"Get some sleep, Logan."
"Diego."
My name in his mouth. Same impact as the bar—landing somewhere my knife couldn't protect.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For bringing me here. For not letting me go back to the ranch alone."
"You'd have done the same."
"I would have." His eyes held mine. The blue steady, warm, carrying something I recognized from the locked doors and the stolen hours—the look he gave me when the world outside couldn't see us. "You know I would have."
I nodded. Stepped back into the corridor. Pulled the door closed between us.
My room was thirty feet away. I walked the distance and closed my door and stood in the dark, knowing he was on the other side of the corridor, settling into a bed that wasn't his. A gravity I'd spent years failing to forget.
I sat on my bed. The footlocker. The weapons rack. The bare walls that had never bothered me until tonight, when the bareness felt less like discipline and more like absence.
Sleep didn't come.
Church filled the room at eight the next morning with leather and coffee and the collective weight of men who'd been told something was coming and wanted to know its shape.
I took my usual spot near the wall. Logan stood beside Hawk at the head of the table, straight-backed, composed, his hands clasped behind him in the at-ease posture that the army had drilled in and civilian life hadn't drilled out. He was wearing a clean shirt I'd lent him—the fabric sat too tight across his shoulders and chest, pulling at the seams where his body exceeded the dimensions mine had been cut for. I let my eyes stay on the stretch of cotton across his pectorals for a half-second longer than operational awareness required. When I looked up, Irish was watching me from across the table with a grin so subtle it barely qualified as an expression. Just the faintest lift at one corner of his mouth. The bastard missed nothing.
Hawk opened. Brief, direct. The desert bodies. The brand marks. The framing attempt. The recon with Ghost. The bar. Four dead Iron Wolves. Then he gestured to Logan.
Logan briefed the way Rangers briefed: clean, sequential, no emotion. The ranch. The workers. High Basin Agricultural Services. The white long-sleeved shirts in ninety-degree heat. The phone call. The locked building on the north acreage. The smell of confinement. He laid each piece of information down and the picture that assembled itself was clear enough to make the room go still.
When he finished, Nolan spoke first. His glasses catching the overhead light, his fingers already moving across his laptop.
"High Basin Agricultural Services. I ran it yesterday afternoon after Ghost's brief." His voice was measured, in a way that made it clear that his words were backed by data, not speculations. "Shell company. Registered in Wyoming, which is a red flag by itself. Its parent entity is a holding company called Bridger Valley LLC, which also owns three other agricultural and construction staffing firms across Montana and Idaho. The money flows upward through two more layers of corporateobscurity to accounts I haven't cracked yet. But the structure is identical to what I found in the Holt weapons pipeline. Same architecture. Different product."
"The product being people," Irish said from across the table. No grin. His voice flat in the way it went flat when the humor was the first thing stripped away by anger.
Nolan's jaw tightened. He looked down at his laptop for a moment. "The product being people," he confirmed, quieter.
Tyler leaned forward beside Tank. "The FBI tip that tried to frame us for the desert bodies—if this is the same operation, the tip came from inside the trafficking network. Someone with enough federal access to place an anonymous call that would be taken seriously." He looked at Hawk. "That's not a local criminal. That's someone inside the Bureau. And if Nolan's right about the financial architecture matching Holt and Cross, we're looking at another corrupt agent using the same playbook."
"Then we find them." Hawk's voice settled over the room. "Nolan follows the money upward. Tyler, your federal contacts start looking at the FBI's Civil Rights Division. That's the unit responsible for investigating labor trafficking, which makes it the perfect place for someone to bury it instead."
Tank spoke for the first time. His voice low, measured. "How many workers?"
Logan answered. "Twelve on my ranch. Based on the size of the transit facility on the north acreage, the total network could be moving hundreds across multiple states."
The room absorbed that. I watched it land differently on every face. Ghost's jaw tightened, the restless energy going still. Axel's hand found Kai's under the table—automatic, the gesture of a man who'd seen human trafficking firsthand and whose body remembered it before his mind caught up. Declan sat motionless beside Irish, his expression flat, the sniper's stillness that meant he was calculating. Irish's hands had stoppedmoving, which was the tell that mattered most: Irish in motion meant Irish processing. Irish frozen meant Irish had arrived at fury.
"Hawk." I spoke from my position at the wall. Every head turned. "This is personal. For me."
Hawk's eyes found mine. Waited.
"The workers on Logan's ranch are Latino. The bodies in the desert were Latino. The people being moved through this pipeline are probably coming from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras." I kept my voice level. The knife on my belt steady under my hand. "My mother crossed that border pregnant with me. My family came from the same places these people are being taken from. This isn't just club business. This is mine."
The room went quiet. But not operational quiet. Something else that made the tension in the air almost palpable.
Hawk nodded. Once. The nod that meant the decision was made and the weight was shared.
"We investigate. Full resources. Nolan, follow the money. Tyler, work your federal contacts. Blade, you're operational lead on this one." His eyes swept the room. "Nobody moves alone. Nobody rides without backup. And nobody touches Logan Kessler. He's under our protection until this is resolved."
