"They're onions, Sean. They don't have opinions."
"Everything in my kitchen has opinions. The onions especially."
Logan and I took seats at the long table. The common room was full—patched members eating and talking, the morning noise of a compound that was learning to breathe again after holding its breath for a while.
Ana sat at the far end. The woman with the braid, the one Logan had known as Sofía before she'd told him her real name. She was eating with a focus that spoke to months of insufficient food, her body already showing the first signs of recovery—her arms less thin, her face less drawn. Beside her, Ernesto, the one the first group of workers we rescued looked to, was having a conversation with one of the prospects in a mix of Spanish and English, his hands moving as he spoke.
And Mateo. At the end of the table, sitting beside Ghost, watching Ghost explain something with his hands while his knee bounced under the table. Mateo's posture had changed since the bunkhouse. Straighter. His eyes on the room instead of the floor.
Tyler's contact had arranged for authorities to come to the compound the day after our return. The workers had been given choices—green cards if they wanted to stay in the country, flights home if they preferred to leave. Housing either way, until they decided. Most had chosen to go home. Some wanted to stay but somewhere else, somewhere without leather and concrete and the smell of gun oil.
But a handful had asked to stay. Here. At the compound. As prospects.
I hadn't expected it. Hawk hadn't either, though his face had barely shown the surprise. Ana had been the first to ask—standing in front of Hawk with her hands clasped and her chin up and a look in her eyes that said she'd been standing in front of powerful men her whole life. Ernesto had followed. Then Mateo, who'd walked into Hawk's office with Ghost trailing behind him and stated his case with a clarity that had nothing to do with his age and everything to do with what he'd survived.
Hawk had accepted them. Watched them with those dark eyes that missed nothing, and nodded once, and told them the patch was earned, not given.
Logan pressed his knee against mine under the table. A brief contact. I pressed back.
"They look good," he said quietly, watching Ana and Ernesto.
"They look like people who made a choice." I watched Mateo laugh at something Ghost said—an actual laugh, open and sudden, the sound carrying across the kitchen. "Some choices change you faster than time does."
Hawk appeared in the kitchen doorway. The shotgun was absent—the first time I'd seen him without it since we'd returned. His eyes found mine across the room.
"Church. Storage room. Nolan might've found Whitfield."
The kitchen went quiet. Forks stopped. Conversations cut off. Irish's spatula paused mid-flip.
Nolan had the projector running before the last man sat down.
The map on the concrete wall showed three properties highlighted in red. The room smelled like leather and the coffee Irish had brought in a thermos the size of his forearm.
"Three properties connected to Whitfield's financial trail." Nolan's glasses reflected the projector's glow. His voice was the precise, data-driven instrument it always was—except for the tightness that surfaced when the numbers led somewhere personal. "Two are older purchases. A cabin outside Missoula, Montana—paid through a trust we've already flagged. And a house in Boise, Idaho, purchased under a shell company that shares a registered agent with High Basin."
He clicked. The map zoomed. A third dot, further south.
"Then there's this one. Southern California, about forty minutes from the Nevada border. Almost off-grid—desert property, set back from the main road, no neighbors for miles. The purchase was buried deep. Three layers of corporate obfuscation that the other properties didn't have." He looked up from the laptop. "If you're Whitfield and you're running, you'd run to the one you spent the most effort hiding."
"How close to us?" Hawk's voice from the head of the table.
"One and a half hours by road. Maximum two."
Tyler leaned forward. "I can contact my prosecutor. Give her the addresses. She can have federal agents at all three within?—"
"And if Whitfield still has people inside the Bureau?" Logan's voice came from beside me, steady. Measured. The rancher's practical thinking cutting through logic. "She ran an operation for seven years with institutional protection. And she doesn't have someone who'd tip her off the very second agents start moving onto her hiding spots?"
The room went quiet. The type of quiet where people are thinking the same thing but waiting for someone to say it.
"Small team." My voice. "We recon the California property ourselves. If she's there and it's lightly guarded, we handle it. Keep her there until agents arrive. If it's heavily fortified, we pull back and give Tyler's contact the location with enough detail to plan a proper raid." I looked around the room. "No point risking men on a full assault if a phone call can do the job. But the phone call needs eyes on the ground first."
"I'm going." Ghost. Immediate. Those pale blue eyes fixed on the projected dot on the wall—the eyes that had earned him half his name, icy pale blue, unsettling. The stare of something that wasn't quite there.
"So am I." Axel, from the side wall. Arms crossed.
"I'm going." Tyler didn't frame it as a question. "If there's movement at the property, I can have my contact briefed on the situation."
"If Tyler goes, I go." Tank's voice came out firm from beside Tyler. He wasn't asking either. His massive hand found Tyler's shoulder—the automatic, possessive contact that had become as much a part of Tank as the grease under his fingernails. Tyler leaned into it. A fraction of an inch. A subtle movement that showed he stopped pretending a long time ago he didn't need the anchor.
