"Someone should be able to handle injuries on the field." Kai spoke from beside Axel. The medic's authority didn't ask for permission. "I'm coming."
Tyler nodded slowly toward his foster brother. "I'll have my contact on speed dial. If we confirm Whitfield's there, I can have a response team mobilized within hours."
I'd been counting. Ghost, Axel, Tank, Tyler, Kai. Plus me. Six. A strong team. Enough for reconnaissance. Enough for contingency.
Hawk stood up. The chair scraped against the concrete. The room shifted—the automatic recalibration that happened whenever Hawk rose to his full height and the gravity in the room redistributed.
"I'm going."
The words landed differently than the others. Hawk didn't volunteer for field operations. Hawk held the compound, held the table, held the decisions that kept thirty men alive and operational. His place was the chair at the head of the table and everyone in the room knew it.
"Whitfield isn't coming back here." His eyes moved around the room. "She's running. The compound is secure. The rest of the Phoenixes and prospects can hold it while we're gone for a few hours." His gaze settled on some point past the far wall. "If she's there, I'd like the opportunity to have a word with Ms. Whitfield about what she did to the people sleeping under our roof."
The room didn't argue. You didn't argue with Hawk when his voice hit that tone—the man who'd been sitting behind a desk while his men fought and who needed, just once, to ride.
"I'm coming too." Logan. His voice quiet. "I need to see this through. Those workers ended up on my property. I paid the ones that enslaved them. I can't go back to the ranch andpretend that's behind me until I know the woman responsible is in a cell... or six feet under."
I looked at him, at his steady blue eyes, at the stitched shoulder, at the bruises fading on his throat. The man who'd shielded twenty people with his body in the back of a van, and who was sitting at this table asking to ride into one more fight because walking away wasn't in him.
Something warm moved through me that had nothing to do with the sex from this morning.
"That's the team." Hawk's palms hit the table. The sound was final. "It's morning. The property is barely two hours away. We ride in one hour. Gear up. Travel light, but armed."
The room emptied with purpose. Tank and Tyler toward the armory. Ghost already at the door, all of him channeled into action. Axel followed Kai toward the medical bay, where emergency kits would be waiting.
Logan and I walked out together. Side by side in the corridor, shoulders close.
"One more time," he said.
"One more."
"Then what?"
I looked at him. The morning light from the corridor window caught the side of his face—the line of his jaw, the damp hair drying in uneven light brown waves, the fading bruises on his throat that made him look like a man who'd walked through something brutal and come out the other side still standing.
He'd never looked better.
"Then you take me to Montana and show me what a normal morning looks like."
Logan's mouth curved into a half-smile. "You wouldn't know what to do with a normal morning."
"Try me."
16
TOOLS
LOGAN
The desert sun hit hard despite the calendar saying summer was almost done.
I rode behind Diego on his borrowed Harley, my arms around his waist, my cheek close to his shoulder, the wind pressing hot and dry against every inch of exposed skin. The Nevada desert stretched flat and bright in every direction—sand and scrub and the bleached white of dry creek beds cutting through terrain that hadn't seen rain in months. The road was a black line dividing nothing from nothing, the asphalt shimmering ahead in the heat.
Hawk rode point. The man looked different on a bike than he did at the head of the table at Church. Bigger, somehow. His shoulders filled the road ahead of us, his hands easy on the grips, his body carrying the machine with an authority that made every mile look like territory he was claiming as he crossed it. He rode fast, at a velocity that didn't invite discussions about speed limits.
I looked around at the others. Kai rode a Kawasaki with violet underlights that matched the purple streaks in his hair. He carried a small backpack that I knew held medical supplies, and the way he leaned through the curves suggested a man who'd been riding long enough to forget he'd ever done anything else. An ER nurse on a Kawasaki with a medkit on his back, riding to confront a federal fugitive. Diego's world was full of contradictions that somehow made sense.
Tyler rode beside Kai on a cherry red shovelhead, the two bikes moving in pure synchronicity. Behind them, Axel and Tank rode close, the formation almost bodyguard-like, the VP and the giant enforcer flanking their partners with the precision of men whose protective instincts operated beyond conscious thought.
