"Almost there," he murmured. His face was so close to mine. The swollen red eye leaking tears, the good one fixed on me with something that looked like enjoyment. "Don't fight it. Makes it worse."
My lungs screamed. My fingers were losing their grip on his wrist, the tendons in my forearm shaking, the muzzle drifting back toward my face one millimeter at a time. The sky above his head was going gray, then white, the edges of the world dissolving. I thought about Diego. About my flannel shirt on his chair. About how this was a stupid, ugly place to die—facedown in the dirt of someone else's cattle ranch, choked out by a man whose name I didn't even know.
Not here. Not now. Not after everything.
But the hand on my throat didn't care what I wanted. My vision was tunneling. The white was winning?—
A blast slammed into the dirt three feet from us.
The impact sprayed earth and gravel across both of us. The behemoth of a man jumped off me on instinct, his body clearing mine in a single fluid motion, the combat reflex overriding the kill he'd been about to make.
The world swam. I was on my back, yet everything tilted and blurred and came apart at the edges the way the world does when oxygen has been gone too long and comes back too fast. The sky above me pulsed—gray, white, gray again. My throat was on fire. Each breath came in a raw, scraping wheeze that tore at the damaged tissue. My hands weren't working right. My fingers opened and closed on nothing, both guns gone somewhere in the dirt, my arms too heavy to search for them.
I looked to my left. The direction where the shot had come from.
My marred vision managed to lock on Tank, ten feet away, shotgun already racking another round.
I looked to the right, my sense of urgency and danger returning.
The bearded man hadn’t faltered. He rested his right knee on the ground, and returned fire. The pistol cracked twice, three times, the rounds snapping past Tank's position. More shots came from the left. Two Wolves near the barn had spotted Tank and opened up, the muzzle flashes strobing from behind a cattle feeder. Tank's second shotgun blast went wide as he threw himself sideways, rolling behind one of the SUVs, the buckshot sparking off concrete instead of flesh.
He came up firing from the new position, but the angle was wrong now—the Wolves had him pinned behind the vehicle, trading shots across twenty feet of open ground.
Somewhere far away, through the ringing and the gunfire and the wheeze of my own ruined breathing, I heard it.
"Logan!"
Diego's voice. Not through the comms. Through the air. Raw, cracked open, carrying across the compound with a desperation that cut through everything else. The voice of a man watching something happen that he couldn't stop.
"LOGAN!"
I rolled onto my unharmed right shoulder. Planted my palm firmly on the ground, left arm lifted against my body, the full damage of the bullet graze unknown to me. The oxygen that rushed back to my brain summoned back enough strength to try and stand up.
The hands that grabbed me were faster.
It wasn't Tank's hands. They came from the wrong direction, and in a violent grip that didn't say ally. Multiple hands—under my arms, on my vest, fingers hooking into the collar of my jacket. I was being dragged. The dirt scraped against myheels, cutting furrows in the packed earth. The sky bounced and lurched above me. I tried to fight. My arms swung, connected with something that felt like leg bone, and a grunt came.
But the hands didn't let go. There were too many of them.
"Take him!" The bearded man's voice, a roar that cut through the firefight. "Take him now! Move!"
More hands. Someone wrenched my right arm behind my back. The tranquilizer pistol was ripped from my left hip—the only weapon I had left.
My legs dragged through the dirt and my throat screamed for more air. They hauled me upright. My legs buckled. Two men held me between them, my arms locked behind my back, my left shoulder flashing hot white pain as it was forced back.
The compound spun around me—headlights, muzzle flashes, the shapes of buildings lurching sideways. Through the chaos I saw Tank pinned behind the SUV, shotgun barking. Saw Wolves falling back in coordinated retreat. Saw, across the compound, a lean figure sprinting toward me with a knife in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, too far away, the distance between us widening with every second as the men pushed and led me away.
Diego. Running. His mouth open, shouting my name, the sound lost in the gunfire.
They dragged me through the firefight. Used me as a shield—my body between them and the Phoenix positions, my frame blocking any clean shot. I felt rounds snap past, close, but nothing hit. The Phoenixes couldn't fire without hitting me. The Wolves knew it. They moved fast, hunched behind my body, boots pounding the dirt.
The van was thirty feet away. Rear doors open. Workers already inside—I could see them in the dim interior, packed together, their faces pale and terrified. Twenty at least. Crammed into a space stripped bare, no seats, no benches,nothing but bare metal floor and the bodies pressed against each other.
The bearded man appeared in front of me. He'd moved fast—faster than a man his size should have been able to. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, the lid purple and weeping where my thumb had done its work. The good eye burned with something that wasn't anger, but clear satisfaction.
His hand shot out and grabbed me under the chin. The grip crushing, fingers digging into the soft tissue beneath my jaw, forcing my head up. His face inches from mine. The beard flecked with dirt. His breath came out hot against my face.
"Seems you're important to these Phoenix bitches." His voice was low, almost conversational, the words delivered with the casual cruelty of a man who enjoyed this part. His fingers tightened under my jaw. "Be a good boy and I might keep you alive."
