He broke from his sliver of cover, sprinting across open ground that felt too bright. Bullets spat around him, kicking up sparks and flakes of paint. He didn’t stop. Didn’t flinch.
He got to Diamondback and Indigo both, grabbed fabric—vest, cut, whatever he could clamp his hands on—and hauled them behind a heavier truck stacked low withanother crushed frame, where the metal thickness actually meant something.
It wasn’t graceful. But it was efficient.
He came back to my side in a half-crouch, eyes hot.
“Cut me loose,” he snapped over the gunfire.
“You are loose,” I said, firing again.
“You know what I mean,” he shot back. “Stop treating me like a guest. I know how to move in this. Let me do my fucking job. Give me a gun.”
I hesitated. Just a breath.
He met my eyes. No fear there, just readiness and that same stubborn core that had kept him alive in that hospital hallway.
“Fight like you would for your own,” I said finally. “Don’t get my people killed doing it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.
I handed him the spare gun from my waistband and then he was gone, peeling off to take an angle I wouldn’t have risked if I’d been babysitting him.
He moved like someone who’d been under live fire before and lived to file it away. Low when he needed to be low, quick when a slow step would’ve gotten him ventilated. He called a position out—“Two o’clock, blue sedan, low”—and Medusa adjusted her aim. The Serpent who’d been ducking there yelped from his new wound and dropped his gun.
We were biting them back, inch by inch. The leader knew it; he kept yelling for better angles, for flanks, for somebody to do something smart for once in theirlives.
I traded fire down the lane, ducked under a spray, popped back up. Heart thudding slow and hard. The world narrowed to muzzle flashes and metal.
It almost cost me.
I didn’t see the one threading left. He climbed a stack two rows over, boots careful on the frames, using height and glass holes to move silently. He dropped down through a gap maybe ten yards behind me.
I felt the prickle on the back of my neck a half-second too late.
“Val—” someone shouted.
I pivoted, swinging my gun up, but his was already leveled. The barrel pointed center-mass at me. For a frozen heartbeat the only thing I saw was the black hole of it and the stitching on his cut.
Then his head exploded sideways.
He’d barely started squeezing the trigger when his face opened in a spray of bone and gristle. The shot that had been meant for me buried itself uselessly in the dirt a foot away as he fell limp to the side, already a corpse.
Behind him, Jersey lowered his pistol.
We locked eyes over the crumpled body.
Something passed between us that had nothing to do with clubs or ledgers or orders.
“You good?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Keep ‘em running.”
The rest of the Serpents must’ve felt the tilt.
One screamed something about “pulling out.” Another cursed bikers and bad intel. They started falling back the way they’d come, dragging the worst of their wounded, while leaving blood and shell casings in their wake.
None of us chased. We weren’t here to take trophies. We were here to secure a ghost and live.
