Hand signals followed the shouted orders—practiced, tactical.
Three of his Wolves broke from formation and sprinted toward the housing units. They weren't flanking. They weren't covering a retreat. They were going for the workers.
"They're going for the housing," I said into the comms. Already moving. "I've got the three breakers. Declan, on me."
"Tracking," Declan's voice came back.
I broke from behind the water tank and ran parallel to the Wolves' path, angling to cut off the first one before he reached the housing door. He didn't see me coming—his focus on the building, his weapon raised. I closed the distance in a hurried sprint, planted my left foot on the last stride, and jumped as I swung my elbow to the front. The bone slammed into the first Wolf’s temple mid-stride with a hollow thud.
The impact took him off his feet. He went down hard, the rifle flying from his hands. Out before he hit the ground.
I spun left. The second Wolf had stopped his run and was bringing his rifle up, aiming at where I'd been a half-second ago. Too slow. I raised the Sig Ghost had tossed me, the borrowed pistol heavy and unfamiliar in my left hand, and fired twice. Both rounds hit him, each impact shaking his body in awkward movements. He dropped flat on his back, rifle landing on the dirt beside him.
The third Wolf was already past me. He'd heard the shots, too close for the background firefight to muffle out, and spun, pistol coming up toward me. I raised the Beretta in my right hand. We locked—his muzzle on me, mine on him, the standoff lasting half a second that felt like half a minute.
Declan's rifle cracked from the hillside.
The Wolf’s neck bent his head violently to the side, the trajectory of the bullet forcing the motion, as a splatter of blood exploded out the side of his temple. He crashed onto the dirt in the same trajectory. Three down.
The housing door was still closed. The people still inside.
I started to turn towards the enclosure?—
The world turned sideways before I understood what had hit me.
The bearded man hit me from the side at a dead sprint. Low. Full tackle. A collision that felt like being hit by an animal that should have been behind a fence. My ribs compressed. My breath left in a single forced exhale that tore something in my throat on the way out. The Beretta and the Sig flew from my hands—I felt them go, the weight vanishing from both grips simultaneously.
We landed hard onto the ground together, his weight crushing me down, the packed dirt slamming against my back hard enough to white out my vision. The taste of blood flooded my mouth where I'd bitten the inside of my cheek. Somewhere far away, Diego's voice came through the comms shouting my name, and I couldn't answer.
His hands found my throat before I could recover.
The grip was crushing—two massive hands, fingers overlapping, thumbs pressing down on my windpipe. The world went dim at the edges. I could feel my pulse hammering against his hands, could taste copper at the back of my throat, could see my own vision collapsing from the outside in.
"There you are." His voice was low, almost intimate, the words delivered with the casual patience of a man who'd done this before. "Thought you were clever, didn't you? Sneaking around my men?"
I snapped my right hand off of grip on my neck and drove my right thumb into his eye.
Not finesse. Survival. I pressed until I felt the wet resistance of the eyeball beneath my thumb and pressed harder. He roared—a guttural animal sound that was more rage than pain—but he didn't let go. His left eye did not leave my gaze. Mass andconviction and the conditioning of someone who'd taken worse and kept fighting.
His hands stayed on my throat, crushing harder—the thumbs digging into my windpipe, the fingers closing until the pulse in my temples was the only sound I could hear.
Suddenly, his left hand shot up and grabbed my right wrist. Yanked my thumb away with a force that wrenched my shoulder. Wild or not, the man’s eye could not take the pain further. He slammed my right arm onto the ground, then his left knee came up and pinned my freed arm down across my chest.
My arm was locked. His other hand was free. The hand on my throat kept squeezing.
He drew his pistol from his left holster.
One smooth motion. The muzzle came up toward my face.
I yanked my right arm with everything I had left, swiping it across the uneven dirt under his knee, and grabbed his wrist as the gun came level, forcing it to the left, and lower, away from my face, in the half-second before he fired. The muzzle flash went off six inches from my shoulder. The crack was deafening—a thunder that vibrated in my eardrums—and I felt the bullet graze my left shoulder in a line of white-hot fire, tearing through jacket and shirt and flesh in a single hot slash.
The bearded man smiled. Teeth in the shape of something that shouldn't have been smiling.
"Should've let me kill you clean." Low and slow, wet with venom. "Now I'm going to make it painful."
My strength was bleeding out. The graze burned along my left shoulder. My right arm was slowly losing the contest against his arm that carried his weapon, inch by inch moving the muzzle back toward me. And the hand on my throat never stopped crushing, the pressure rising until the edges of my vision were going black.
Declan couldn't take the shot. The bearded man was directly on top of me.
