Chapter 39 Adam
Adam
Mud plastered my face, rain running in rivulets past the cut swelling over my eye.
Hawk dragged me back to my feet, his jaw clenched tight, his eyes wild.
Russ was still firing, steady as a machine, but his last mag was running thin.
Blade melted out of the dark with blood on his knife, silent as death.
And still they came. Masked. Trained. How many were there?
Where the hell was the cavalry?
This was Texas. Flood zone or not, by now we should’ve had sheriffs, state police, hell—at least a Guard unit moving in. FEMA had been crawling all over these sectors earlier. And if this was bigger than them, if this was organized crime—then Rangers should’ve been on-site hours ago.
But it was empty. Just us.
“Adam,” Russ called, ducking back behind cover, his voice calm but heavy. “We’re not alone out here by accident. Someone pulled the net.”
The words hit harder than the rifle butt I’d taken to the skull.
They were right. This wasn’t neglect. It was deliberate.
“They wanted us here,” Hawk snarled, his chest heaving as he hurled an empty mag into the mud. “Wanted us to bleed.”
More shots surged from the treeline, rifles raised. I raised my pistol—three rounds left. Three, for a sea of them.
My gut twisted, not from fear but from fury. “Where the hell are the Rangers?” I spat, voice raw. “Where’s backup? Where’s anyone?”
No answer came but the storm. Just rain, and gunfire, and the steady press of masked men who should’ve broken by now but hadn’t.
Something was wrong. Deeply wrong.
And as I leveled my pistol for another shot, the sick certainty lodged in my chest:
We weren’t just fighting the flood.
We were fighting someone powerful enough to make sure no one else showed up.