The driver had a pistol now. The muzzle aimed back at me through the glass. His hand was shaking. Mine was steady. Thedistance between us was six feet, then four, then the length of my arm plus the barrel of the Eagle.
"Rest of the convoy stopped at the compound gate." Ghost's voice from the far side of the van. "Not turning around."
I processed the information without looking away from the driver. The Wolves had abandoned the rear van. Cut their losses. Left their man to whatever was coming.
"They're watching," Ghost continued. "But they're not coming back."
The driver's window rolled down. The pistol came through first, aimed at my chest. Then his face. Young. Sweating. The fear visible in his jaw, in the tightness around his eyes, in the tremor that ran through his forearm and made the pistol barrel trace small circles in the air between us.
"You're surrounded." I kept my voice flat. "Your co-pilot's dead. Your convoy left you. Put the gun down."
"Spur will come back." His voice cracked on the name. "He doesn't leave men behind."
"Look ahead. He already did."
His eyes flicked to the front. The compound gate in the distance. The vehicles had started to disappear through it. His jaw trembled. The pistol barrel traced wider circles.
Behind me—the sound of engines. Tank's SUV pulling up. Then the second. Doors opening. Boots on pavement. The driver's eyes tracked past me to the armed men spreading out around the van—Tank with the shotgun, Tyler with the Glock, patched members fanning into a perimeter. Axel's rifle and Irish's gun aiming at a distance at the driver's head.
The noose was closing.
"It's over," I told him. "Put it down."
"You don't know Spur." The desperate courage of a man with no options trying to convince himself he still had one. "He'll killevery one of you. And for what? Saving these animals? They're not worth?—"
Something behind my eyes went quiet.
The noise stopped. The calculations stopped. The rage that had been compressed and directed and waiting found its target, and the target was six feet away calling branded, enslaved, stolen human beingsanimals,through a car window while their bodies pressed together in the dark behind him.
"The man with the beard and the piercings." My voice came out lower. A sound I heard from the outside, as if someone else were speaking through my throat. "That's Spur?"
"The same one. A much better fucking leader than that that grave?—"
The Desert Eagle's unforgiving recoil pushed hard against my arm as I pressed the trigger. The heavy crack of a large-caliber round rolled across the empty Montana grassland and echoed.
The brutal .50 caliber round hit the driver's face at four feet and erased it. The back of the cab painted red—the seat, the headrest, the rear window, all of it instantaneously coated in a spray that the dawn light caught and held. The pistol clattered from fingers that no longer had a brain sending them instructions.
I held the Desert Eagle aimed at the space where his head had been. The barrel smoking. The brass casing spinning on the asphalt at my feet, the metallic ring of it the only sound in the sudden quiet.
Animals.He'd called them animals. And the name I'd needed was confirmed. Spur. The man who'd choked Logan. The man I was going to kill next.
Ghost lowered his Glock from the front windshield. His visor was up. His eyes met mine across the cab—through the shattered glass, through the mess of what had been the driver, across thespace where two men looked at each other and understood what had just happened without needing to discuss it.
No shock. No judgment. Agreement.
He looked back toward the compound. "Convoy's finished moving through the gate. Not coming back."
I filed it. The Wolves were retreating behind their walls instead of fighting for the rear van. Too small a fraction of the workers they had enslaved to care, maybe? Either way, they were giving us the van and the people inside it, and the decision to retreat instead of engaging nagged me.
Tank and Tyler were already at the rear doors. Ghost circling from the front. Kai and Rosa out of their SUV, medical bags in hand, Rosa's face set in the controlled urgency of a woman who knew what she was about to find inside. The rest of our brothers held a loose perimeter, weapons out, eyes on the compound two miles down the road.
Tank grabbed the rear handle. Pulled.
The doors swung open.
The interior was dark. Hot. The smell hit first—sweat, blood, fear, the accumulated stench of more than twenty bodies packed into a metal box with no ventilation and no light. The bare metal floor gleamed dully where the dawn light reached it. No seats. No benches. Nothing. Just people. Crammed together on bare steel, their bodies shaking, their faces turned toward the sudden light with the expression of people who didn't know if the opening doors meant rescue or the next terrible thing.
And in the center, standing—Logan.
