If looks could put men in the ground, I'd have been six feet under.
She turned. Walked toward the lead SUV. The agents followed—some of them casting glances back at the compound, at the watchtowers, at the gate. The square-jawed one was the last to move. He looked at the viewport for a moment. Not hostile. Something closer to uncertainty. Then he turned and walked to his vehicle.
The engines climbed from idle to drive. One by one, the black SUVs pulled away from the gate, turned onto the main road, and headed east toward the highway. The gravel settled. The dust drifted.
I watched until the last vehicle disappeared around the bend. Then I closed the viewport.
"Stand down." I pitched it loud enough to reach the men on the walls and behind the gate mechanism. "The clubhouse is secure."
Safeties clicked on. The tension released in a collective exhale I could feel in the air. The men who'd been ready to defend this compound against the FBI were looking at me with questions written on every face.
I raised the phone to my ear. The line was still open.
"Hawk." Blade's voice was controlled, but his worry showed through the edges. "Status?"
"The problem seems to have fixed itself." I looked at the gate. "Tyler's contact made it just in time. The judge vacated the warrant, or so one of the agents said. Whitfield and her agents are gone."
A pause. Tyler's voice came through next. "She'll regroup. She's too connected to go down this easy."
"She might." I leaned against the gate. The steel warm from the sun. "But she just stood at my gate with a warrant that got pulled out from under her while she was holding it. Her own agents saw it happen. That doesn't stay quiet in the Bureau."
"The tables are turning." Blade's voice. The edge of satisfaction beneath the operational tone.
"They are." I pushed off the gate. Straightened to my full height. Looked at my men. At the compound we'd built. At the walls that had held through wars and would hold through whatever came next. "Finish what you're doing in Billings. Destroy the compound. Leave nothing standing. Then bring our people home."
"Copy. Blade out."
The line went dead.
I stood in the courtyard with the shotgun resting on my shoulder and the silence settling back over the compound—the good silence, the one that came after a threat had been turned away and the walls were still standing.
Whitfield would come back. Women like her didn't build empires and walk away when the first wall crumbled. She'd regroup. Reposition. Find another judge, another warrant, another angle of attack. The corruption that had produced Chen and Cross and Holt had roots deeper than any one person, and cutting Whitfield off at the gate didn't mean the roots were dead.
But today, the gate had held. Today, my men were alive in Montana, and the Iron Wolves compound was burning. The workers sleeping in our rooms were one step closer to freedom.
I walked back inside. Past the courtyard. Past the men who lingered with questions written across their faces. Through the back door. Into the corridor where the fluorescent lights hummed and the compound breathed around me like the living thing it was.
The workers in the common room looked up when I passed. Some scared. Some hopeful. All of them carrying marks on their shoulders that a woman with a badge and a press conference had put there.
I nodded to them. Once. The way I nodded to my men—brief, weighted, carrying everything the words couldn't.
Then I walked to my office. Set the shotgun against the wall. I sat behind the desk and waited for the phone to ring again, because the fight wasn't over. It never was.
15
OBSCURED
BLADE
Iwoke up reaching for a body that wasn't there.
The mattress beside me was warm. Dented. The sheets carried cedar and sweat, and underneath that, something sharper—antiseptic, the ghost of Kai's handiwork on Logan's shoulder. From behind the bathroom door, the hiss of a running shower.
I dropped my arm back to my side and stared at the ceiling.
My room had changed in the two days after the cattle ranch. After the Iron Wolves compound. The walls were still bare, the weapons rack still mounted, the footlocker still positioned at the foot of the bed. But the flannel shirt had migrated from the chair to a hook on the back of the door. A second pair of boots sat beside mine. A battered leather watch on the nightstand that wasn't mine, next to the Ka-Bar that was.
Two days since Billings. Two nights of Logan falling into this bed beside me and both of us being asleep within minutes, the exhaustion pulling us under before our bodies could rememberwhat they wanted. I'd held him. He'd held me. We'd slept like men who'd forgotten what rest felt like and were trying to relearn it all at once.
