My hand found the throwing knife out of pure reflex. The custom seven-inch blade, double-edged. It left my hand the way it always did—the snap of the wrist, the rotation calibrated todistance, the release point calculated by a part of my brain that didn't use numbers, only instinct. Ten thousand repetitions and the absolute certainty that the blade would go where I sent it.
The knife crossed twelve feet in less than a second. It hit the Wolf above the bridge of the nose.
The point entered the skull with a sound that was wet and final and louder than it should have been in the sudden quiet of the bar. A slicing thud that carried a weight beyond its volume.
The man's head snapped back. His pistol discharged into the ceiling with a bang that echoed in my ears. His body folded backward through the doorway he'd just kicked open, and he hit the ground outside with the dense, permanent sound of a body that would not be getting up.
I registered what I had done in the time it took to draw my second knife. The Ka-Bar combat knife. Close-quarters. The throwing knife was now gone, buried in the skull of a man who'd made the mistake of walking through a door while I was in the room.
Logan was beside me. On his feet now, pressed against the wall, a Beretta in his hand that he'd pulled from somewhere I hadn't seen. His grip was steady. His eyes were wide but focused. The Ranger underneath the rancher surfacing like something that had been sleeping, not dead.
More shapes outside. Moving past the windows. At least two, maybe three, their silhouettes crossing the broken glass in quick lateral shifts. Boots on gravel. The sound of weapons being readied.
The dead man's radio crackled from the floor. A voice, distorted by static: "Status. Report."
I looked at Logan. Logan looked at me. The six years between us gone. The conversation about workers and brands and buildings evaporated. What remained was the thing underneath—two Rangers in a kill box, armed, trained, and very much notwilling to die in a bar called The Junction on a nothing road in eastern Idaho.
"How many rounds?" I kept my voice low. The Ka-Bar in my right hand, my left palm flat against the wall, feeling for vibration. Footsteps transmitted through the structure.
"Fifteen in the mag. One in the chamber." Logan's voice matched mine. Calm, clipped, the shorthand of men who'd done this before. "You?"
The Desert Eagle sat in the holster at the small of my back. Seven rounds of .50 caliber, more than destructive enough to stop anything that walked through that door. I'd brought it because riding into Wolf territory without a firearm was suicide, not bravery. But I'd reached for the knife first. Always the knife first. Faster at close range, quieter, and it didn't announce your position to every hostile within half a mile.
"Desert Eagle. Seven rounds. And two blades."
Logan's eyes flicked to the knife in my hand. To the dead man in the doorway with seven inches of custom steel somewhere in his forehead. Back to my face.
"You went for the knife."
"I always go for the knife."
The shapes outside the windows shifted. Closer. The radio crackled again.
I pressed my back against the wall and adjusted my grip on the Ka-Bar. I felt the weight of it, the balance, the edge I'd sharpened two nights ago in my room while I stared at a phone screen and tried to decide whether our silence was worth breaking.
The silence was broken now. All of it.
5
ERUPTION
LOGAN
The next man came through the door and I pulled the trigger twice.
The Beretta bucked in my hand—two sharp kicks that traveled up my wrist and into my forearm, the reports so loud in the enclosed space they felt like physical blows against my eardrums. The muzzle flash lit the dim bar in two orange strobes. The man staggered backward over the body already blocking the doorway—the first attacker, the one Diego had dropped with the throwing knife—and went down across him in a heap that sealed the entrance.
Glass was everywhere. In my hair, on my shoulders, grinding into the floorboards beneath my boots. My ears rang with a high persistent tone that sat beneath every other sound like a second pulse. The air tasted like gunpowder and plaster dust and the copper-sweet edge of blood. Spilled beer soaked into the wood beneath us. The shattered neon sign above the frontwindow sparked and fizzed, throwing blue-white light across the wreckage in irregular flashes that turned the bar into a strobe.
Two down. The doorway was barricaded by their bodies. Which meant the rest of them would find another way in.
Diego was three feet to my left, pressed against the wall beside the kicked-in door. Ka-Bar in his right hand. Desert Eagle holstered at the small of his back. His body angled low, weight on the balls of his feet, shoulders squared to the broken windows. His eyes were flat. Calm. The dark brown gone cold in a way I'd seen exactly twice, both times in situations where the people on the other end of that stare didn't walk away.
I'd watched him kill the first man. The throwing knife left his hand and crossed twelve feet of dim bar air, entering the attacker's skull above the bridge of his nose. All of it happened in the space between my hand reaching for the Beretta and my fingers closing around the grip. Insanely fast.
The knife left his hand the way breath left his lungs. Automatic.
Shapes were moving outside the broken windows. The heat from outside poured through the shattered frames, mixing with the gunshot smoke hanging at chest level.
