Chapter 16 Nitro #2
He grinned, that old, mean glint I hadn’t seen since the pipeline job. “You fuck up, I’ll kill you myself.”
I managed a smile. “That’s the deal.”
We moved through the club in silence, the only sounds the shuffle of boots and the metallic click of magazines slamming home. Out in the lot, the bikes waited, lined up in black and chrome, engines ticking in the cold.
I mounted the Harley, the cold metal biting through my gloves.
The wind up here was always worse at night, a scalpel edge that stripped you down to bone.
I kicked the engine, let it roar once, then cut it to a whisper.
Damron did the same. We rolled out in formation, two wide, headlights off, letting the moon carve our way through the dirt.
No one spoke on the ride. The world was reduced to vibration, the gun at my thigh, the target glowing in the back of my skull. The only thing alive in me was the thought of her, somewhere in the black, and the certainty that I would kill every man in that cabin if it meant bringing her home.
When we reached the base of the Jemez, Seneca met us at the pull-off, idling his bike in the brush. He didn’t bother with greetings, just pointed up the trail. “They’re in the main building. No sign of motion for the last half hour. Lights are off.”
Damron eyed the treeline, then the sky. “Anyone watching the road?”
Seneca shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a deer.”
We checked our weapons, loaded mags, and chambered rounds.
The clicks and slides sounded like the only real language left in the world.
Augustine handed out radios, but none of us bothered to test them.
We moved as a unit, slipping through the trees in a staggered line, each man scanning a different quadrant of the dark.
The ranger station was a corpse of old government wood, windows long since shot out, roof slouched like a man about to collapse.
There was only one door, and it hung crooked on its hinges, daring you to try it.
The van was parked beside the porch, black paint still wet enough to reflect the moon.
I counted three silhouettes in the front cabin, heads slumped low.
Another two in the back, moving slow, deliberate.
Seneca signed, “Three inside, two on watch.”
I nodded, swept left. Damron took point, shotgun ready. Augustine ghosted the perimeter, hugging the wall.
We waited, every heartbeat a countdown.
Then the scream.
It was hers. Seraphina, unmistakable, sharp, and wild as a blade in the dark.
We breached the door before the echo faded.
Inside, everything went to hell.
We hit the threshold with all the subtlety of a pipe bomb in an elevator.
Damron led, shotgun up, the door tearing off its hinge with a single boot.
The next second was a fire drill of noise and light—Seneca’s pistol barking twice, the back window exploding, Augustine pivoting right and drawing fire away from the entry.
I saw her immediately, in the center of the main room, duct-taped to a chair beneath the hanging corpse of a rafter. The men circled her like a ritual, four of them, all in black, two already up and aiming, the other two stunned by the breach.
Damron fired first, the twelve-gauge buck tearing a chunk from the nearest Russian’s thigh.
He went down, howling, blood blooming on the pine boards.
Seneca moved with impossible speed, crossing the room in a blur, hand-to-hand, before the second shooter could finish cursing.
The Russian swung his rifle around and caught Seneca in the shoulder, but the Sadist just kept coming, teeth bared, a knife flashing from nowhere.
Augustine’s cover fire kept the other two pinned by the ancient woodstove. I hit the deck and crawled left, using the overturned furniture as a shield. The gunfire was so close it made my fillings ache.
Seraphina sat absolutely still. Not cowering, not crying. Her face was a mask of calculation, eyes tracking the vectors, judging the odds.
The second Russian went down, screaming, Seneca’s blade protruding from the hollow of his neck.
The room smelled like copper and panic. Damron racked the shotgun and fired again, hitting the third man square in the torso.
The Russian slammed back into the wall, dropped his weapon, and tried to crawl to the kitchen. Damron let him.
The last man, the one closest to Seraphina, went for her like a shield, grabbing her by the neck and hauling her upright, chair and all. He had a pistol to her temple, speaking in a rush of guttural Russian. I caught only a word—"govno"—before the rest was lost in the reverb.
I froze. He was three meters away, maybe less, and her eyes had gone wide.
Seneca broke the standoff, circling behind, hands already red up to the wrist. “Drop it,” he said. His voice sounded like it was made of gravel and broken glass.
The Russian didn’t drop it. He pressed the muzzle deeper into Seraphina’s scalp, drawing a line of blood at her hairline. She flinched but didn’t cry out.
I saw the decision in Damron’s face before he even moved. He lowered the shotgun, a half-second of fake surrender. The Russian tracked him, yelling something about "Amerikanskiy suka," spit flying.
In that blink, Augustine fired one shot. It caught the Russian in the shoulder, a clean hole that spun him sideways. The bullet missed Seraphina by a breath, but the shock was enough. She twisted, chair buckling, and the Russian went down with her.
Seneca was there, fast and final. He pinned the Russian, broke the man’s wrist with a single stomp, and pried the gun from his useless hand. I rushed to Seraphina, heart in my throat, and started cutting the duct tape with my pocket blade.
She was breathing, shallow but steady. The blood at her temple was superficial, a red line already drying in the cold air.
“You okay?” I asked, stupid as hell, but I had to say it.
She laughed, sharp and raw. “I told you I’m harder to break than I look.”
I could have kissed her then, but her hands were still taped behind her back.
Seneca wiped his knife on the Russian’s shirt, then tossed the blade at my feet. “You owe me,” he said, not looking at either of us.
Damron checked the dead and the dying, his own face unreadable behind the sweat and powder smoke. Augustine stood in the doorway, rifle at low ready, watching for the next wave.
The world had gone so quiet I could hear my own pulse.
Seraphina leaned into me, her body trembling with the aftershock. I freed her hands, then held them in my own. Her skin was ice, but the grip was fierce. “Is it over?” she whispered.
I looked at the carnage, at the men who had thought they could take her and walk away. “For now,” I said.
Seneca yanked the one live Russian to his knees, tied his hands with a length of dirty cord. “What do we do with him?”
Damron shrugged, already reloading the shotgun. “Nothing. Let the feds clean up their own mess.”
Seneca grinned, but it was the kind of smile that belonged on a warning label. He dragged the prisoner outside, left him kneeling in the snow, then lit a cigarette and waited for the headlights of the responding units. They’d be here soon. It was always that way.
Inside, Augustine handed me a bottle of water, then sat next to the stove, nursing a bruised rib. “You good, Chemist?”
I nodded. “Never better.”
He nodded back, then shut his eyes. He wouldn’t talk about the fear, and neither would I.
Damron made a sweep of the building, double-tapping each corpse to make sure the job was done. He came back, wiped the stock of the shotgun on his jeans, and said, “We should go.”
Seraphina tried to stand, but her knees buckled. I caught her before she hit the floor. She leaned into me, head buried in my shoulder, hair wild and sticky with blood.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“I don’t think so,” a man said as he appeared through a doorway, his thick Eastern European accent almost too thick to understand. He was the size of a mountain, his nose just as crooked. “She stays.”
I moved Seraphina behind me. “I got him,” I said to Damron, Seneaca, and Augustine.
The large Russian came at me fast. I couldn’t have said how I moved, only that the antique wiring in my brain took over, rerouting all conscious thought into a single line of force.
My body went low, straight into the Russian’s center of gravity, but he was ready—no amateur, no rent-a-gun.
His fist smashed my right shoulder, and the Kevlar vest drank just enough of the punch to keep my collarbone intact.
I felt the impact all the way down my spine, a hot lance that nearly short-circuited my legs.
I staggered, but he didn’t press; he waited, poised, smiling like he’d already counted the moves to checkmate.
Damron and Seneca angled off, flanking, but I shook them off with a flick of my left hand. This was mine.
The Russian’s eyes were opera blue, glinting in the darkness. He spat blood onto the worn pine and beckoned with two fingers. I answered with the butt of the stock of the AR—one, two, three—each blow meant to erase what portion of his brain still thought this was a contest.
The first shot cracked him in the cheekbone—a sound like a pool cue breaking.
The second caught him just under the jaw, driving the tongue through the back teeth with a meaty thunk.
The third? That was for me. I put it square between his eyes, and the blood misted in a perfect halo as he toppled backward, legs folding before the torso even registered death.
The silence that followed wasn’t real. My ears rang, the adrenaline carving time into tiny, feverish slices.
I felt Seraphina’s hands on my back, gripping for anchor.
I turned just as she lost her balance, caught her at the waist. Her glasses were gone, her face streaked with tears or sweat or both, and her mouth worked at a sentence the rest of her body couldn’t remember how to finish.
“You’re okay,” I said, because nothing else would come. I cradled her, half holding her up, half holding her together, and our bodies—her shuddering, mine locked hard with leftover aggression—made an unsteady sculpture in the middle of the kill zone.
Augustine was already clearing the hallway, slow, checked for more, but the echo of the last shot was a guarantee: no one would come in that door unless they wanted to die.
Damron swept the perimeter one last time, then beckoned us all toward the exit. “Clean up, fast. If there’s a follow-on team, they’re already en route.”
Outside, the moon was high, painting the whole mountain in blue and white. The bikes waited where we’d left them, engines cooling in the frost. Damron gave me a nod, then took point down the trail. Augustine limped after him, clutching his side.
Seneca hung back, watching the station as if expecting the world to crack open and deliver another enemy. “You gonna be okay?” he asked.
Seraphina straightened, wiped her face with the sleeve of my jacket. “I’ll manage.”
He watched her a moment, then turned to me. “You did good,” he said, low. “Just don’t let it happen again.”
I didn’t promise anything.
We left the Russian alive, because that’s what men like us do. We take what we need and leave the rest for the world to clean up.
The ride home was silent. Seraphina rode behind me, arms locked tight around my waist. I could feel her heartbeat through my jacket, faster than the engine, faster than anything I’d ever known.
At the club, we patched up the wounds, counted our own, then sat at the chapel table, letting the smoke and silence do the talking. Nobody mentioned what it had cost. Nobody mentioned how close we’d come.
Seraphina sat beside me, her hair still matted, her eyes never leaving my face.
When the world started up again, she was still there, alive and unbroken.
And so was I.