"If anything feels wrong—anything at all—you call this number. Not my personal phone. This one. Save it."
A pause. Silence on the line. Then Danny's voice, quieter.
"Yeah. Okay. I can do that."
"Danny." I paused. "I'm going to make this up to you. I promise. When this is over, I'll explain everything."
"You're scaring me, Logan."
"Good. Scared is smart right now. I'll be in touch."
I hung up. Handed the phone back to Diego. Our fingers touched on the exchange—a half-second of contact, his skin warm and dry against mine—and neither of us acknowledged it and neither of us could pretend it didn't happen.
The screen went dark. Twelve workers and a twenty-three-year-old foreman on a ranch in Montana that was a node in a trafficking network, and I was about to drive in the opposite direction because the alternative was a bullet on my own porch.
Diego was already at the door, stepping over the bodies. "Let's go. Clock's ticking."
We moved out through the front entrance, past the two bodies piled in the doorway, past the blood spreading across the threshold in a dark pool that the gravel was slowly absorbing. The afternoon sun was blinding after the dim bar, the heat pressing against my face like a flat hand, and I squinted against the glare as we crossed the lot.
Diego stopped.
His motorcycle sat where he'd parked it near the entrance. Both tires were slashed, the rubber hanging off the rims in torn strips, the chrome of the wheels resting against the gravel at angles that spoke to blades applied with deliberate force. They'd done it before they entered the bar. Cut off the escape route before launching the assault.
Diego stared at the bike. His jaw worked, the muscles flexing beneath the skin, and for the first time since the fight began I saw something on his face that wasn't tactical calculation or combat focus. It was loss. Brief, controlled, gone in two seconds—but real. A man looking at a machine that meant more than transportation, the way a rancher looks at a horse that's been put down.
"Truck," I told him. "My F-250. Blue Ford, parked on the east side."
He looked at the bike for one more second. Then he turned away and walked toward the truck.
Five hours in a truck cab with the man who'd just killed three people in front of me and saved my life in the process.
I drove. Diego sat in the passenger seat with the Ka-Bar in his lap and his eyes on the side mirror, watching the road behind us. He'd cleaned the blood from his hands with a rag he'd found behind my seat, the dark stains transferring from his skin to the fabric in long deliberate strokes. Now his hands rested on the knife and the knife rested on his thigh.
The highway stretched south. The landscape flattening, the grassland thinning, the air warming through the open windows because the F-250's air conditioning had died two summersago and I'd never fixed it. The wind pulled at Diego's hair and flattened the collar of his jacket, and I watched from the corner of my eye the way the afternoon light caught the geometric tattoos on his forearms where he'd pushed his sleeves up.
The tattoos were new. At Bragg, his arms had been bare, the brown skin smooth, the muscles lean and quick. Now the ink ran from his wrists to somewhere beneath his shirt, dark geometric patterns that shifted when the muscles underneath moved. I wanted to trace them with my fingers the way you trace the lines on a topographic map—slowly, following the contours, learning the terrain.
I didn't. My hands stayed on the wheel.
"You okay?" Diego's voice broke the silence after the first hour. He wasn't looking at me, his gaze fixed on the mirror instead.
"I killed a man today."
"You've killed men before."
"Under rules of engagement that someone else wrote." I kept my eyes on the road. The center line dividing the blacktop in a steady pulse of yellow dashes. "This was a bar in Idaho."
"This was a bar where four armed men tried to execute you for asking questions about slaves on your property." His voice was level, flat, without judgment or comfort. Just the fact, laid down clean. "The rules of engagement wrote themselves."
I let that sit. Let the highway eat the miles while the logic settled into the space where the guilt was trying to build. Diego's clarity in moments of crisis had been the thing I'd relied on most at Bragg—the ability to cut through noise and find the bone of a situation and hold it up without flinching.
I missed it. I missed him.
I'd told him so, at the bar, right before the windows exploded.I missed you.The words had left my mouth and crossed the table and landed somewhere in the two inches between our hands.Then the world had detonated, and the words were still there, unresolved. He hadn't answered. He'd been about to. I'd seen his mouth open. Seen the word forming. Then the glass.
The truck hummed beneath us, the big engine eating the miles. I shifted my grip on the wheel and my arm brushed against the center console, close to where Diego's arm rested. The accidental contact sent a current through my skin that had nothing to do with static electricity. The last time we'd been this close in a vehicle was a rented sedan, parked behind a gas station at midnight. His hand on the back of my neck. His mouth on mine. The certainty between us burning so hot it fogged the windows.
Six years. His arm an inch from mine on the console. The smell of him filling the cab the way it used to fill the bunk space—leather and steel and something warm underneath, something his skin produced that didn't have a name but that my body recognized the way it recognized gravity.
