Arms spread wide. Positioned between the doors and the workers. Shielding them with his body. His face was bruised, the skin around his jaw mottled with the purple imprint of fingers. His throat carried dark marks—the outline of hands still visible in the damaged tissue. His left shoulder was trembling, soaked through with blood, the fabric of his jacket saturated from thegraze that had been bleeding for two hours without pressure or bandage. His legs were braced apart, his arms stretched to either side, making himself as wide as possible. A human wall between whatever came through those doors and the twenty people behind him.
Then his eyes found mine.
I watched the tension release. The tension that had been holding his body upright—the weight of a man who'd been bracing for the worst since the doors slammed shut—released. The arms lowered. His shoulders dropped. His chest expanded with a breath that shook on the way in—his body catching up to what his eyes were seeing.
He turned to the workers. Fast. His voice came out rough and destroyed but steady enough to carry.
"Está bien. Estamos a salvo. Este es el hombre del que les hablé. Estamos a salvo."
It's okay. We are safe. This is the man I told you about. We are safe.
The workers didn't move. Not yet. But a sound went through them—a collective exhale, the release of twenty-some breaths held too long, the first loosening of bodies that had been clenched in terror since the van doors slammed shut at the ranch.
Logan looked back at me. Blue eyes in a battered face. Blood on his shoulder. Bruises on his throat. Alive.
"Logan, step out of the van." Kai's voice came from behind me, firm, cutting through whatever trance had locked my body in place. "We need to look at those injuries. Now."
His hand landed on the side of my shoulder. Gentle but deliberate—the touch of a medic redirecting a man who was standing where a patient needed to be.
I stepped aside.
Rosa was already at the van's edge, one hand extended toward the dark interior, her voice low and steady in Spanish. Not coaxing. Inviting. The workers watched her hand, wanting to move, not yet trusting the opening.
I let our two medics do what they did best.
Logan was alive. The workers were breathing. Kai and Rosa would handle the wounds.
But it wasn't over. The Iron Wolves compound sat two miles down the road in the flat Montana dawn—low buildings behind a fenced perimeter, the gate closed now.
Spur was behind those walls. The rest of the Wolves with him.
One more fight. One more push. It could all end before the next dawn.
But I looked at the men around me. A small team—the one I'd built for a stealth operation, for gathering evidence, extracting witnesses, and support if needed. Not for storming a fortified compound, protected by the full strength of an MC that enabled corrupted federal agents.
13
SKELETONS
BLADE
Something was wrong.
I pressed the binoculars tighter against my eyes and swept the compound for the fourth time. The rocks we'd positioned behind were massive—gray granite boulders near the top of the hill, tall enough to crouch behind, wide enough to hide four men. We'd driven past the compound on the main road, taken the first right turn before the gates, looped behind the hill out of the Wolves' sight line, parked the vehicles at the base, and climbed. The grass was dry under my boots. The morning sun warm against my neck.
Below us, maybe six hundred yards east, the Iron Wolves compound spread across the flat basin like a wound.
And the wound was barely breathing.
"Two on the south perimeter." Ghost, beside me, binoculars pressed to his face. "Walking a patrol route. Sloppy. Overlapping sight lines."
"One on the north gate." Axel, further left. "Stationary. Rifle across his chest, but he's leaning against the wall. Not ready."
"Watch tower." Logan, on my right, his voice low and controlled despite the bandage Kai applied on his shoulder and the bruises ringing his throat. "One man. He's moving. Agitated."
I swung my binoculars to the tower. A wooden structure at the compound's northeast corner, twenty feet high, a platform with a corrugated metal roof. The man on the platform was pacing. Back and forth, rifle in his hands, stopping every few seconds to scan the horizon with his own optics. Even at six hundred yards, I recognized the build. Massive. Shaved sides with a strip on top. The beard.
Spur.
