Chapter 10
DYLAN
The run felt wrong before the first shot.
That was the thing about trouble. It had a smell.
Not always literal, though sometimes it came wrapped in dust, gasoline, hot metal, and the sour tang of men sweating through lies.
Sometimes it was a silence too clean for the desert.
Sometimes it was headlights where no headlights should be.
Sometimes it was Nate going quiet beside me when Nate’s whole purpose on earth seemed to be filling silence until someone begged him to stop.
We were south, close enough to the border that every shadow felt like it belonged to somebody armed.
The night stretched wide and black around us, cut by the weak beams of bikes and trucks, dust lifting in pale clouds behind the tires.
I had done runs like this before. Too many.
The kind that were supposed to be routine because calling something routine made men feel less stupid for risking their lives over it.
Nothing about that night felt routine.
Nate rolled up beside me, one hand loose on his throttle, eyes hidden behind the dark shield of his helmet. “You feeling that?”
I didn’t look over. “Yeah.”
“Good. Thought maybe I was developing anxiety.”
“You’ve had anxiety your whole life. You just call it charm.”
“Rude. Accurate, but rude.”
Even through the helmet, I could hear the forced ease in his voice. That was Nate. If the road opened up and swallowed us whole, he’d probably make a joke about poor city planning on the way down.
Ahead, the lead truck slowed.
My hand tightened.
The signal came wrong.
One brake tap too many.
Then headlights flared on the ridge to our left.
Not ours.
“Down!” I shouted.
The first bullet hit the truck’s windshield before the word finished leaving my mouth.
The night exploded.
Gunfire split the dark open, loud and vicious, ricocheting off metal and rock. Men scattered. Bikes slid. Someone cursed over the roar of engines. A windshield shattered. A brother went down hard near the rear vehicle, his body hitting the dirt with a sound I felt more than heard.
After that, thinking stopped being a thing with words.
Move.
Cover.
Return fire.
Find Nate.
I dumped the bike behind the nearest truck and came up with my weapon already in hand.
Dust stung my eyes. The air tasted like powder and burned rubber.
Shapes moved between headlights, too fast and not fast enough.
I fired toward the muzzle flashes on the ridge, controlled bursts, not because I was calm but because panic wasted bullets.
Nate was fifteen feet away, crouched behind the open door of the second truck, firing high and left. He glanced at me once, and even in that chaos, I knew him well enough to read the look.
Bad.
Real bad.
I saw movement behind him.
“Nate!”
He turned half a second too late.
The shot caught him high.
His body jerked backward, shoulder slamming into the truck door before he dropped to one knee. He didn’t fall all the way. Stubborn bastard. He tried to lift his gun again.
I was already moving.
Bullets chewed dirt near my boots as I crossed the open space. Someone shouted my name. I ignored it. Nate’s face had gone pale under blood and dust, one hand pressed uselessly near his shoulder while dark spread too fast across his shirt.
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped, grabbing the back of his cut and hauling him lower.
He coughed, then grimaced. “That your bedside manner?”
“You’re not in bed.”
“Yet.”
“Save your flirting for the nurses.”
“Depends on the nurse.”
I got an arm under him, dragging him toward better cover.
He was heavier than he looked when half his body decided not to cooperate.
His blood slicked my hand. The shooting kept coming.
Too many angles. Too many muzzle flashes.
Someone on our side returned fire from behind the lead truck.
Someone else screamed for a medic we didn’t have.
I shoved Nate behind the wheel well, dropped over him, and fired until the figure advancing on our right vanished back into the dark.
“Stay down,” I told him.
“Bossy.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“You’re observant.”
I pressed harder against the wound. Nate hissed through his teeth.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“No, you’re not.”
“No.”
His mouth twitched, then the humor went out of his eyes. “Dyl.”
I hated that tone.
“Don’t.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“I know.”
“No.” His breathing hitched. “With me.”
I looked down.
Blood bubbled where it shouldn’t.
Chest too.
Not just shoulder.
Cold slid through my gut.
“Callum!” I shouted.
Then the second impact hit me.
For a second, I thought someone had swung a sledgehammer into my side.
There was no pain at first. Just force. A brutal, breath-stealing punch low in my abdomen that folded the world inward. My hand went there automatically and came away wet.
Nate’s eyes widened. “Dylan.”
I tried to answer.
Nothing came out.
Then the pain arrived.
Hot.
White.
Mean enough to make my knees forget their job.
I went down beside him.
The sky above me was black and full of stars that had no business looking that calm while men bled under them.
Gunfire kept cracking. Voices moved around me in fragments.
Callum roaring orders. Someone calling for extraction.
Someone else saying cops were too close, border patrol might be moving, we had to get out now.
Nate’s hand found my sleeve.
“Don’t die,” he rasped.
I laughed, or tried to. It came out wet and wrong. “You first.”
“Copycat.”
The world started tilting at the edges.
I knew wounds. I had seen enough men bleed to know when the body began making decisions the mind had not approved.
Warmth spread under me. Too much. My fingers pressed against the hole in my side, but blood did not care about my hands or my stubbornness or the fact that I still had things unfinished.
Georgia.
Her face came first because it was supposed to.
Blonde hair catching sunset in La Jolla.
Blue dress fluttering around her knees. Hands pressed to her mouth when I opened the ring box.
The way she said yes before I finished asking, laughing through tears, like joy had outrun manners.
Her mother crying in the kitchen. Her father clapping my shoulder and telling me he trusted me with the most precious thing in his life.
I had put a ring on Georgia’s finger.
I had promised.
Maybe not with a date. Maybe not with invitations or vows spoken in front of families. But a promise was still a promise, even if a man made it while trying to outrun another woman’s ghost.
Georgia deserved to be my last thought.
I tried to hold her there.
Her ring.
Her laugh.
Her soft hands on my face.
Her voice saying, You disappear sometimes.
I’m right here, I had told her.
Liar.
My eyes closed against the desert.
Destiny came anyway.
Not walking.
Burning.
The memory opened like a door kicked in by fate. Smoke. Fire. Dark hair wild around a pale, bruised face. Blood on her mouth. Eyes too big, too haunted, too alive. She had looked at me that night like she didn’t know whether I was salvation or one more dangerous thing coming out of the dark.
Beautiful.
I hadn’t meant to name her like that.
The word had just been there, waiting.
My body bounced as hands dragged me. Pain tore through my side, then receded too far, which scared me worse.
Someone was yelling for pressure. Someone else was cursing about time and cops and hospitals.
Nate was beside me or behind me or gone.
I tried to turn toward him, but my body had become a distant country with bad roads.
Georgia, I told myself.
Think of Georgia.
But my mind kept running backward through Destiny like she was the only road left lit.
Her hands shaking at Mandy’s grave.
Red paint smeared across stone. Across her fingers. Across her sleeve. Destiny scrubbing at poison like grief could be cleaned off if she just ruined enough fabric.
My hands around hers later, washing the red away.
Soap.
Water.
Her silence.
The way she let me touch her because I wasn’t trying to take anything.
Then her mouth under mine in the dark by that grave, soft and trembling and brave. The kiss that should have been nothing. One kiss. One mistake. One moment with a girl too young, too wounded, too forbidden to become anything real.
Except it had become everything.
The vehicle lurched.
Pain flashed.
I heard Nate groan somewhere close.
Good.
Alive.
“Stay with me,” a brother said.
I didn’t know which one.
Callum maybe.
Bullet.
God.
Didn’t matter.
I was trying.
The dark kept getting warmer.
That was how I knew I was in trouble. Pain sharpened when a man was meant to fight. Warmth invited him to quit.
I thought of Georgia’s ring again.
Thought of how proud her father had looked when he hugged me.
Thought of her sitting somewhere safe, not knowing I was bleeding my life out in a vehicle heading north toward a hospital full of cops and fluorescent lights.
I should have felt terror for her.
I did.
I should have felt love strong enough to pull me back.
I tried.
Destiny’s voice cut through instead.
Don’t call me that if you’re just going to walk away.
Santa Monica.
Her black dress.
Her mother’s diamonds.
The turquoise ring.
My cuff hidden under her sleeve like a secret she could have thrown away and hadn’t.
Her eyes when she realized I knew about Dean’s List and Cupcake and matcha and Cal’s blue quilt.
The hurt on her face when I walked away again because I had convinced myself hurting her cleanly was better than wanting her honestly.
Noble.
That word came back and tasted like blood.
I had called myself noble because chicken was harder to swallow.
The vehicle stopped.
The doors opened.
Light hit me.
Too bright.
Too loud.
The world became voices.
“GSW abdomen, unstable!”
“Second patient, chest and shoulder!”
“Move, move, move!”
Hands pulled. Wheels slammed. A ceiling rushed above me in white panels and streaking lights.