Chapter 6
The truck on the highway disappeared at sunset.
Roughcut didn't trust it for a second.
He'd moved Elise from the bunkhouse to the garage—better sightlines, thicker walls, closer to the weapons locker. She'd argued for ten minutes about being treated like cargo before he'd pointed out that cargo didn't get to keep a shotgun within arm's reach.
That had shut her up. Mostly.
Now she sat on a workbench with her acoustic guitar in her lap, playing soft chords that echoed off the concrete walls while Roughcut watched the treeline through a gap in the garage door.
The compound had gone quiet in that particular way that meant men were positioning themselves, checking weapons, preparing for something ugly.
Whiteout had melted into the forest two hours ago. Tundra was somewhere on the perimeter with a rifle that could reach out and touch someone at eight hundred yards.
They all felt it coming.
"You should try to sleep," Roughcut said without turning around.
"You should try to relax," Elise shot back. "Your shoulders have been up around your ears for the last hour."
"My shoulders are fine."
"Your shoulders are lying."
Despite everything, he almost smiled.
The guitar went quiet. He heard her set it aside, heard her boots hit the concrete as she crossed to stand beside him at the gap in the door.
"They're coming tonight," she said. Not a question.
"Probably."
"How do you know?"
"Because Kovich spent the whole day letting us know he was watching." Roughcut kept his eyes on the darkness beyond the compound lights. "That wasn't surveillance. That was a statement. He wanted you scared, wanted you thinking about running."
"I'm not running."
"I know."
She was close enough that he could smell her—something clean underneath the stress sweat, the faint trace of guitar strings and coffee. His hands wanted to reach for her. Pull her behind him. Put his body between her and every threat the darkness held.
He kept them still.
"When it starts," he said quietly, "you stay behind the workbench. The steel's thick enough to stop most rounds. You don't come out until I tell you it's clear."
"And if you can't tell me?"
"Then you use that shotgun and you don't stop pulling the trigger until nothing's moving."
Elise was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're not very good at the comforting thing."
"Never claimed to be."
"No." Her hand found his arm in the darkness—just a touch, brief and warm. "You didn't."
The first shot came at three in the morning.
Roughcut was on his feet before the echo died, shoving Elise toward the workbench with one hand and grabbing the rifle with the other. Muzzle flash lit up the treeline—multiple shooters, at least four, maybe six, spreading out to flank the garage from both sides.
"Stay down!" he barked.
Glass shattered somewhere. Return fire crackled from the compound—Whiteout's rifle, that distinctive bark, followed by Tundra's heavier report from the opposite direction.
Roughcut moved to the side door, keeping low. The compound's security lights had been cut—someone who knew what they were doing had taken out the generator building first. Smart. Professional.
Kovich wasn't playing games anymore.
A figure darted across the gap between two outbuildings. Roughcut tracked, squeezed, and the figure went down hard. No time to confirm the kill—more movement on his left, boots crunching on gravel.
He spun.
Two men came through the side door with weapons raised. Roughcut caught the first one with a rifle butt to the throat, felt cartilage crunch, and used the body as a shield while he put two rounds into the second. Both went down. Neither got up.
Behind him, the shotgun roared.
Roughcut whipped around. Elise stood behind the workbench with the twelve-gauge braced against her shoulder, smoke curling from the barrel. A man lay in the main doorway, chest opened up by buckshot, hand still reaching for the pistol he'd never gotten to fire.
Her hands were shaking. Her aim hadn't.
"Clear?" she asked. Her voice was steady even if her body wasn't.
"Not yet." Roughcut grabbed her arm—harder than he meant to, pure instinct—and pulled her toward the back of the garage. "We need to move. They'll regroup."
They made it ten feet before the wall exploded.
Something came through the corrugated metal like it was paper—a truck, Roughcut realized, a goddamn truck ramming straight through the garage wall. He threw himself over Elise, covering her body with his as debris rained down and the vehicle's headlights cut through the dust like searchlights.
The driver's door opened.
Dean Kovich stepped out.
He looked bigger in the chaos, that doorman's build turned monstrous by the shadows and the violence. Blood ran down his face from a cut above his eye—Whiteout must have clipped him somewhere in the treeline—but he moved like it didn't matter.
"Should've stayed out of this, prospect." Kovich's voice carried over the gunfire still crackling outside. "This was never about you."
Roughcut pushed himself up, putting his body between Kovich and Elise. Again. Always.
"It is now."
Kovich smiled. All teeth, no warmth. "Yeah. I guess it is."
He moved fast for a big man. Faster than Roughcut expected. The first punch came in like a freight train and Roughcut barely got his arm up in time, the impact numbing him from elbow to shoulder.
He gave ground. Let Kovich press forward, let the man's confidence build with every step. The enforcer wanted to make a speech—Roughcut had seen it at the bar, that half-second of self-importance before the swing.
"You know what Wennberg's going to do to her?" Kovich kept coming, fists raised, eyes bright with violence. "When we're done here, when your little club is nothing but bodies and ash—"
Roughcut stopped retreating.
The shift caught Kovich off-guard. The enforcer had been expecting another step back, had already committed his weight to the advance. When Roughcut planted his feet and drove forward instead, Kovich's whole stance went wrong.
Roughcut hit him like forty tons of earth.
No technique. No finesse. Just the raw, brutal strength of a man who'd spent years moving machines that could crush houses, channeled into a single devastating impact.
His shoulder caught Kovich in the chest and drove him backward, off his feet, into the crumpled metal of the truck he'd rammed through the wall.
Kovich bounced off the hood and came up swinging. Caught Roughcut in the ribs, a blow that would have dropped a smaller man. Roughcut absorbed it. Let the pain wash through him and kept moving.
His hands found Kovich's throat.
The same hands that held babies at cookouts. That fixed screen doors for old women. That handled Elise's guitar like it was made of glass.
They closed around Dean Kovich's windpipe and they did not let go.
Kovich fought. Clawed at Roughcut's arms, drove knees into his stomach, tried every dirty trick a career enforcer knew. None of it mattered. Roughcut had made his decision three hours ago, when he'd watched Elise's pulse jump in her throat while a black truck idled on the highway.
This man had threatened what was his.
The thought came unbidden, primal, absolute. His. She was his to protect, his to keep safe, his—
Kovich's struggles weakened. Stopped.
Roughcut held on for another ten seconds. Making sure. Then he let the body drop.
The gunfire outside had gone quiet.
"Roughcut!"
Tundra's voice, somewhere in the darkness. Roughcut turned and saw the VP coming through the hole in the garage wall, rifle raised, Ironside and Whiteout flanking him. They swept the space with professional efficiency, confirming bodies, checking corners.
Tundra stopped when he saw Kovich's corpse.
"The prospect handled himself," he said. It might have been approval.
Roughcut didn't answer. He was already moving back toward the workbench where he'd left Elise.
She was still there. Still holding the shotgun. Her face was pale in the headlights of the wrecked truck, dust in her hair and a smear of something dark across her cheek. Blood or oil—he couldn't tell.
"Is it over?" she asked.
"This part." He took the shotgun from her hands, gently, and set it aside. "You did good."
"I shot someone."
"You defended yourself." His hands found her shoulders. Checked her for wounds without conscious thought, running over her arms, her sides, the column of her throat. "Are you hurt?"
"No." She caught his wrists, stilling his frantic inventory. "I'm not hurt."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
He should have let go. Should have stepped back, given her space, remembered that she wasn't his to hold.
Instead, he pulled her against his chest and wrapped his arms around her like the world was trying to tear her away and he was the only thing holding her in place.
She didn't resist. Her hands fisted in his cut, her face pressed into his shoulder, her body shaking with the aftermath of adrenaline and violence and survival.
"We need to move," Tundra said from somewhere behind them. "Compound's compromised. Permafrost wants everyone at the main house until we assess the damage."
Roughcut didn't let go immediately. Gave himself three more seconds with her trembling against him, breathing her in, feeling the living warmth of her.
Then he stepped back.
"Let's go," he said. His voice came out rough. Wrecked.
Elise looked up at him. Something had shifted in her eyes—the same shift he'd felt in his chest when his hands had closed around Kovich's throat.
She nodded.
They walked out of the shattered garage together, stepping over bodies, moving toward whatever came next. Behind them, Kovich's corpse cooled in the wreckage of his own truck.
He'd made an example, all right.
Just not the kind he'd intended.