanking it right, dragging it down. His hands were shaking. His jaw was set.
The klaxon hit. The compound alarm—a sound that meant the perimeter had been breached. I'd heard it twice in three years. Both times followed by gunfire.
I handed Sean the Glock from the nightstand drawer. He took it without a word. Checked the chamber. The humor was gone from his face—all of it, stripped clean, replaced by the focused intensity that surfaced when the situation demanded the real man under the jokes.
"Stay behind me," I told Nolan. "Both of you stay behind me."
The hallway was chaos. Men pouring from rooms in various states of dress, boots on concrete, weapons drawn, the organized panic of a club under attack. The air was already wrong—acrid, chemical, the stink of burning rubber seeping through the walls from somewhere outside.
We reached the common room. Glass crunched under our boots—two windows blown inward, shards scattered across the concrete floor, the frames buckled from the pressure wave. Through the gaps where the panes had been, smoke. Black, thick, rolling across the lot from the direction of the main gate. The reinforced garage door—steel-plated, bolted to concrete posts—had been hit. The center was torn inward, peeled back like aluminum, a ragged gap three feet wide glowing orange at the edges.
RPG. The signature was unmistakable. Shaped charge, anti-armor—ordnance that didn't belong in a domestic dispute between motorcycle clubs. Ordnance that came from a weapons pipeline funded by a corrupt federal official.
"Contact at the gate!" Hawk's voice, cutting through the klaxon from somewhere ahead. "Nobody rush it! Hold positions!"
Smart. The breach was an invitation. Walk through that gap and you walked into whatever was waiting on the other side.
I pulled Nolan and Sean behind the van parked twenty yards from the gate—a panel van used for supply runs, the engine block heavy enough to stop most rifle rounds. We crouched in the shadow of the passenger side, the metal warm against our backs from the reflected heat of the burning gate.
"Tower guards?" Sean asked. Low, urgent, his eyes scanning the roofline.
"Stunned." I'd seen them through the smoke—three men on the east tower, one on the west, all on their knees or flat, disoriented from the concussive blast. They'd seen the vehicles coming. They'd tried to call it in. The RPG had been faster.
The second explosion was different. Smaller. A sharp, flat crack followed by a blinding white flash that strobed through the gap in the gate and turned the smoke into a wall of light. Flashbang. Then another. Then a third, the detonations overlapping, the concussive waves hitting my chest like fists.
