Chapter 4 Rekindling Flames #3
His hand moved across the table. Not reaching for mine. Resting near it. Two inches between his fingers and mine. Close enough that I could feel the heat off his skin, the warmth making the fine hairs on my forearm stand up.
Two inches. The distance was a question.
I looked at his hand. The calluses and the scars and the veins running beneath the tanned skin. The fingers that had held my face in a motel room so long ago and traced the line of my jaw like they were memorizing it.
"I missed you." Logan's voice was low. Not a performance. A fact delivered with the same directness he'd use to report a grid coordinate.
The two inches between our hands hummed.
I opened my mouth. The word yeah was right there, loaded and chambered, the single syllable that would carry everything I'd spent years not saying.
Then the window exploded.
The sound came first. A percussive crack that split the air and sent glass spraying across the bar in a horizontal rain of fragments that caught the light and turned it into a thousand tiny blades.
The second shot followed a half-second later, punching through the window frame and burying itself in the wood paneling behind the bar.
I felt the thud in my sternum. The third shot took out the neon beer sign above the front window and it died in a shower of sparks and blue-white light.
My body moved before my brain finished processing the first shot.
Two thousand hours of combat training collapsing into a single sequence below conscious thought—I was out of the booth, across the table, my hands on Logan's shoulders.
Pulling him down and sideways. Putting my body between him and the window.
The booth's wooden back absorbed a fourth round that punched through where Logan's head had been half a second ago.
"Down. Stay down." My voice came out flat, calm, stripped of everything except instruction. The operational register. The sound I made when the world narrowed to threat and response and the distance between was measured in fractions of a second.
The bar erupted. Patrons screaming, scrambling. The trucker diving behind the bar. The old man in the John Deere cap frozen in his seat. The bartender had dropped below the counter—the sound of a shotgun being racked echoed from somewhere behind the taps.
The gunfire stopped. The silence after was worse—the held-breath pause that meant the shooters were moving, repositioning, transitioning from ranged to close quarters. I knew the rhythm. I'd used it myself.
The front door kicked inward. The frame splintered. A man came through the opening, a pistol in a two-handed grip, sweeping left, and I saw the colors on his back before I saw his face.
Iron Wolves.
The leather cut. The snarling wolf patch. The same colors I'd seen in photographs from the Holt war and the Cross operation and every briefing Hawk had given about the enemy that had been bleeding us for way too long.
My hand found the throwing knife out of pure reflex.
The custom seven-inch blade, double-edged.
It left my hand the way it always did—the snap of the wrist, the rotation calibrated to distance, the release point calculated by a part of my brain that didn't use numbers, only instinct.
Ten thousand repetitions and the absolute certainty that the blade would go where I sent it.
The knife crossed twelve feet in less than a second. It hit the Wolf above the bridge of the nose.
The point entered the skull with a sound that was wet and final and louder than it should have been in the sudden quiet of the bar. A slicing thud that carried a weight beyond its volume.
The man's head snapped back. His pistol discharged into the ceiling with a bang that echoed in my ears. His body folded backward through the doorway he'd just kicked open, and he hit the ground outside with the dense, permanent sound of a body that would not be getting up.
I registered what I had done in the time it took to draw my second knife. The Ka-Bar combat knife. Close-quarters. The throwing knife was now gone, buried in the skull of a man who'd made the mistake of walking through a door while I was in the room.
Logan was beside me. On his feet now, pressed against the wall, a Beretta in his hand that he'd pulled from somewhere I hadn't seen. His grip was steady. His eyes were wide but focused. The Ranger underneath the rancher surfacing like something that had been sleeping, not dead.
More shapes outside. Moving past the windows. At least two, maybe three, their silhouettes crossing the broken glass in quick lateral shifts. Boots on gravel. The sound of weapons being readied.
The dead man's radio crackled from the floor. A voice, distorted by static: "Status. Report."
I looked at Logan. Logan looked at me. The six years between us gone.
The conversation about workers and brands and buildings evaporated.
What remained was the thing underneath—two Rangers in a kill box, armed, trained, and very much not willing to die in a bar called The Junction on a nothing road in eastern Idaho.
"How many rounds?" I kept my voice low. The Ka-Bar in my right hand, my left palm flat against the wall, feeling for vibration. Footsteps transmitted through the structure.
"Fifteen in the mag. One in the chamber." Logan's voice matched mine. Calm, clipped, the shorthand of men who'd done this before. "You?"
The Desert Eagle sat in the holster at the small of my back.
Seven rounds of .50 caliber, more than destructive enough to stop anything that walked through that door.
I'd brought it because riding into Wolf territory without a firearm was suicide, not bravery.
But I'd reached for the knife first. Always the knife first. Faster at close range, quieter, and it didn't announce your position to every hostile within half a mile.
"Desert Eagle. Seven rounds. And two blades."
Logan's eyes flicked to the knife in my hand. To the dead man in the doorway with seven inches of custom steel somewhere in his forehead. Back to my face.
"You went for the knife."
"I always go for the knife."
The shapes outside the windows shifted. Closer. The radio crackled again.
I pressed my back against the wall and adjusted my grip on the Ka-Bar. I felt the weight of it, the balance, the edge I'd sharpened two nights ago in my room while I stared at a phone screen and tried to decide whether our silence was worth breaking.
The silence was broken now. All of it.