Chapter 2 Dead Ground #2
My mother's skin was that color. The same warm brown, the same undertone from generations of Oaxacan sun and soil.
My tías' hands—the ones that had held mine when I was small enough to be held—were marked with the same calluses of agricultural work.
The world my mother and her sisters had crossed a desert to leave.
And someone had branded these men like cattle and worked them until they dropped and left the bodies on our doorstep.
"They were running." Declan's voice cut through the silence. Flat. Analytical. "The direction of travel suggests they came from the northeast, moving on foot. No supplies, no navigation equipment. They weren't crossing the border. They were fleeing something."
"Northeast puts their origin somewhere in the Montana-Idaho corridor," Nolan added from behind his tablet.
His fingers were already moving. "I can cross-reference missing persons databases for unidentified Latino males in that region, but if these men were undocumented, they won't be in any system. "
"They won't be." My voice came out harder than I intended. Every head turned. I didn't care. "Undocumented workers don't file missing persons reports. Their families back home don't know who to call. And whoever was holding them knows that. That's the point. They're invisible."
Hawk's eyes found mine. Held. He knew what I was seeing in those photographs.
"There's more." Tyler spoke from beside Tank, his voice carrying the careful precision of a man choosing his words for a room full of armed people who were already angry.
"I got a call thirty minutes ago from a contact in Henderson PD.
Someone phoned in an anonymous tip to the FBI's regional field office overnight, linking the Steel Phoenixes to the bodies. "
The room detonated. Irish's hand slammed flat on the table. Ghost surged forward. Three voices overlapped in profanity and outrage that Hawk let run for exactly four seconds before raising one hand. The noise died.
"Someone is trying to frame us." Hawk's voice dropped low. The quieter he got, the more dangerous the situation. "Someone put bodies on our border and then called the feds to make sure we'd take the blame."
"Which means the bodies weren't dumped randomly." Declan again, already three moves ahead. "They were placed. Specifically, on our territory. Someone knows where our patrols run and timed the dump to ensure we'd find them."
"The Iron Wolves know our patrol patterns." Axel leaned forward. "They surveilled us before the Holt war. We've updated the system, but the core pattern is still there."
"Speculation." Hawk held up a hand. "But noted. Tyler, can you shut down the tip?"
"Already working on it. My contact at Henderson PD is sympathetic.
He'll sit on it for a few days, give us time to investigate before the feds send anyone.
" Tyler's jaw tightened. "But if this reaches the FBI field office officially, we're looking at a formal investigation.
And whoever called in the tip knows that. "
"Then we work fast." Hawk swept the room.
"Nolan, I want everything you can find on the brand mark.
That H inside a circle is a logo, which means it belongs to someone.
Find out who. Tyler, keep your contact warm and monitor the FBI channel.
If this tip gets traction, I want to know before the suits do. "
"What about the bodies?" Rosa interjected. "I can run more detailed forensics, but I need time and equipment. Some of these injuries suggest long-term captivity. If there are more people being held somewhere, the timeline matters."
"Do it." Hawk looked at me. "Blade."
"I want the eastern perimeter." I heard myself say it. "The bodies came from the northeast. I'll ride out, follow the trail back. See where they came from."
"Take Ghost. Two riders, minimal profile."
I nodded. My hand was still on the knife. I made myself let go.
Hawk straightened. His palms came off the table. The room waited.
"Five men are dead on our land. They were branded, starved, worked to destruction, and left in the desert like garbage.
Then someone tried to pin it on us." His voice dropped into the register that meant war.
"We are going to find out who did this. We are going to find out why.
And when we do, we are going to make them wish they'd picked a different doorstep. "
No one spoke. No one needed to.
"Dismissed."
The room emptied—Hawk first, then the officers, then the rank and file, the chairs scraping back in a wave from the head of the table outward. I stayed where I was. Back to the wall. Hand off the knife but the ghost of the grip still in my palm.
Irish paused at the door. Looked back at me. The grin was gone. What was underneath was sharp, serious, older than his years.
"You okay?"
"Fine."
"You're not fine. Not since the moment Rosa showed the photos." He leaned against the doorframe. Declan and Nolan moved past him, Declan's hand brushing Irish's shoulder as he went—gravity, not choice. "Talk to me, hermano."
"Not now."
Irish studied me for three seconds. He knew when to push and when to let a blade sit in its sheath. "I'm here. You know where to find me."
"I always know where to find you. You're the loudest person in any building."
The ghost of the grin flickered. "That's my charm." He pushed off the doorframe and followed Declan and Nolan down the corridor.
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 walking through 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.