Chapter Nineteen
~ Sterling ~
I was at the long table in the bunkhouse kitchen with a mug of coffee that had gone cold two hours ago and a list of names I’d been staring at for the better part of the morning.
Cruz sat across from me, his dark eyes on the window, saying exactly nothing, which from Cruz meant he was thinking hard and didn’t want to share. The wood stove ticked behind me. Patient. Counting seconds the way it counted everything.
Then Caleb’s voice came through the frequency. One word. “Moving.”
The word landed in the bunkhouse kitchen like something with physical weight. Caleb’s voice was steady—Caleb’s voice was always steady—but underneath it was a current I’d never heard from him before. Raw. Controlled, but barely.
And Mitch said nothing.
I was already moving before the word finished. Chair back, rifle off the wall rack, boots on gravel, and my hands were doing something they had never done in twenty years of operations across nineteen continents.
They were not steady.
I gripped the rifle stock and felt it. My fingers weren’t flush. My knuckles weren’t locked. The weapon sat in my hands the way it always sat, and my hands were not holding it the way they always held it.
This had never happened. Not Caracas, not Tbilisi, not the night in Ramadi when the roof came down and I carried two men out through smoke so thick I couldn’t see my own boots.
My hands are steady in firefights. They are steady in surgery. They are steady when the world is ending and there is nothing left to hold onto except the thing in my hands.
They were not steady now.
Caleb had said one word. Mitch had said nothing at all, and the silence where Mitch should be was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
Cruz was already at the Humvee. Two hands from the north pasture jogged across the yard at the look I gave them—not a command, not a request, just the look—and they piled into the back without questions because my face at 10:42 on a Tuesday morning did not invite questions.
I slid into the passenger seat. Rifle across my knees, barrel down, safety off because I wasn’t fucking around. My hands were still wrong. I curled my fingers tighter and pretended I didn’t notice.
Cruz turned the key. The engine caught. The Humvee lurched forward before the transmission had fully engaged, gravel spitting under the tires, and we were on the main road before the bunkhouse was out of sight.
“Faster,” I said.
“I heard you the first time.” Cruz’s voice was flat. His eyes were on the road. His hands on the wheel were exactly what my hands should have been: locked, certain, moving the vehicle at a speed that defied several traffic laws and one basic principle of physics.
“Then act like it.”
“I am acting like it. You’re watching the speedometer instead of the road.”
I looked at the road. The county highway was laid out ahead of us, gray and pocked and objectively terrible, and Cruz was pushing the Humvee through it at a pace that made the suspension howl.
He said, without inflection, “They’re going to be fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The eastern ridge came into view ahead of us, dark against the thin Montana sky, and the scanner on the dash picked up two vehicles running hard on the ridge road. Mitch’s truck. Second vehicle behind it, closing.
I did the distance math in my head. Ridge curve. Drop-off. Two hundred feet of lodge pole pine and nobody finding the wreckage for days.
I didn’t like the answer.
“Service road,” I said. “Cut across.”
“The service road is not rated for this vehicle.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Cruz took the service road. The Humvee dropped onto the dirt track that cut through the east pasture and the suspension took the kind of punishment that would have made the manufacturer weep. Something in the undercarriage scraped.
I didn’t care.
The ridge road was visible through the trees now, a gray ribbon winding along the eastern face, and I could see Mitch’s truck—small, dark, moving fast—and the second vehicle pushing it from behind, grille to bumper, metal on metal.
We hit the straightaway before the ridge curve. Pure luck. The only piece of geometry in this situation that worked in our favor, and I was out of the Humvee before Cruz had fully stopped, rifle up, bad leg screaming and irrelevant.
Three men. Weapons out. The second truck had braked hard, doors open, and the center man had a radio in his hand and a pistol in the other, and what I felt was not fear.
What I felt was something cold and specific and furious, sharpening me to a single point.
These men had put their hands on Mitch’s truck.
They had driven it toward a drop-off with Caleb in the passenger seat.
Caleb, who weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds on a good day.
Caleb, who had a voice that could make a room feel easier just by being in it.
Caleb, who had held my hand in a hallway at three in the morning and told me to come back to bed.
The fight was fast and not clean. Cruz took the left flank without discussion. The two hands covered the road, weapons up, creating a firing lane that the contractors did not want to cross. I went straight at the center.
The center man had the radio. I wanted the radio.
My bad leg buckled on the third step. I caught myself, drove forward, and the center man’s fist caught me in the ribs with the kind of force that said he’d done this before and knew where to put his weight.
The impact drove the air out of my lungs.
Something cracked. Not broken. Cracked. I’d feel it for a week.
I considered it an acceptable trade.
I took the radio. I also took the man’s shoulder—one hard rotation, downward pressure, the particular sound of connective tissue giving way under more force than it was designed to handle—and he went down making a noise that I filed under a category I did not care about.
Under four minutes total. Three men on the ground. Zip-ties around wrists, plastic biting into skin the way it was designed to, and the one with the dislocated shoulder was making sounds that suggested he had opinions about the quality of medical care available on the eastern ridge road.
I had opinions too.
Mine were about zip-ties and the satisfaction of pulling them tight.
The road went quiet. Wind across gravel. The Humvee’s engine ticking as it cooled. My ribs ached with each breath, a bright, specific pain that sat just below my sternum and reminded me, helpfully, that I was not twenty-five anymore.
I stood over the contractors. Three men face-down on cold asphalt, zip-ties securing their hands behind their backs, the drop-off visible just past the curve where the world fell away into pine and rock. One of them was still making noise. The other two had gone quiet, which was smarter.
Cruz stood at the edge of the road, rifle lowered, but not slung, his eyes on the tree line. The two hands had the perimeter. Standard procedure. Nothing fancy. Just men doing their jobs when the job had gotten complicated faster than anyone had planned for.
I picked up the radio. Turned it over in my hands. The plastic was warm from the center man’s grip, and the frequency was still open, which meant someone was listening.
I closed the frequency. Pocketed the radio. Looked down the road toward Mitch’s truck, stopped twenty yards back, both doors open, engine still running.
I started walking.
Mitch was out first. One hand braced on the truck frame, his body angled toward the road, scanning the tree line with the focus of a man who had spent twenty-four years being the one who reached Caleb first. His eyes found me across twenty yards of gravel and asphalt, and they went warm.
Completely warm. Inappropriately warm for the middle of an active scene with three zip-tied contractors and a dislocated shoulder moaning in the background.
Mitch’s eyes did that thing where the joke drained away and what was left was raw and certain and entirely without performance, and I was already moving before my brain caught up with my feet.
Caleb came around the passenger side. Moving fine. One hand pressed to the side of his head where the seatbelt had caught him, a red mark already blooming along his temple, and the sight of it did something to my chest that had no operational classification.
I closed the twenty yards without making a conscious decision to do it. My arms went around both of them at once—Mitch’s broad shoulders under one arm, Caleb’s smaller frame tucked against my ribs—and I held on.
This was not something I did. I did not hug people on active scenes. I did not stop moving during a tactical operation to put my arms around two men who had just been run off a road.
Protocol existed for a reason.
Protocol kept people alive.
I held on anyway.
Mitch made a sound against my shoulder. Low.
Warm. Slightly undone, the kind of sound that came from somewhere behind his sternum when the performance ended and the man underneath decided he was needed.
His arms came up around my back hard and certain, fingers digging into my flannel like he was making sure I was real.
Caleb tucked his face into my chest and exhaled. One long breath, shaky at the edges, like he’d been holding it since the first impact and had only just been given permission to let it go. His fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt. Small. Warm. Certain.
I held them longer than was justified.
The contractors were zip-tied. Cruz was standing ten yards away pretending not to watch.
The road was secure. None of that mattered as much as the fact that Mitch’s heart was hammering against my ribs and Caleb’s breath was warm through my shirt and both of them were whole and breathing and apparently determined to remain that way despite several recent indications to the contrary.