The throwing knife was buried in the back of Spur's skull. Lodged deep, the handle protruding at a slight angle, the blade sunk past the hilt, past bone. A perfect throw. From fifteen feet, through smoke and bad light, into a target that had been moving a second before it hit.
The room was quiet. The emergency lights hummed. The fires in the courtyard crackled through the broken windows. Spur's blood poured out of his head, spreading slowly across the concrete.
Diego lowered his arm. Wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His chest heaving.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
"You okay?" My voice came out thick. The uppercut had done something to my jaw.
"No." He stepped forward. Reached down and gripped the handle. The blade resisted—lodged deep in bone—and he twisted hard, the wet scrape of steel against skull filling the quiet room. The knife came free with a wet sound. He wiped the blade on his jeans. "But he's worse."
He sheathed the knife. Crossed the room to where the Desert Eagle and his Ka-Bar had landed, recovering his weapons.
Then he walked to me. Stood close. His hand found the side of my face—the palm rough and warm, the thumb resting against my cheekbone. The same touch from the kitchen. The same touch from the first night. Blood on his fingers, on his face. His eyes were holding mine with an intensity that made the room disappear.
"Don't ever get taken from me again."
"I'll work on that."
His mouth twitched. Not a smile. Close enough.
He dropped his hand. Turned toward the door.
"Let's finish this."
14
STALEMATE
HAWK
Thirty minutes since Blade had hung up, and the silence was doing what silence always did when one of my men was in the field.
It filled itself with every version of what could go wrong.
I stood at my desk with my hands braced on the wood, studying the map on the wall. The Southwest spread out in pins and ink—red for confirmed threats, blue for assets, black for the locations we'd buried. Montana was a cluster of activity now. The ranch. The cattle operation outside Billings. The Iron Wolves compound. Blade and his team were somewhere in that cluster, engaging or retreating or bleeding, and I was south staring at a map that couldn't tell me which.
The shotgun leaned against the wall beside the door. Loaded. It had been loaded since Holt's men had come to this gate with rifles and the intent to burn everything I'd built. I'd carried it everywhere since—meetings, meals, the courtyard at night when the compound was sleeping and I was taking turns with mymen walking the perimeter.A president's paranoia, some of the younger members probably thought.
They were wrong. It wasn't paranoia if they'd already tried once.
I straightened. Rolled my shoulders. The tension had settled between them during the call with Blade—the sound of gunfire through the phone, the snap of rounds hitting rock, and then the line had gone dead. Not a disconnect. Blade had hung up to fight. The difference mattered. A disconnected line meant the worst. A deliberate hang-up meant my man was still making choices.
I picked up the shotgun and walked out of the office.
The corridor stretched ahead of me, familiar as my own skeleton. Concrete walls. Fluorescent lights. The smell of coffee and leather and the industrial cleaner Rosa used on the medical bay floors. I'd built this compound to be a fortress—twelve-foot walls, razor wire, reinforced gate, camera coverage on every approach. Years of wars and three corrupted federal agents—now four—had proven the fortress necessary. The bullet scars in the concrete were the proof of concept.
I walked through the east corridor toward the common room. My boots struck the floor with the measured rhythm that was a signature—every man in this compound knew the sound of my walk the way they knew the sound of their own engine. Steady. Unhurried.
The common room was half-full. Patched members at the tables, some eating, some cleaning weapons, some doing the nothing that men did between operations when the adrenaline had no target. And the workers. Thirty of them, spread through the room in clusters. Some eating. Some sitting with their hands in their laps, the watchful stillness of people who still weren't sure if the walls around them were protection or containment. A few of the younger ones had started helping in the kitchen—I'd noticed that yesterday, the way they gravitated toward Irish's chaos the way lost things gravitate toward warmth.
Every eye in the room found me when I walked through. The workers' gazes were uncertain, tracking, trying to read the large man with the shotgun crossing their space. The members' gazes were different. They read my posture, my pace, the set of my jaw. They'd learned to decode me the way I'd learned to decode them, and what they were reading now said something was happening.
I didn't stop. I walked through the common room, past the kitchen, through the back corridor, and out the rear door into the courtyard. Slowly.
The Nevada sun hit me like a wall. Late morning, the heat already pressing down on the concrete, the air carrying the dry mineral smell of desert that I'd breathed for years and would breathe until the clubhouse didn't need me anymore. The courtyard spread before me—the motor pool to the left, the watchtowers at the corners.
I stopped in the center. Turned. Waited.
