"Flanking right," I called, tracking a silhouette through the jagged glass. The figure was low, circling toward the side of the building. Gravel crunched under boots I couldn't see. "One more on the east side."
Diego nodded. A single sharp movement.
The sound came from my right. A boot heel through the side window, the intact glass cascading inward in a spray of fragments that caught what little light remained. A third attacker came through the frame fast, younger than the others, his pistol already sweeping the room as he vaulted the sill. The afternoon heat poured through the opening behind him, a blast of dry air that smelled like parking lot asphalt and sage.
Diego met him before his second foot hit the floor. The Ka-Bar caught the man across the side of his throat—a fast, clean arc that opened the skin in a line that went dark and wet immediately. The man's pistol discharged into the air, a reflex shot that punched a hole in the ceiling, and then the gun clattered to the floorboards as both hands flew to the gash.
The gurgling started instantly—a thick, bubbling sound that filled the space between the man's fingers. But Diego was already spinning around the backside of the hostile, reversing his grip on the Ka-Bar mid-turn, his body coming to a sharp stop with his arm fully extended, and the blade buried in the other side of the man's neck with a wet sound.
The Wolf's knees hit the floor hard, the impact cracking against the wood, and then he crumpled forward in a single heavy thud—face down, hands still at his throat, his body shaking once. Twice. Then going still.
Three down. My ears ringing so hard the silence between shots felt pressurized, like being underwater. The smell of blood had thickened, mixing with the gunsmoke into something dense and animal that coated the inside of my throat.
"One more." Diego's voice cut through the ringing. Flat. Certain.
Behind the bar counter, the bartender rose from his crouch with the shotgun in both hands. His face was flushed, the bridge-cable forearms sheened with sweat, his grip white-knuckled on the stock. He stepped out from behind the counter into the open room, sweeping the shotgun in wide arcs, the barrel traveling past furniture and shadows and the bodies on the floor—scanning for a target he didn't know how to find, his back to the kitchen hallway, his attention pointed in exactly the wrong direction.
The fourth man appeared behind him. Kitchen entrance. The route none of us had covered because the bartender's bulkand the counter and the shotgun had seemed like enough of a barrier. He stepped into the barroom with his pistol raised and the muzzle three feet from the base of the bartender's skull—his focus locked on the big man with the shotgun, not yet registering the figure pressed against the wall to his left.
The Desert Eagle came up in a single motion—draw, aim, trigger, one unbroken line.
The sound that exploded out of Diego's weapon shook dust from the ceiling beams.
The shot was deeper and heavier than that of my Beretta gun, a concussive blast that I felt in my chest cavity.
The round hit the man in the temple at close range, and the exit wound took most of the opposite side of his skull with it. Blood and bone sprayed across the kitchen doorframe and hit the wall behind him with a liquid, thick slap that I felt in my stomach.
The body didn't stagger. It just dropped—straight down and to the side, like the strings of the puppet had been cut, hitting the floor hard and with the certainty that it was never getting up.
The bartender stood frozen. The shotgun rattling in his grip so hard I could hear the stock clicking against the receiver. His face had gone white. His eyes were locked on the spot where the man had been standing a second ago and was now a shape on the floor.
The bar was quiet. The jukebox had died at some point during the fight. Glass crunched under Diego's boots as he moved through the space, checking each body—Ka-Bar in one hand, Desert Eagle in the other, his eyes sweeping corners, doorways, the shadows beneath overturned tables.
"Clear." One word. He holstered the Eagle and wiped the military combat knife on the nearest dead man's jacket without breaking stride.
I lowered my gun. My hands were steady but my thighs were trembling, my breathing shallow, the metallic taste of spent adrenaline building in the back of my throat. I'd killed a man. The second one through the door. I'd killed men before, in situations that were sanctioned and documented through the military's machinery of justified violence. This wasn't that. This was a bar in eastern Idaho.
The bartender still hadn't moved. The shotgun rattled in his hands.
Diego crossed the room to him. Stopped three feet away.
"You're alive because I was in the room." Quiet but firm. "Remember that."
The bartender's mouth opened. Closed. His Adam's apple bobbed on a swallow that looked painful.
Diego reached into his jacket and pulled out a fold of bills. Set them on the bar. "For the damage." He held the bartender's eyes. "And for your memory, which is going to be real short about the two men who were in here this afternoon. You saw nothing. You know nothing. We were never here."
The bartender nodded. Jerky, mechanical—his body obeying commands his brain hadn't fully authorized.
"Good." Diego turned away from him and looked at me. "We need to move. Now. Someone might've heard the shots. This place is twenty minutes from the nearest town, which gives us fifteen if someone calls it in."
We moved fast. The bar smelled like a firing range now—gunsmoke hanging in the air, mixing with the copper tang of blood pooling on the floorboards and the sharp chemical bite of neon gas still leaking from the shattered sign. Glass crunched under every step. The afternoon sun poured through the broken windows in shafts of white light that caught the haze and turned it visible.
The first phone I found was on the man nearest the door, the one I'd shot. It was in his jacket pocket, the screen lighting up with notifications as I pulled it out. Face-recognition locked. But the notification banner was visible on the lock screen, a text message, recent, the preview text showing the first two lines:
did you get the phoenix bitch who rode into our territory?
I held the phone up for Diego to see. His jaw tightened. He said nothing, just moved to the third body—the one he'd put down with the Ka-Bar knife—and went through the pockets with the methodical speed of someone searching a corpse on a timeline. He found the phone in the front pocket of the man's jeans. Face-recognition locked, same as the first.
