The brand. Under the sleeves. On the left shoulder. Twelve people on Logan's ranch marked like cattle. The scar hidden by the only clothing they'd been given. The instruction to keep covered carrying enough weight to override the body's basic instinct to cool itself.
The knife stopped turning in my hand. I set both palms flat on the table.
"Five men are dead in the desert outside our compound," I told him. "They were branded with that mark. They were starved, overworked, and dumped on our border. Then someone called the FBI and tried to pin it on us."
"Pin it on you?"
"Anonymous tip. Linking the Steel Phoenixes to the bodies. Someone wanted us framed."
Logan's jaw worked. I watched the muscle in his cheek flex, the teeth pressing together behind the skin—thephysical expression of a man processing information that was reconfiguring everything he thought he knew.
"The building on my north acreage," he said slowly. "The trucks at three in the morning. The workers who can't look me in the eye." His voice cracked on the last word. Not loud. A hairline fracture that I heard because I'd spent almost two years learning the structural tolerances of this man's composure. "Someone is using my ranch. My land. My money. To do this."
"Not just your ranch." I kept my voice level. The counterweight to his fracture. "The bodies came from the northeast. Ghost and I tracked their trail for two days. Footprints, tire tracks, all heading back toward central Montana. Your ranch is one point. But the scale of this—the branding, the infrastructure, the FBI tip." I let each word land. "This is a network. Multiple sites. Your property is a node, not the center."
"High Basin." Logan's hands were flat on the table now, mirroring mine, the knuckles white against the tanned skin. "They're the connection. The labor contractor. The front company."
"And whoever's behind them has federal reach. The framing attempt was designed to redirect law enforcement toward us and away from the real operation. That's not a local criminal. That's someone with access to the system."
The bar noise filled the gap between us. Jukebox playing something with a pedal steel guitar. The bartender wiping glasses. The low murmur of other patrons, none of whom were paying attention to two men in a back booth whose conversation had just mapped the outline of something monstrous.
Logan looked at me. The blue eyes carrying everything the words hadn't said—the guilt, the fury, the weight of discovering that the sanctuary he'd built was poisoned at the root.
"I can't do this alone." Quiet. Direct. The same register he'd used at Bragg when the mission parameters exceeded a singleoperator's capacity and requesting support wasn't weakness, but math.
"You're not alone."
The words came out before I could filter them. Three words, carrying more than their weight. The look that crossed Logan's face was the same look he'd given me the first time I'd kissed him in the supply closet at Bragg. Surprise. Recognition. A wall coming down that he'd expected to hold.
His hand moved across the table. Not reaching for mine. Resting near it. Two inches between his fingers and mine. Close enough that I could feel the heat off his skin, the warmth making the fine hairs on my forearm stand up.
Two inches. The distance was a question.
I looked at his hand. The calluses and the scars and the veins running beneath the tanned skin. The fingers that had held my face in a motel room so long ago and traced the line of my jaw like they were memorizing it.
"I missed you." Logan's voice was low. Not a performance. A fact delivered with the same directness he'd use to report a grid coordinate.
The two inches between our hands hummed.
I opened my mouth. The wordyeahwas right there, loaded and chambered, the single syllable that would carry everything I'd spent years not saying.
Then the window exploded.
The sound came first. A percussive crack that split the air and sent glass spraying across the bar in a horizontal rain of fragments that caught the light and turned it into a thousand tiny blades. The second shot followed a half-second later, punching through the window frame and burying itself in the wood paneling behind the bar. I felt the thud in my sternum. The third shot took out the neon beer sign above the front window and it died in a shower of sparks and blue-white light.
My body moved before my brain finished processing the first shot. Two thousand hours of combat training collapsing into a single sequence below conscious thought—I was out of the booth, across the table, my hands on Logan's shoulders. Pulling him down and sideways. Putting my body between him and the window. The booth's wooden back absorbed a fourth round that punched through where Logan's head had been half a second ago.
"Down. Stay down." My voice came out flat, calm, stripped of everything except instruction. The operational register. The sound I made when the world narrowed to threat and response and the distance between was measured in fractions of a second.
The bar erupted. Patrons screaming, scrambling. The trucker diving behind the bar. The old man in the John Deere cap frozen in his seat. The bartender had dropped below the counter—the sound of a shotgun being racked echoed from somewhere behind the taps.
The gunfire stopped. The silence after was worse—the held-breath pause that meant the shooters were moving, repositioning, transitioning from ranged to close quarters. I knew the rhythm. I'd used it myself.
The front door kicked inward. The frame splintered. A man came through the opening, a pistol in a two-handed grip, sweeping left, and I saw the colors on his back before I saw his face.
Iron Wolves.
The leather cut. The snarling wolf patch. The same colors I'd seen in photographs from the Holt war and the Cross operation and every briefing Hawk had given about the enemy that had been bleeding us for way too long.
