"Copy that, sir."
The gate was open. Afternoon sun hammered the courtyard, the heat rising in visible waves off the asphalt, the compound walls casting hard shadows that shortened by the minute. The repaired gate stood wide, the new hinges gleaming, the welded patches bright against the older steel.
Four Harleys idled in formation near the entrance. The low, guttural rumble of V-twin engines filled the air with a vibration I could feel through the soles of my boots, through the concrete, through the bones of my feet. The exhaust shimmered in the heat. The chrome caught sunlight and threw it back in blades.
Sean was already on his bike, helmet off, cut zipped, his gloves resting on the tank. Beside him, three patched members I'd vetted myself—all experienced, all armed, all briefed on the security protocols Hawk had laid down that morning.
Nolan and I stood at the gate. Nolan had his arms crossed, his glasses catching the glare, his expression carrying the controlled neutrality of a man who was running probability calculations and not sharing the results.
Sean swung off the bike. Crossed to us.
"I'll be back in three hours." He took Nolan's face in both hands. Kissed him slow. "I love you."
The words were easy in his mouth. They'd always been easy for Sean—the man who narrated his life, who filled silence, who spoke feeling the way other people spoke weather. For eight years I'd watched him say what I couldn't, and for eight years the saying had been enough for both of us.
"I love you too." Nolan, quiet, his hands gripping Sean's wrists. "Be careful."
"I'm always careful."
"You are literally never careful."
Sean grinned. Turned to me.
"I love you, Dec."
"I know." I pulled him in. Kissed his forehead. Held him there for two seconds longer than tactical. "Come back."
"Always do."
He walked back to his bike. Swung on. The engine roared as he twisted the throttle, and the sound hit my chest the way it always did—deep, percussive, the bass note of every departure I'd watched from this gate. The three escorts fell into formation behind him. Four bikes rolling toward the gate, chrome flashing, engines thundering, the riders' silhouettes sharp against the bright desert beyond.
Sean raised one hand as he passed through. Not a wave. A salute. The grin visible even at distance, even through the heat shimmer, the confidence of a man who'd rebuilt himself from the ground up and was finally being allowed to use what he'd built.
The bikes hit the highway. The engines opened up—a rising snarl that traveled across the desert floor and thinned with distance, the sound stretching and fading until it was absorbed by the heat and the silence and the vast, patient emptiness of the Nevada landscape.
Nolan stood beside me. Watching. His arms still crossed. His jaw working.
My hand found the back of his neck. The gesture was instinctive, the same anchoring pressure I'd given Sean for eight years—thumb against the muscle below the skull, fingers curving around the side, a grip that saidI'm herein the only language I'd ever been truly fluent in. On Nolan, the gesture felt different. Not lesser. Not a copy. A translation. The same word in a new dialect, and the rightness of it—the way his shoulders eased under my hand, the way he leaned back into the pressure the same way Sean always did—confirmed a truth I'd known but hadn't articulated.
Two recipients now. Two anchors. The geometry had changed and the foundation had held.
"He'll be fine," I said.
Nolan nodded. His eyes didn't leave the highway. The bikes were gone. The dust they'd raised was settling. The gate stood open to the desert and the road and the thirty-two miles between here and Hawthorne.
I kept my hand on Nolan's neck, and hoped I was right.
16
SNARE
IRISH
The desert between Henderson and Hawthorne was a different country when you weren't riding toward a gunfight.
Three hours out and the landscape had shifted from the baked scrubland near the clubhouse into something wider, flatter, the earth turning pale and alkaline under a sky so blue it looked painted on. No clouds. No shade. Just the highway cutting a surgical line through miles of nothing, and the sun pouring down like it had a personal investment in making every surface too hot to touch.
I was happy.
