Diego started to protest. Kai cut him off with a look that carried the authority of a medical professional who'd decided hispatients included the two men pretending they weren't about to collapse.
"Blade. Sleep. Now. Both of you. I'll handle this."
We turned without arguing. Diego held the infirmary door for me, and we walked into the corridor together.
The compound was quiet. Settling into the post-mission stillness—the hush that followed action, when the adrenaline had burned off and the bodies that had been running on urgency discovered that urgency was no longer available as fuel.
Diego walked beside me. Our shoulders close but not touching. The corridor forking toward the guest room on one side and his room on the other, and we both stopped at the junction. The same junction we'd navigated two nights ago, after the kitchen, after the almost-kiss, aftersoon.
He looked at me. I looked at him. The exhaustion visible in both of us. I wanted to touch him. Wanted to press my hand against his face the way he'd pressed his against mine in the kitchen, wanted to close the distance that had been measured in inches for days and finally cross it.
But not now. Not like this. We were wrecked, hollowed out, running on fumes. Whatever happened between us—and it was going to happen, the certainty of that was as solid as the concrete under my feet—it deserved more than two exhausted men who could barely keep their eyes open.
"Sleep," I told him. Borrowed Kai's word. Gave it back with a different weight.
He nodded. Held my gaze for one more second. Then he turned and walked toward his room, and I turned and walked toward mine.
I lay on the guest room bed and stared at the ceiling.
The mattress was too soft. After four years on a ranch bed that was firm from use and smelled like cedar and dog hair, this one felt like sinking into something that didn't know my shape. The room wasn't dark—ambient light from the courtyard leaked through the small window, casting a gray rectangle on the opposite wall. The compound hummed. The low vibration of a generator, the distant murmur of voices, the occasional sound of boots on concrete.
The bunkhouses I'd built with my own hands. The beds I'd chosen, real mattresses, because I'd wanted the workers to sleep on something that acknowledged they were human. The kitchen I'd stocked, the hot water I'd installed, the care I'd poured into a space that had been turned into a node in a network that branded people and called them assets.
The money. Thousands of dollars a month to High Basin Agricultural Services for "worker salaries and benefits" that had never reached a single worker. My money, funding slavery, processed through a shell company and laundered upward to a woman in a Washington office who gave press conferences about justice while her operation burned letters into teenagers' shoulders.
The guilt pressed against my sternum, compressing my lungs, making each breath shorter. I thought about the man I'd shot at the bar. The Beretta kicking in my hand. The sound of the rounds hitting his chest.
I thought about Mateo. The brand. Diego's hand covering it.
I thought about Diego's face in the bunkhouse doorway, speaking Spanish to people who shared his heritage, the tears he wouldn't let fall.
The thoughts circled. The guilt pressed. The ceiling stared back.
But the body knew what the mind wouldn't admit: it was finished. The adrenaline had burned off. Thirty people were safe in a building surrounded by concrete walls and armed men and a woman named Rosa who knew how to fix what was broken.
Sleep took me. Not gently. It pulled me under the way exhaustion always did—suddenly, completely, the world disappearing mid-thought.
I woke to the sound of laughter.
Not close. Distant, carrying through the corridor from somewhere deeper in the compound. The light through the window told me hours had passed—morning gold replaced by the amber of late afternoon. I'd slept through the day.
I dressed. Splashed water on my face. Followed the laughter.
The sounds led me to the kitchen, which was transformed.
Irish had expanded his operation. Every burner occupied. Multiple pots. The smell of garlic and onions and something involving ground beef filling the corridor before I'd reached the doorway. Irish stood at the center of it, commanding a crew of four. Nolan was among them, his laptop nowhere in sight, his glasses steamed from a pot he was stirring with the concentrated expression of a man applying forensic precision to not ruining a sauce. The dark-haired man who seemed to always be near Irish and Nolan—Declan, I'd heard them call him—was choppingonions at the counter. I watched him work for a moment, surprised. His hands moved with a speed and precision that seemed out of place in a kitchen, each cut identical, the blade barely pausing between strokes. The hands of someone trained for something other than cooking.
"No, Nolan, that's a simmer, not a boil. A simmer. The bubbles should be polite, not aggressive." Irish punctuated the instruction with a wooden spoon pointed at the pot. "And Declan, for the love of God, they're onions, not enemy combatants. You don't need to execute them."
The tables were full. Not just with club members I'd been learning to recognize. My workers were there. All twelve of them, seated along the long tables, some together, some mixed among the compound's residents. They were quiet, still watchful. But they were there. Sitting. Present.
When I came through the doorway, the older man—the one who'd introduced himself as Miguel when he'd first arrived at the ranch—saw me first. He straightened. Nudged the man beside him. One by one, the faces turned, and something happened that I wasn't prepared for.
They smiled. Not all of them. Not wide, not confident. But the older man nodded, and the woman with the braid—the one I'd known as Sofía—raised her hand in a gesture that was half-wave and half-salute, and Mateo, at the end of the table, looked up at me with an expression that hit me in the chest before I could brace for it.
I swallowed. Nodded back. Took a seat among them—not at the club's table, not in a position of authority, but here, with the people whose beds I'd built and whose freedom I'd failed to protect and whose rescue I would carry as both the worst failure and the best moment of my life.
I turned to the older man. The name Miguel had always felt uncertain on him—he'd hesitated when he'd given it, the same way Mateo had hesitated over Tomás. I asked in Spanish.
