Chapter 19 Fracture
FRACTURE
TANK
The ride back took seven hours. Seven hours in the back of a van that smelled like copper and smoke and the sharp chemical sting of field dressings.
Seven hours watching Blade's chest rise and fall in shallow, uneven rhythms while Declan held pressure on the wounds and Vega monitored his pulse with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling.
Seven hours with blood drying on my hands and a bullet graze burning across my left shoulder, counting the mile markers through the rear window, calculating the distance between Reno and Henderson like the math could somehow bring us home faster.
Tyler wasn't in the van. Tyler wasn't anywhere I could reach, anywhere I could protect, anywhere I could hold onto.
Tyler was in the back of a different vehicle heading the opposite direction, hooded and bound, being carried deeper into the desert by a man who believed he owned him.
And I was here, pressing a blood-soaked bandage against my shoulder with hands that shook no matter how hard I clenched my fists, trying not to scream.
We'd left Reno in a ragged convoy. Blade had taken five vehicles into the front assault—three armored vans and two SUVs—and we'd lost two of them: a van gutted by the warehouse fire, abandoned with its armor plating warped and blackened, and an SUV that had taken heavy fire near the front entrance until its tires melted and its windshield shattered.
Two of the less battered brothers—men whose wounds amounted to scrapes and bruises rather than bullet holes and shattered bone—drove back to retrieve the truck our insertion team had abandoned near the drainage pipe, the vehicle sitting where we'd left it in the pre-dawn dark, covered in a fine layer of desert dust like the desert had already started trying to bury what happened there.
The four surviving vehicles carried what was left of Blade's distraction team, packed with men who had burns and shrapnel cuts and the thousand-yard stares of soldiers who'd walked through hell and hadn't fully come out the other side.
We'd moved Blade into the insertion team’s truck, and onto the covered bed, because it had the most space for a man who couldn't sit up.
Declan rode in the back with me, keeping pressure on Blade's chest wounds during the long hours on the road, changing the dressings when they soaked through, monitoring his breathing by the sound of it alone.
Rosa had talked us through the field treatment over a burner phone—pressure here, elevation there, don't let the bleeding restart, keep him warm, keep talking to him even though he can't hear you—but her voice had gone tight when we described the wounds.
Chest shots. Two that penetrated, a third stopped by the vest. The body armor had saved his life, but the two rounds that got through had done damage that wouldn't wait seven hours.
Four vehicles crawling through the Nevada dawn.
Marco in one of the two vans behind us, with his leg elevated and Santos applying a fresh tourniquet every time the bleeding restarted.
Axel behind the wheel of our truck, slotted into the middle of the convoy like a heartbeat between ribs—Hawk's SUV cutting the road ahead, the two surviving vans trailing behind with their wounded cargo and their bullet-scarred armor plates catching the morning sun. Axel’s bandaged shoulder stiffened with every mile.
Hawk drove the SUV in the lead, with one arm.
The other hung at his side, blood-soaked from a rifle graze that had torn through muscle.
He'd waved off help at the warehouse, barked at Vega to get Blade loaded first, and climbed behind the wheel like a man who'd driven through worse. He probably had.
We drove fast. We drove through the dawn and into the morning, through the flat Nevada desert that stretched endless and indifferent on every side, and Declan changed Blade's dressings three times, and each time the gauze came away darker, and each time his pulse grew a little weaker.
I sat against the truck’s wall and watched, and felt nothing.
Not the pain in my shoulder, not the ache in my bruised ribs, not the cold that seeped through the truck’s metal floor.
The nothing was worse than agony would have been.
Agony meant I was still connected to the world.
The nothing meant I was somewhere else—somewhere dark and hollow, where Tyler's face disappeared behind a hood on an endless loop and I couldn't reach him no matter how far I stretched.
The clubhouse gates appeared in the windshield just past noon—the reinforced chain-link topped with razor wire, the guard towers flanking the entrance, the cluster of low buildings behind the perimeter fence that had become home.
Someone must have radioed ahead because the gates were already rolling open, and two figures stood in the wash of midday sun: Kai, with a medical bag slung across his body and latex gloves already on his hands, and Rosa, her silver-streaked hair pulled back, face set in the expression I'd come to recognize as her combat mode.
The van lurched to a stop. Doors flew open. The desert air hit me—dry, furnace-hot, carrying the faint smell of sage and motor oil that always hung around the Phoenix grounds—and for a split second everything felt normal, felt like coming home after a long ride.
Then Rosa's voice cut through the stillness, sharp and commanding: "Get him on the stretcher. Now. Careful with the chest—don't jostle him, don't—yes, like that. Move."
Hands reached in for Blade. Santos and Vega lifted him with the grim precision of men who'd carried wounded brothers before, transferring his weight to the stretcher Rosa had waiting.
Ghost stood nearby, leaning hard on his crutch, his healing leg braced at an angle that wouldn't take weight—he reached out to steady the stretcher as they moved past, the only help his body could offer, and his face said he knew it wasn't enough.
Blade's head lolled, his face slack, his skin the color of old concrete under the desert sun.
The two remaining vans pulled in behind us.
Doors opened. Men climbed out—some walking, some limping, all of them carrying the warehouse in their eyes.
The walking wounded lined up at the infirmary door without being told, a grim procession of burns and lacerations and deep bruises that would take weeks to fade.
Kai was already moving between the vans, assessing, triaging, his clipboard forgotten as he used his hands instead—checking pulses, peeling back bandages, murmuring instructions to Ghost who relayed them to the men who could still stand.
Then Kai's eyes found Axel stepping down from the passenger seat of our, and something cracked in his expression.
Relief so raw it looked like pain. He crossed the distance in three steps and had his arms around Axel before either of them could speak, his face pressed against Axel's neck, his body trembling.
Axel held him with his good arm, his injured shoulder hanging limp, and pressed his lips to Kai's hair.
A whispered exchange I couldn't hear. Then Kai pulled back, wiped his eyes with the back of his gloved hand, and became a medic again—checking Axel's shoulder, barking instructions about getting the infirmary doors open, already prioritizing the wounded with quick, practiced efficiency.
He was good at this. Better than anyone had expected when he'd first started patching up scraped knuckles and bar-fight bruises.
The months since the Chen operation had hardened him, honed him.
The softness was still there, but underneath it was something stronger now—a competence born from necessity and love.
Kai turned to me. His eyes swept over the blood on my shirt, my hands, the makeshift bandage on my shoulder, and then past me, scanning the van's interior, the vehicles still unloading, the faces of the men streaming toward the infirmary.
"Where's Tyler?" His voice carried the careful steadiness of someone bracing for impact. "Is he—" The question caught in his throat. He tried again. "Tank, is he alive?"
I opened my mouth. The words came out broken, jagged-edged. "Cross took him. They put a hood over his head and—" I stopped. Swallowed. "He's alive. Cross wants him alive. But I don't know where they took him."
Kai's face went through three expressions in two seconds—horror, grief, and then something harder. Something that looked like the same rage I felt burning in my own chest, tempered by the discipline of a man who had patients waiting.
He squeezed my arm once. Then he turned and rushed into the infirmary, and I heard him start issuing orders—the steadiness in his voice held together by willpower alone, ready to shatter the moment he stopped concentrating on keeping it whole.
Rosa had transformed the clinic into something resembling a field hospital—every surface covered with supplies, every light blazing, the sharp smell of antiseptic fighting a losing battle against the smell of blood.
She worked on Blade with the focused intensity of a woman who refused to let death walk through her door, her hands moving with a speed and precision that turned surgery into something almost mechanical.
Kai handled the rest. Marco first—the leg wound was bad, a through-and-through that had clipped the femoral artery.
Kai packed it, applied a fresh tourniquet, and talked Marco through the pain with the same calm steadiness I'd heard him use on Axel during his worst moments.
Ghost sat on a stool nearby, his crutch propped against the wall, passing instruments and supplies—limited in mobility but steady where it counted.