"That's a lot of people moving slow on back roads in the dark."
"Which is why we move now."
The comms crackled. Ghost's voice, tight: "Blade. Headlights. Northwest, coming down the main road. Multiple vehicles. Moving fast."
I was at the edge of the drive in four seconds, the Ka-Bar in my right hand, the Desert Eagle drawn with my left. The main road ran northwest from the ranch toward the highway, a straight line of gravel and dirt invisible at night except for one thing: headlights. And the headlights coming down that road were moving in a pattern I recognized.
Staggered. Close together. Motorcycles in formation.
"Logan." I kept my voice low, sharp. "Get the workers out of the truck bed. Behind the far side of the vehicle. Down. Quiet. Danny too. Nobody moves, nobody makes a sound."
Logan didn't hesitate. I heard him moving behind me, the tailgate lowering, his voice a controlled murmur in Spanish and English, guiding twelve people off the truck and behind the F-250. The shuffle of feet on gravel. A stifled whimper. Then silence—the kind that comes from people who've spent months learning to be invisible.
"Irish. With me. Ghost, hold position at the road edge. Let them pass you. We hit from three sides."
Irish fell in on my left and we moved toward the road, splitting as we crossed the drive. Irish toward the equipmentshed, a solid wooden structure twenty feet from the road. I went right, toward a corrugated metal lean-to near the fence line with bags of fertilizer stacked inside and scattered around its base. Enough to stop a round and hide a body. I crouched behind the bags, the throwing knife in my right hand, the Desert Eagle in my left. The Ka-Bar stayed on my belt. The smell of chemical fertilizer sharp in the cool air. No streetlights. No house lights. Nothing but the crescent moon throwing a wash of silver across the grass. We were invisible. They were headlights.
Four bikes. They came down the road in a loose column, high beams cutting through the dust, engines loud in the silence. They slowed at the ranch entrance. The lead rider saw the vehicles—the vans, the truck, shapes that didn't belong—and his hand went to the weapon on his hip. All four killed their engines. Killed their headlights. The sudden darkness was like a door slamming shut. Four men dismounting, drawing weapons, fanning out with the nervous energy of people who'd expected an empty property and found it occupied. Their silhouettes barely visible against the faint silver of the grass.
One of them pulled a radio from his vest. Started to raise it to his mouth.
I came up from behind the bags. The throwing knife was already in my hand. I threw.
The blade crossed fifteen feet of dark air and hit the device in his hand with a crack that sent plastic and metal scattering across the gravel. The man screamed, his hand jerking back, blood from his sliced palm catching the faint moonlight. The shattered radio hit the dirt.
No communication. No calling for backup. Rule one of an ambush: cut the comms.
The scream broke the night open. The other three Wolves tracked the direction the radio had fallen, their weapons swinging toward the lean-to. The lead rider fired first. Then theothers. The shots came rapid and overlapping, muzzle flashes bursting orange in the dark, the rounds punching into the fertilizer bags and the corrugated metal with flat, percussive impacts that sprayed dirt and chemical dust into the air around me. I pressed flat behind the bags, my face against the ground, the smell of torn fertilizer and gunsmoke filling my lungs. Rounds snapping overhead. Fragments of metal pinging off the lean-to's frame. I held position. The bags were holding. The dark was holding. They were shooting at a direction, not a target.
The gunfire was loud enough to cover everything else.
Including Irish.
I pressed my body against the base of the shelter and turned my head sideways, one eye past the edge of the bags. The muzzle flashes threw the scene into a strobe: freeze-frames of the road, the bikes, the men firing, and—beyond them, moving low and fast from the equipment shed—Irish. Each burst of orange light caught him in a different position. Twenty feet back. Fifteen. Ten. The flashes making him appear and disappear, each frame closer, a figure materializing in the gaps between light and dark. The Wolves couldn't see him because they were looking at me, their eyes ruined by their own muzzle flash, their ears deafened by their own noise.
The shooting paused. Magazines. The half-second gap where fingers fumbled for a reload and the night went black.
Irish reached the nearest Wolf. His hands found the man's ankles from behind and he pulled. A single, brutal yank. The Wolf's feet came out from under him with no warning—the ground disappearing beneath him. He hit face-first. The sound of his nose breaking against the hard-packed road was sharp and wet, a crack followed by a dense thud. He didn't move after he landed. Out. Instant.
The Wolf closest to the collapse heard it. He spun, weapon tracking toward the sound, toward Irish, who was still low on theground beside the unconscious man. The pistol came up. Irish was exposed.
The remaining two Wolves opened fire again. A fresh volley aimed at my position, the muzzle flashes strobing the dark. And in the exact same moment, masked by the noise?—
The cold circle of a Glock's muzzle pressed against the back of the exposed Wolf's skull.
Ghost. The kid had circled wide through the darkness on the far side of the road, patient, invisible. The Wolf understood instantly. His body went rigid. Every muscle locking simultaneously. His hands rising slowly, the pistol dangling from one finger. Ghost's free hand came down hard, the butt of the Glock connecting with the back of the Wolf's skull in a single clean strike. The man's knees folded. He dropped onto the road beside his brother. Two down. Neither of the remaining Wolves had heard a thing.
The shooting stopped. Two Wolves left. The lead rider and the radio man, both still on their feet, both aiming at my position.
The lead rider's voice cut through the ringing.
"Come out! Hands up! Now!"
I didn't move. Waited.
A shot rang out from behind the truck. Logan's Beretta. The round hit the dirt two feet from the lead Wolf's boots, spraying chunks of the road against his legs.
"Drop the weapon." Logan's voice. Flat, hard, carrying across the dark from a position the Wolves couldn't pinpoint. He was barely there—a shape against the darker shape of the truck, almost nothing.
