11. CHAPTER ELEVEN #2
He was across the room before the phone reached his ear.
Four strides, door open, into the hallway with Ace and Socket on his heels and me following because his hand had found my wrist on his way past and the grip said move now, questions later.
The common area erupted around us — Loch came out of the bunkroom pulling on his cut with one arm already through the sleeve, his ice-blue eyes doing that fast sweep of the room that every man in this building seemed to have mastered.
Ace was shouting something down the corridor that I couldn’t make out over the sudden percussion of boots on concrete and doors slamming.
J.D. sprinted past with a shotgun broken over his forearm, the barrel pointing at the floor, his prospect cut flapping against his back as he disappeared toward the compound’s rear gate.
I had a mug in my hand. Coffee, half-full, still warm from Screwball’s refill five minutes ago. Mustang took it from me without breaking stride, set it on the nearest counter with a click that sounded too deliberate to be casual, and turned to face me with both hands on my shoulders.
“Stay behind me,” he said. His voice was flat, final, each word carrying the full weight of its intention. “Don’t stop moving unless I tell you to stop. You understand?”
I nodded. My throat had closed around whatever response I might have offered, and nodding was all I had.
He kept one hand on my upper arm as he moved us through the clubhouse.
Not dragging, not pulling — guiding, his body between mine and every doorway, every corridor junction, his eyes doing that constant sweep I’d come to recognize as the way he navigated the world.
The clubhouse had transformed in the space of thirty seconds.
Men I hadn’t met yet were moving with purpose through rooms I hadn’t seen, weapons appearing from places I wouldn’t have thought to look, and the air itself felt charged, thick with the electricity of trained bodies responding to a threat they’d drilled for.
He kept one hand on my upper arm as he moved us through the clubhouse.
Not dragging, not pulling, guiding, his body between mine and every doorway, every corridor junction, his eyes doing that constant sweep I’d come to recognize as the way he navigated the world.
The clubhouse had transformed in the space of thirty seconds.
Men I hadn’t met yet were moving with purpose through rooms I hadn’t seen, weapons appearing from places I wouldn’t have thought to look, and the air itself felt charged, thick with the sharp electricity of trained bodies responding to a threat they’d drilled for.
“J.D.,” Mustang said, and the prospect was there before the name had finished leaving Mustang’s mouth, shotgun cradled against his chest, his expression set in a way that made him look ten years older than he was. “Nobody opens this door but me. You read me?”
“Yes, sir.” J.D.’s voice didn’t shake. Something in it had hardened, the eagerness burned away by whatever was happening outside, and what remained was steady.
Mustang looked at me. One last time, his steel-gray eyes holding mine across the concrete room, and then he was gone, the door closing behind him with that same vault sound, and I was alone with the hum of a single fluorescent tube and the distant crack of gunfire that I realized, with a clarity that turned my stomach, was coming from the direction of the motorcycle shop.
I pressed my ear to the door. Not smart, probably, but my body did it before my brain could intervene, and the steel was cold against my cheek and carried sound the way metal does — muffled but present, voices overlapping on what had to be a radio channel.
“,east side, behind the concrete,”
“,prospect down, shoulder hit, I need a,”
“,SUV backing into Caldwell, Loch you got eyes,”
Ace’s voice, calmer than the others, cutting through the chaos with the measured precision of someone who’d done this before and would do it again: “Mustang’s two minutes out. Hold your positions. Nobody pursues past the intersection.”
The gunfire came in bursts. Not constant — rhythmic, controlled, the disciplined pattern of men who were conserving ammunition and choosing their shots.
Each burst was followed by a silence that felt heavier than the noise, and in those silences I could hear engines, tires on gravel, the rising whine of a motorcycle accelerating hard enough to make the frame scream.
Mustang’s bike. I knew the sound without having heard it before, the way you know certain things about a person without being told — a pitch of their movement through the world made audible.
Time passed. I stopped counting minutes because counting made each one longer, and instead I sat on the floor with my back against the concrete wall and my knees pulled to my chest and Mustang’s jacket wrapped tight around me, and I listened to the radio through the door and tried not to imagine what the cracks of gunfire meant when they found their mark.
The door opened without warning. No knock, no call — just the heavy mechanism engaging and the steel swinging inward, and Mustang stood in the frame with his cut dark across his shoulders and something wet on his right knuckles that wasn’t sweat.
He didn’t look injured. That was the first thing I registered — no blood on him except what wasn’t his, no limp, no favoring of any one limb.
He looked exactly the way he had when he’d left, except colder, the set of his jaw harder, and his eyes did that fast sweep of the room that took in every corner before they landed on me.