The ceiling stared back. My mind did what it always did when the body was still.
It replayed.
The six Wolves who'd surrendered at the compound. Zip-tied, sitting in a row against the wall of their own ruined clubhouse while the smoke from the RPG damage drifted overhead. Two of them had talked. The rest had stared at their boots with the empty look of men whose infrastructure had collapsed and who were wondering what came next.
What came out was clarifying. Gravedigger—Victor Graves, president of the Iron Wolves—had pulled out weeks before we'd ever hit. Taken a handful of men loyal to him personally, not to the club, and disappeared. Just gone. No forwarding address, no plan communicated to the rank and file.
The remaining Wolves who stayed had done so for one reason: Whitfield's money. The trafficking operation paid well enough that a dozen men without a president had been willing to keep running enforcement, and Whitfield had installed her own leader to replace Gravedigger. Spur. An ex-military mercenary with the tactical training to command and the cruelty to enforce, appointed directly by the woman who signed the checks.
Spur, whose blood I cleaned from the throwing knife I'd pulled out of his skull.
I'd told the six survivors what had happened. Whitfield was in trouble. The evidence was with a federal prosecutor. Spur was dead. The Iron Wolves compound was about to become rubble. They had one option: leave. Walk away. If I ever saw any of them again, the conversation would involve fewer words.
They'd left. On foot, heading east toward Billings, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever reckoning was waiting for them when the federal investigation widened.
After that, the ride to the large cattle ranch, toward the remaining dozens of enslaved workers. Kai and Rosa worked on Irish's graze and Logan's shoulder—the bullet wound needed proper stitches, and Logan had sat on the tailgate of a van with his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed on the middle distance while Kai's needle went through the torn flesh in neat, practiced loops. Logan hadn't made a sound.
We'd hidden behind a ridge near the ranch and watched through binoculars as official vehicles arrived. Black SUVs with federal plates. Men and women in windbreakers stepping out with clipboards and bottled water and the careful body language of people trained to approach traumatized populations. The workers at the cattle operation had come out of the housing slowly, blinking, and the agents had extended their hands.
Tyler's contact had moved fast. The wheels of federal authority were finally turning in the right direction.
We'd ridden home after that. Ten hours of highway with the wind pressing against my face and the borrowed Harley eating miles and the exhaustion settling into my bones.
Church happened as soon as we arrived. Hawk at the head of the table. The debrief. The Wolves' compound destroyed, Spur dead, six survivors released, workers recovered, evidence transmitted, Whitfield's warrant pulled out from under her at the gates while she stood there holding it. The room had absorbed the information in silence, and the silence had been the good kind.
One piece was still loose. Tyler's federal contact had called yesterday with news that landed wrong.
Whitfield had vanished.
Resigned from the Bureau—or been removed, the details were murky—and disappeared. Irish and Nolan had been running her financial trail since the call, but the woman who'd built a trafficking empire across three states didn't create said empire without learning how to disappear.
She was out there. The woman who enslaved people who looked like my mother was somewhere breathing free air, and the thought sat behind my ribs like a fire that wouldn't go out.
The shower cut off.
I listened. The squeak of the faucet handle. The drip of water on tile. The rustle of a towel being pulled from the rack. Footsteps—bare, wet, the heavy pad of a big man moving across bathroom tiles.
The door opened.
Logan stepped through with a white towel wrapped around his waist, slung low on his hips. Water still on his shoulders. His hair damp, pushed back and to the side from his face, the brown strands dripping onto the muscles of his neck. Steam curled around him from the bathroom. The bruises around his throat had shifted—the dark purple softening to yellow at the edges, the fingerprints still visible but fading, partially hidden by the tan his skin carried from four years of ranch work. The stitches on his left shoulder were clean, the wound closed, the skin around it renewing.
His body was a problem. The kind I had no interest in solving because the problem was the point. Thick through the shoulders and arms, the ranch-built muscle carrying a density that gym work couldn't quite replicate. His stomach was flat, the abs defined, the V-cut at his hips directing attention downward where the towel hung low enough to be a suggestion.
My cock was already hard. Had been since I'd woken up, but the sight of Logan wet and half-naked in my doorway upgraded it from inconvenient to need.
He looked at me. Serious. The blue eyes holding mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with missions or debriefs or the war we'd just fought.
"We've had enough time." His voice was low. Morning-rough. "The rest, the recovery. All of it. I'm done waiting."
"Logan—"
"I could hear you thinking from the shower, Diego. Your brain's the loudest thing in this compound." The corner of his mouth lifted. Just a fraction. "Turn it off."
I looked at him. The water on his shoulders. The bruises on his throat. The blue eyes that were asking and telling at the same time.
"It's off."
His hands went to the towel. One pull. The fabric dropped to the concrete floor.
