"He will find us." I whispered to myself. I repeated the words like a mantra.
But the van kept driving, and the words kept getting quieter.
12
PURSUIT
BLADE
The van's taillights shrank to red pinpoints and disappeared around the bend in the road.
I was still running. Boots hammering packed dirt, the Desert Eagle up and aimed at the empty road. My lungs burned with air that tasted like dust and gunsmoke. The distance grew with every stride because the van was doing fifty and the math didn't care how fast I ran.
Logan was in that van.
The thought arrived as a physical event—a detonation behind my chest that sent cuts into every part of me. Logan was in that van with twenty-some workers, no weapons and a bullet graze and that man's fingerprints bruised into his throat. Logan was in that van because I'd been two hundred yards away when they grabbed him and the compound had been a wall of gunfire between us, and I'd screamed his name until something tore in my voice and none of it had changed the distance by a single foot.
I stopped. The road stretched east, the dust from the van still hanging in the predawn air, settling on my skin and on the barrel of the Desert Eagle. The gun was heavy in my hand. Useless.
Something cracked within me. Not grief. Rage. A black, consuming fury that started at the base of my spine and climbed upward, into my skull, until the edges of my vision pulsed red. I was going to find that van. I was going to open it. And I was going to kill every man who had touched Logan with my bare hands if I had to.
I turned. Sprinted back toward the compound.
The headlights from the parked vehicles were still burning, throwing long shadows across the dirt. A handful of bodies laid on the ground—six Wolves, not moving, the dark stains beneath them spreading and catching the light in ways that meant they wouldn't be moving again.
I ran past Axel's team, which was patrolling the perimeter in pairs, their boots crunching on gravel, weapons tracking the tree line. Tank stood by the lead SUV with the shotgun across his chest, his massive frame blocking the driver's door. Ghost was near the water tank, pale beneath the dirt and sweat, his Glock still drawn. Irish emerged from behind the north housing unit with four workers—two men, two women—shell-shocked, their eyes glazed.
I ran straight to one of the SUVs. My voice came out loud. Cracked. Wrong. "Keys. Who has the keys?! We need to go after them. Now. Right now! The vans went east, they can't be more than five minutes ahead if we?—"
Every head in the compound turned. I saw it register on their faces one by one—the shift in posture, the widening of eyes, the slight backward lean of men recalibrating what they thought they knew. I was panicking. The man who processed the world through edge and silence and never raised his voice because volume was waste. I was screaming.
"—move now! Axel! Throw me the goddamn keys, we need to?—"
A palm hit my chest.
Tank's hand. Massive. Flat. Five fingers spanning from my left pectoral to my right, planted against my sternum with enough force to stop my forward motion completely. My boots skidded on the dirt. I tried to move around him. The hand stayed. I pushed against it. The hand didn't budge. Two hundred and sixty pounds of patience and mechanical certainty anchored behind that palm, and the force I was generating wasn't close to enough.
"Blade." Low. Steady. The same voice I'd heard him use with engines that wouldn't turn over—the register that saidI have all the time in the world, and I'm not moving until you're ready to hear me."Stop."
"They have Logan! They have the workers!"
"I know." The hand didn't move. His eyes held mine. Brown, calm, immovable. "And you chasing that van in a blind rage is not going to get them back. It's going to get you killed. It's going to get him killed. It's going to get every person in that van killed."
"Tank—"
"You are operational lead." His voice dropped lower. Harder. The softness burned off. "You call the shots. Not me. But I will not follow you into a decision you made from panic. None of us will." The hand pressed harder against my sternum. I could feel my own heartbeat hammering against his palm. "Breathe. Think. Then tell us what to do. That's what Logan needs from you right now. Not speed. Not rage. A plan."
The words landed the way a blade lands on a sharpening stone. The angle correcting. The edge finding itself.
I took a deep breath. The rage still pulsing red at the edges. Two breaths. The red receding. Three. The bodies on the groundcoming back into focus. The vehicles. The weapons. The workers behind Irish. The assets I had and the time I was wasting.
Tank's hand stayed on my chest. He was watching my eyes. Waiting for the shift.
It happened on the fourth breath. The rage became focus. The panic burned off. What replaced it was cold. Focused. The operational clarity that had kept me alive through every firefight since the army and every war since the Phoenixes.
My mind moved fast.
Six dead Wolves on the property. Tyler's prosecutor needed clean evidence. Bodies muddied everything—turned a rescue operation into a crime scene, gave Whitfield ammunition.
