Chapter 8 Blood and Soil #3
A shot rang out from behind the truck. Logan's Beretta. The round hit the dirt two feet from the lead Wolf's boots, spraying chunks of the road against his legs.
"Drop the weapon." Logan's voice. Flat, hard, carrying across the dark from a position the Wolves couldn't pinpoint. He was barely there—a shape against the darker shape of the truck, almost nothing.
The lead Wolf flinched, his aim jerking away from my position toward the sound.
"I would listen to him if I were you."
My voice. I was standing now, clear of the shelter, the Desert Eagle aimed at the lead Wolf's face from twelve feet. He hadn't seen me move.
The lead Wolf's gaze traveled from Logan's position to me. To the Desert Eagle. His jaw worked.
"You guys have them aimed?" His voice shook—trying for steadiness and not finding it. "It's four against two. You people lower your weapons inst—"
He looked to his side. The word died in his throat.
Irish had the last Wolf—the radio man with the sliced palm—in a chokehold, one arm locked around the man's neck, the other pressing a pistol to his temple. The radio man's weapon lay on the ground.
The lead Wolf looked behind him. Two men on the ground. Unconscious. Ghost standing over them with the Glock aimed back at the lead Wolf's head.
Surrounded. Flanked. Outmaneuvered in the dark by people who knew how to use it.
His pistol hit the gravel.
"Logan." I kept the Desert Eagle aimed. "Headlights."
The truck's headlights flared to life. The light swept across the scene in a harsh white flood.
The four Wolves. The unconscious men on the ground, blood pooling beneath the one whose nose had hit the road.
The lead rider blinking against the brightness, his face drained of color.
The radio man sagging in Irish's chokehold.
The leather cuts with the snarling wolf patch. The bikes behind them, chrome gleaming.
I approached the lead rider. Kicked his weapon away, the metal skidding across the lit road.
Drew the Ka-Bar and placed the blade under his chin.
The flat of the steel against his throat, the edge resting against the soft tissue, the point dimpling the skin beneath his jaw.
The sweat beading along his hairline. The pulse hammering in his throat above the blade.
"How many more behind you?"
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I leaned closer. Switched to Spanish. My mother's accent carrying the weight of everything I'd seen in the bunkhouse and everything I'd carry out of it.
"?Cuántos más?"
How many more?
The blade pressed harder. Not cutting. Promising.
His eyes blew wider. He'd heard it. The heritage in the accent. This wasn't a rival club enforcing territory. This was a man whose blood came from the same places as the people being trafficked, and the knife at his throat was the most honest thing anyone had said to him all night.
"Four more." Strangled, barely audible past the steel. "With vans. They're coming to take the people."
"When?"
"Dawn."
I held the blade for one more second. Let him feel the edge. Then I stepped back.
"Irish. Zip ties. All four. Wrists and ankles. Ghost, Logan—keep them aimed. Either of the conscious ones moves wrong, put them down."
Irish released the radio man, who crumpled to the gravel gasping, and produced the ties from his vest. Four Wolves, wrists bound behind their backs, ankles cinched. The two unconscious ones wouldn't be going anywhere when they woke. The two conscious ones wouldn't be going anywhere at all.
I walked to the bikes. Four Harleys sitting on the road in a row.
I drew the Ka-Bar. Knelt beside the first bike and drove the blade into the front tire.
The rubber split with a hiss. I moved to the rear tire.
Same. Then the next bike. And the next. And the last. Eight tires, sixteen cuts.
A small retribution for the Harley they'd crippled at the bar, but retribution nonetheless.
I found the throwing knife in the gravel six inches from the shattered radio, wiped both blades on my jeans, and sheathed them.
"Leave them," I ordered. "Take the keys, take their phones, take their weapons. When the other four show up at dawn with their vans, they'll find their advance team tied up on a ranch with no workers, no foreman, and no one to collect."
Ghost gathered the phones. Irish pocketed the keys and the weapons.
Behind the truck, I could hear the workers—the whispered Spanish coming fast and frantic, people who'd heard volley after volley of gunfire and understood that the men who'd branded them had come to take them back.
A woman sobbing, the sound muffled by a hand or a shirt pressed against her mouth.
Another voice praying, rapid and repetitive, a rosary without beads. Someone hyperventilating.
Logan moved to them. His voice low, steady, the calm that came from somewhere deep in him and never wavered. The Spanish rough but the tone carrying what the grammar couldn't: It's over. They're down. You're safe. We're leaving now.
Slowly, the workers climbed back into the truck bed.
Their faces visible now in the residual glow of the headlights, the fear sharper than it had been in the bunkhouse, made concrete by the bound men on the road and the smell of gunsmoke in the cool Montana air.
Their bodies were shaking—hands, shoulders, the way they gripped the tailgate as they climbed up.
Mateo was the last one in. He looked at the restrained Wolves on the ground and his face carried something I recognized: not fear anymore, but fury.
The fury of a boy who'd been branded and numbered and was looking at the men responsible for it, helpless on the gravel, and understanding for the first time that they could be beaten.
"Bravo, status." I pressed the comms.
A pause. Then Tank's voice: "Loaded. Both vans. Eighteen evacuees. Two need medical attention. Declan's working on them." Another beat. "We heard shots. Multiple. What happened out there?"
"Four Wolves. Advance team. All four restrained. No casualties on our side. Four more incoming at dawn with transport vans. We need to move now."
"Copy. Moving to the main drive."
The vans appeared from the north acreage road two minutes later, headlights off. Logan's truck was already running, the twelve ranch workers back in the bed, Danny in the cab with the dogs.
Logan stood beside the driver's door. His Beretta holstered. The adrenaline still visible in the set of his shoulders.
"Thirty people." I stopped beside him. Close. The darkness making the proximity feel private even though it wasn't. "Twelve from the ranch, eighteen from the building. Plus Danny. The vans are full. Your truck is full. We need to move."
"That was a lot of gunfire aimed at you behind that shed."
"They were shooting at a direction. Not at me. The dark did the work."
He looked at the ranch. The bunkhouses. The barn. The dark outlines of the house where he'd sat on the porch with his dogs and stared at the sky.
"The horses," he breathed. "Rio. The others. The cattle in the south pasture. I can't just—"
"Danny." I turned to the truck cab. The kid's face was visible through the glass, pale but holding. "The horses and cattle. Are they safe?"
"Pastures are open. They can range." Danny's voice was muffled through the window. "There's enough grass and water for weeks. They'll manage. It's the people I'm worried about."
Logan's jaw worked. He was leaving the ranch. Leaving everything he'd built for four years, abandoned in the dark because the alternative was staying and dying.
I put my hand on the back of his neck. My palm against his skin, the warmth of him grounding me the way the knife grounded me—contact saying everything the mission didn't leave time for.
"We'll come back for them." Low. Only for him. "I promise."
He nodded. One sharp movement. Got in the truck. Closed the door.
I mounted the borrowed Harley. Kicked the engine to life. The V-twin caught and the vibration rolled through the frame, through my arms and into my chest where it settled beside the heartbeat that was only now beginning to slow.
Ghost and Irish pulled alongside. The vans settled into position behind Logan's truck. The convoy formed: truck, two vans, three bikes flanking. Thirty evacuees, one foreman, three dogs, and six men who'd ridden ten hours to take apart a piece of a machine that branded people.
We rolled south. Logan killed the headlights once we cleared the ranch road.
No lights for the first five miles, the convoy navigating by moonlight and memory, the secondary roads that Irish had mapped winding through grassland that stretched flat and dark to the horizon.
The bound Wolves disappeared behind us. The ranch disappeared.
The mountains faded into silhouettes against a sky beginning to lighten at the edges—the first gray suggestion of a dawn that would arrive to find an empty property, slashed tires, and four men on the gravel with a story their backup wouldn't believe.
The air was cool. Montana cool, the kind that pressed through my jacket the moment the speed picked up, the wind stripping the day's heat from my hands on the grips.
I leaned into it. Let the cold strip the excess, reduce the noise, leave only the road and the speed and the thirty people in the vehicles behind me breathing free air for the first time in months.
Mateo was in the back of Logan's truck. I'd seen him climb in last, his duffel over his shoulder, his face carrying the expression of a young man who'd taken his name back and was holding it with both hands.
Ten hours south. Henderson. The compound. Rosa and Kai waiting with medical supplies.
I rode point. The wind cold against my face, the highway opening ahead in the borrowed headlight. Behind me, the convoy stretched in a line of dark vehicles carrying thirty people toward something that might, for the first time in months or years, feel like safety.
My mother had walked north in the dark toward a gas station and a stranger's kindness and a life she couldn't see yet.
Her son was riding south, carrying thirty people toward the same thing.