"He sleeps through the night now." A pause. A pause that carried weight. "Hasn't had a nightmare in two weeks."
I didn't comment on that. Didn't need to. The fact that Tank was tracking Tyler's sleep patterns and reporting them as a positive metric said everything about where those two were, and where they'd been, and the distance between the two points.
I threw another combination. Faster. The bag shuddering under the barrage, Tank's arms flexing to absorb. Sweat ran down my temples, pooled in the hollow of my throat. The gym smelled like iron and rubber and the particular musk of men who used physical exertion as therapy. Which, in this compound, was everyone.
The door opened. I caught the movement in my peripheral vision without breaking rhythm. Red hair. The walk that was half-swagger, half-dance, the gait of someone whose body had been rebuilt from the ground up and who treated every step as a celebration of the engineering. Irish crossed the gym toward the dumbbell rack with the specific energy of a person who was happy for absolutely no external reason and didn't care who knew it.
The grin was permanent now. Not the performance grin, not the deflection grin. The real one, the one that had been missing for months during his recovery and had come back twice as bright since the compound had two more residents in his bedroom. He picked up a pair of thirties, started curling, and the grin didn't waver. Just a man lifting weights and smiling at the wall like the wall had told him a joke.
"Irish looks even happier than the bastard already did before," I observed, driving a hook into the bag. "Didn't think that was physically possible."
"Love does that." Tank. Simple. The voice of a man who knew.
"Three people's worth of love, apparently."
"Apparently."
I watched Irish in the mirror between combinations. The ease of him. The way the brightness had settled from manic into steady, from performance into permanence. He'd found his people. All of them. And the compound had absorbed the configuration without blinking, because the Steel Phoenixes hadnever cared who you loved. Only whether you'd bleed for the person beside you.
"What about you?" Tank asked.
I threw a jab. Hard. The bag jumped.
"What about me?"
"Love life. Yours." Tank's tone was conversational, unhurried. He wasn't pushing. He was opening a door and seeing if I'd walk through it. "You've had girlfriends. Boyfriends. More of the former, but enough of the latter that nobody was keeping score. Any of them stick longer than the usual?"
The jab I threw was faster than I intended. The bag cracked.
"No."
"None?"
"This isn't a conversation, Tank. It's an interrogation."
"It's a question. From a friend."
I dropped my hands. Caught the bag. The leather warm and damp under my palms, my knuckles red from the session, my heart rate elevated but controlled. Tank watched me from behind the bag with the patient steadiness of a man who could wait as long as the question required.
"There was someone." The words came out before the filter caught them. Clean. Precise. The way words came out when they'd been stored too long and the pressure exceeded the seal. "In the army. Before I left. Before Hawk, before the Phoenixes, before any of this."
Tank waited.
"It didn't end well." I picked up my towel. Wiped my face. "It ended the way things end when one person leaves and the other one doesn't."
I walked out of the gym before Tank could ask the follow-up. Not because I was angry. Because the next question would have required a name, and the name was a blade I'd been carrying ina sheath for six years, and pulling it out in a room full of people wasn't how I operated.
I carried my own weight. Always had.
My room was the smallest in the compound. By choice. Four walls, a bed, a footlocker, a weapons rack that held three combat knives and the Desert Eagle in its holster. The walls were bare. No photographs, no posters, no decorations. The room looked like what it was: a space designed for sleeping and sharpening, nothing else.
I peeled off the workout shirt. The mirror on the back of the door caught my reflection: the lean torso, the shoulders ropy with the fast-twitch muscle that made my hands quicker than anyone else's in the compound, the tattoos that ran from my collarbones to my wrists in dark geometric patterns that a buddy in the Rangers had inked during a deployment that felt like a lifetime ago. The scars underneath the ink. Two bullet wounds, long healed. A knife scar across my ribs that I'd given myself during a training accident at nineteen that had taught me more about blade angles than any instructor ever had.
The phone was on the footlocker. The new one. Nolan had distributed them three days after the attack, every device in the compound replaced, every number rotated, every encryption protocol rebuilt from the ground up because the forensic accountant who'd taken a fire extinguisher to a federal official's skull didn't do anything by half measures. The phone was clean. Unhacked. Secure.
I picked it up. The screen lit.
One notification. Text message. Unknown number.
