I pulled on a clean shirt. Strapped the folding knife to my belt. Checked the mirror on the back of the door. Lean, dark, running on zero sleep, which showed in the shadows under my eyes but nowhere else. The tattoos ran from my collarbones to my wrists in geometric patterns that shifted when the muscles underneath moved. My mother's face was in mine if you knew where to look—the jaw, the cheekbones, the coloring that came from Oaxaca by way of El Paso by way of a woman who'd crossed a border pregnant and never looked back.
I headed for the kitchen.
The common room was half-full and running on the domestic chaos that had replaced Maria's quiet authority. Beforeshe'd left, the kitchen ran on her schedule—meals at set times, fridge stocked with purpose, counters clean. Her absence had left a hole that the brothers were filling badly. Dirty dishes in the sink. A skillet on the stove with scrambled eggs turning to leather. A carton of milk sweating on the counter. The only appliance that functioned reliably was the espresso machine Nolan had installed, protected by laminated instructions and threats of bodily harm.
The smell hit through the disorder: coffee and bacon and the faint residual trace of gun oil that never left the building. Axel sat at the long table with Kai beside him, eating in quiet synchronization. Kai's violet highlights had been freshly re-applied, and he was wearing one of Axel's flannels, the sleeves rolled three times to fit his smaller frame. Axel's hand rested on the back of Kai's neck. Permanent.
Irish was at the counter, making something that involved too many ingredients and not enough supervision. The grin was already at full power, which meant Declan and Nolan had been thoroughly attended to this morning.
"Morning,hermano." Irish slid a plate toward me without being asked. Eggs, toast, hot sauce. He'd learned my breakfast order six months into my patch and hadn't forgotten it once. "You look like you slept in a blender."
"Didn't sleep."
"Knives?"
"Knives."
Irish nodded. He understood the ritual without sharing it. Different outputs, same engine.
I ate standing up, back to the wall. Old habit. The food was good. I was three bites in when Tank appeared in the doorway.
Tank filled doorways. Massive, tall, his relationship with architecture adversarial. His arms crossed over his chest. Tyler appeared behind him a second later, lean and sharp, a coffeemug in one hand and his phone in the other, his jaw set in a way that meant bad news.
"Church." Tank's voice hit the room like a bass drum. "Hawk wants everyone. Now."
Forks set down. Chairs pushed back. The room shifted the way it had to after men who had survived three wars together heardChurchat seven in the morning.
I left the plate on the counter. Followed Tank toward the meeting room. Irish fell in beside me, the grin compressed into something harder, his body already switching from kitchen to combat readiness. Behind us, Axel and Kai. Behind them, Ghost, fingers drumming against his thigh, his whole body humming with the wired energy of a man who couldn't hold still even on the walk to war.
The meeting room filled. Hawk stood at the head of the table, hands flat on the scarred wood. The shotgun propped against the wall behind him. He'd aged in the weeks since the Holt war—the lines around his eyes deeper, the set of his jaw tighter, the empty space beside him where Maria used to stand now just empty space.
The brothers settled into chairs. I took my usual spot near the wall—close enough to the table to participate, far enough to see every face in the room. Declan sat beside Irish, posture straight, expression flat and ready. Nolan beside him with his glasses and a tablet, already pulling up something on the screen. Tyler near Tank, their chairs close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
The room smelled like leather and coffee and tension.
Hawk didn't waste time. He never did.
"Patrol found something on the eastern perimeter this morning. Five bodies. Rosa's been with them since dawn." He paused. Let the words settle. "They're not ours."
"Who are they?" Axel's voice was quiet, controlled. The VP register.
"That's the question." Hawk turned to Rosa, who stood near the door with her medical bag over one shoulder and blood on her gloves she hadn't had time to remove. "Rosa."
Rosa stepped forward. She pulled a tablet from her bag and swiped through photographs. Held it up.
Five men. Latino. Young, most of them, the oldest maybe forty. They were lying in the desert scrub on the eastern edge of our territory, arranged in a rough line, as if they'd been walking together and dropped one by one. Their clothes were thin—work clothes, the type you'd wear on a construction site or a farm, not for a desert crossing. No water bottles. No packs. No supplies.
"Five males, estimated ages nineteen to forty," Rosa began. Her voice was clinical, detached—she was trying to keep the sadness of such an event at bay. But I'd known her long enough to read through her professional tone. "Cause of death is dehydration and exposure, complicated by severe malnutrition and what appears to be months of physical overwork. Muscle wasting in the extremities consistent with sustained labor under caloric deficit. Healed fractures in two of them, never properly set. Scarring on the wrists and ankles consistent with restraint." She swiped to another image. "And this."
The photograph showed a shoulder. Brown skin, the muscle beneath it wasted. Burned into the flesh in raised, scarred tissue: a letter. H. Inside a circle.
"All five have the same brand." Rosa's voice tightened by a fraction. "Same location, same design. Left shoulder. The scarring indicates the brand was applied with a heated metal instrument, probably weeks or months before death."
The room went quiet. Not confusion. The quiet of men whose bodies were processing faster than their minds.
I stared at the photograph. The brand. The H inside its circle, seared into brown skin. My hand found the knife on my belt without my permission, fingers wrapping around the handle before my conscious mind caught up.
My mother's skin was that color. The same warm brown, the same undertone from generations of Oaxacan sun and soil. Mytías'hands—the ones that had held mine when I was small enough to be held—were marked with the same calluses of agricultural work. The world my mother and her sisters had crossed a desert to leave. And someone had branded these men like cattle and worked them until they dropped and left the bodies on our doorstep.
