The meeting room was empty. Rosa's tablet still on the table. I walked over and picked it up. Swiped through the images slowly. The way you handle evidence when you need to see it clearly rather than react to it.
Five men. Brown skin. The brand on each left shoulder, identical, the H inside its circle raised and scarred. The bodies wasted down to bone at the joints. These men had been strong once—you could see it in the frame, the skeleton built for labor. Someone had used that strength until there was nothing left and thrown the empty containers into the desert.
I thought about my mother. She never talked about the crossing. The one time she'd come close was a night when I was twelve and she'd found me crying over something I couldn't remember now, and she'd held me and whispered, in Spanish,Mijo, you don't know what hard is. And I pray you never learn.
I'd learned. The army taught me. But what these men had endured wasn't hard. It was systematic. The brand wasn't cruelty—it was inventory management. Someone marking people the way you mark property.
I set the tablet down. Walked out of the meeting room, through the common room, through the back door and into the sunlight.
The compound courtyard was bright. The desert stretched beyond the walls in every direction. I stood in the heat and let it press against my skin and thought about five men walkingthrough this landscape with nothing. No water. No food. No names—just brands on their shoulders.
I pulled my phone from my pocket. Logan's message still there, unanswered.
Yup. Where are you? I'm in Montana.
Montana. The bodies came from the northeast. Montana was northeast. The Iron Wolves operated out of Montana. And Logan was in Montana, reaching out after years of silence, the timing too precise to be accident and too loaded to be coincidence.
The old training said:No coincidences. Every variable is connected until proven otherwise.
The rest of me—the part that remembered the supply closet and the motor pool and the motel with the bleach-white sheets, the part I'd welded shut six years ago when I walked out of Bragg—that part just said his name. The way it always did. Quiet. Stubborn. Refusing to stop.
Ghost and I would ride east today, follow the trail the dead men had left. A day, maybe two, tracking their route back toward wherever they'd come from. The trail would lead northeast. I already knew that. And once I had what I needed, Ghost could ride back to the compound with the intel while I kept going north.
Toward Montana.
I typed.
I'm in Nevada. We need to talk. Not over text. Can you meet me? Three days. I'll send coordinates.
I sent it before the filter could catch it. Then I pulled up a map, found a roadside bar in eastern Idaho—halfway between the clubhouse compound and Montana—and sent the pin. Three days gave me enough time for the recon and the ride north. If the trail led where I thought it led, I'd be heading in Logan's direction anyway.
I pocketed the phone and walked toward the garage. Ghost was already there, strapping gear to his Harley with the focused efficiency of a man who'd been told to ride and was grateful for the assignment. He looked up when I approached.
"Ready when you are."
I swung onto my bike. The engine caught on the first kick, the V-twin vibrating through the frame and my body. The same principle as the knife. Speed. Direction. Commitment.
Ghost pulled out beside me. We rode through the compound gate and turned east, toward the desert, toward the place where five men had died, toward whatever trail they'd left in the dust and the scrub and the silence.
The sun sat low and white on the horizon. The road opened ahead.
I rode fast. I always rode fast. But this morning the speed wasn't pleasure or habit. This morning the speed was anger, and the anger had a shape, and the shape was an H inside a circle, and somewhere in Montana or Idaho or wherever the trail led, someone had built a machine that branded people and worked them to death and thrown the evidence on my doorstep.
I was going to find that machine. And I was going to take it apart.
The desert swallowed the sound of our engines and gave back nothing.
3
HIGH BASIN
LOGAN
The long sleeves bothered me to no end.
Two days into the work rotation and the pattern was rigid. Every morning, all twelve workers emerged from the bunkhouses dressed identically: the same white long-sleeved shirts—plain cotton, crew neck, the sleeves extending past the wrists—the same new jeans, the same boots. No variation. No pushed-up sleeves, no concession to the heat that was building across the ranch like a slow fever.
And Montana in late summer was not kind to long sleeves.
