"Then we'd have died doing the job we signed up for." I turned his face toward me. Made him look at me. The water ran between us, warm and relentless. "You didn't send us anywhere, Nolan. You gave us a target. We chose to hit it. That's what we do. That's what the club is."
"I'm not the club." Quiet. Fierce.
"No." I kissed his forehead. Held my lips there. "You're the reason the club still exists."
Dec's arms tightened around Nolan's waist. The smallest increase in pressure—his version of an entire paragraph. Nolan exhaled against my mouth, shaky and long, and the tension in his shoulders released by a fraction. Not gone. Lighter.
We stayed until the water began to cool. Dec washed Nolan's hair—his big hands gentle on the scalp, thumbs tracing behind the ears, and the sight of it, the sniper's hands cradling theaccountant's head with a tenderness that could make you forget those same hands had killed men twelve hours ago, made me look away for a second because watching felt like eavesdropping on a sacrament. Then Nolan washed mine, his fingers working through the short red strands with the systematic attention he brought to everything, and I closed my eyes under the spray and let the water run down my face and thought:this is what surviving feels like.
After, in the bedroom, Nolan sat me on the edge of the bed and took my hands. The first aid kit was open on the nightstand—antiseptic, gauze, tape, scissors, each item arranged with the parallel precision he gave to everything, lined up like surgical instruments. He cleaned each split knuckle separately, dabbing antiseptic that burned cold enough to make me hiss, then pressing gauze, then wrapping tape with a tension that was firm enough to protect and loose enough to move. The forensic accountant's precision applied to the damage my fists had done.
"No punching for a week," he murmured, turning my bandaged hands over in his, inspecting his work.
"You know I can't promise that."
"I know." The ghost of a smile. "I'm establishing a baseline for negotiation."
Dec sat behind us on the bed, his back against the headboard, watching. When Nolan finished, Dec leaned forward and kissed the top of Nolan's head. No words. Just the press of his lips against damp hair and the quiet certainty of a man who'd decided that tenderness wasn't weakness and was done pretending otherwise.
I leaned back against Dec's chest. Nolan leaned against my shoulder. Three men on a bed in a room that smelled like soap and steam, the hour ticking toward a debrief that none of us wanted to attend and all of us needed to.
"Ten more minutes," I murmured.
"Five," Dec corrected.
We took seven. Nobody complained.
Church filled the room with exhausted men and the smell of soap and coffee and the stubborn trace of gunpowder that no shower could fully scrub. Hawk sat at the head of the scarred table, his shotgun propped against the wall behind him, both palms flat on the wood. Every chair filled, maybe twenty-five men, maybe more. The silence had the held-breath quality of a room waiting for someone to go first.
Dec went first. Flat, precise, operational—the warehouse approach, the breach, the ambush from the catwalks, the kill box that had nearly ended them. Tank's covering fire. Ghost holding the stairwell. The explosion that destroyed the office complex and gave Kolev his escape route south. His delivery carried the measured cadence of data without commentary, every word stripped of feeling, and that was the tell. Everyone at the table heard it. Dec's clinical detachment wasn't the absence of emotion. It was the sound of emotion being held at gunpoint by discipline.
I went next. The dock bay, the containers splitting open, the firefight. Four hostiles down, two fleeing south. Blade's team securing the loading area while I read serial numbers through the comms to Nolan, my voice steady, my hands splitting open on men's jaws while my mouth shaped lot numbers into a microphone. I kept it professional, kept it clean, but when I reached the part about Dec's channel going silent—the static and the seventeen seconds—my throat tightened despite my best efforts and Hawk's eyes narrowed. Not in suspicion. Inrecognition. He knew what that frequency of fear sounded like. Every man at that table did.
Nolan closed it out. The serial number cross-referencing, one hundred and forty-seven confirmed matches, the complete evidence package transmitted to Vasquez via secure email before Tyler's call. Steady, analytical, the forensic accountant presenting findings to a room that listened with the awed attention of people who understood violence but not spreadsheets, watching him wield numbers the way they wielded weapons—with precision, with purpose, and with the quiet confidence of expertise.
"Vasquez should be moving on Holt as we speak." Tyler, from his seat beside Tank. "Arrest warrant's been active since?—"
His phone vibrated against the table. The buzz severed his sentence mid-breath. Every head turned. Tyler glanced at the screen. His expression recalibrated—not alarm, not yet, but the sharp narrowing of an ex-federal agent reading caller IDs for threat levels.
"Vasquez." He picked up. "Tell me."
Nothing. Tyler's face emptied. The blood left it in a slow, visible tide—jaw first, then cheeks, then forehead—the color receding like water pulling back from a shore.
"When?" More silence. His gaze found Hawk's across the table and the message in them hit the room before the words did. "Copy. Keep me updated."
He set the phone down. The screen went dark against the scarred wood.
"Holt's gone." Stripped to bone. "His office was empty when the arrest team arrived this morning. Someone inside the DOJ tipped him off. He vanished hours before they got there."
The table detonated. Blade's fist hit the wood hard enough to rattle every mug on the surface. Ghost's chair scraped backward across the concrete. Axel, sharp and furious, cutting through thenoise with a string of words I'd never heard him use in Church. The exhaustion of the night converting into rage the way fuel converts into fire—every brother at that table who'd bled for this evidence discovering that the target it was built to bury had walked out the back door.
I wasn't watching the table. I was watching Nolan.
His hands were flat on the wood, both of them trembling with a vibration I recognized because I'd seen it before—when Tyler had announced the arrest, in the courtyard when he'd sprinted across the gravel to reach us. But his expression wasn't afraid. His jaw was set, the intensity behind his glasses hot enough to melt glass. Not fear. Rage. The cold, precise, analytical fury of a man who'd spent eight weeks running from a ghost and had just learned the ghost was still walking. Who'd built an airtight case and watched the defendant slip the net.
I moved to his side. Dec was already there, his hand on Nolan's shoulder, the grip firm and grounding. Nolan didn't look at either of us. He stared at the table with the concentration of someone running calculations he despised the answers to.
"ENOUGH!"
