Chapter 19 Fracture #2
Hawk sat on a crate by the door, letting Irish clean and wrap his arm.
The president's face betrayed nothing—not the pain from the wound, not the weight of what had happened, not the decisions already forming behind his gray eyes.
He watched Rosa work on Blade the way a general watches the field after a battle: assessing losses, calculating what remained, planning the next move before the dust had settled.
Irish worked on Hawk's arm with grim efficiency, his own movements stiff.
Frustration radiated off him like heat from asphalt.
Every few seconds his jaw tightened, the muscles in his neck cording as he glanced at the wounded men filling the room.
He should have been there. The thought was written across his face as clearly as his scars.
Declan lingered near the doorway, cleaned up but still carrying the warehouse in his eyes. He watched Irish with quiet attentiveness—tracking the way Irish favored his healing leg, noting the tension in his shoulders, ready to step in if the stubborn bastard pushed himself too far.
"Sit down." Kai appeared at my side, a suture kit in one hand, his voice carrying the firm authority of someone who wouldn't take no for an answer. "Shoulder. Now."
I dropped onto a stool. Kai peeled the bandage away, and the pain flared—white and sharp, cutting through the fog I'd been wrapped in since the warehouse.
The bullet had grazed the muscle, carving a furrow along the top of my shoulder without hitting bone.
Lucky, Kai murmured, threading the needle. I didn't feel lucky.
He stitched me in silence. Twenty-two sutures, each one a small bright point of pain that I welcomed because it gave me something to focus on besides the emptiness where Tyler should have been.
When he finished, Kai taped a clean bandage over the wound and rested his hand on my arm. Not a medical touch—a human one.
"We'll get him back." His voice was barely above a whisper, rough with emotion he was trying to contain. "We will."
I nodded. Couldn't speak. If I opened my mouth, something would come out that I couldn't take back—a sound, a scream, the kind of raw animal noise that lived in the place where grief and rage collided.
I stood, walked out of the infirmary, and crossed the grounds to my room.
Tyler's jacket hung on the back of the chair.
The leather one I'd given him before our first ride—too big in the shoulders, the Phoenix patch on the back that didn't officially belong to him but that no one had questioned.
He'd draped it there the night before we left, the night we'd spent tangled together in these sheets, making promises we both knew might break.
I picked it up. Pressed it against my face. Breathed in.
Leather. Gun oil. That clean scent underneath that was just Tyler—soap and skin and something warm that I'd never been able to name but that I'd recognize anywhere, in any room, for the rest of my life.
The sheets still smelled like him. Like us. Like the eternities we'd spent memorizing each other's bodies, learning the geography of scars and calluses and soft places, whispering things in the dark that neither of us had ever spoken out loud before.
I sat on the edge of the bed with his jacket in my hands and Danny's knife on the nightstand and I tried to breathe.
The room was quiet. Too quiet. No sound of Tyler's breathing beside me, no warmth radiating from the other side of the mattress, no sleepy mumbled protest when I shifted my weight.
Just empty space where he should have been.
I'd watched them take him. The memory played on a loop I couldn't stop—the secondary explosion, the wall of force that separated us, and then Tyler on the ground, dazed, bleeding, reaching for a weapon that wasn't there.
The guards closing in. His eyes finding mine across the chaos, wide with fear but still there, still present, still fighting.
The hood going over his head. His body disappearing into the smoke as hands dragged him backward and I screamed his name until my throat tore.
I'd kept fighting. Took down two more of Cross's men before Axel hauled me back, before Hawk's voice in my earpiece ordered the retreat, before the burning warehouse started to collapse and there was nothing left to fight for.
I hadn't been fast enough. Hadn't been strong enough.
Hadn't been enough. Danny's knife caught the light from the bedside lamp—the worn handle, the blade I'd carried since the day I buried my brother.
I picked it up, turned it over in my hands, felt the familiar weight settle into my palm like a handshake from a ghost.
I failed you too, Danny. I couldn't protect you. Couldn't save you. And now the same thing is happening again, and I'm sitting here with blood on my hands and nothing to show for it.
My fist connected with the wall before I realized I'd swung.
Plaster cracked, dust sifting down like snow, and pain exploded through my knuckles—sharp, clarifying, almost welcome.
I pulled my hand back. Blood welled from split skin across two knuckles, mixing with the dried brown flakes already caked into the lines of my palm.
I pressed my forehead against the cracked plaster and stood there, breathing, bleeding, holding Tyler's jacket against my chest. I would get him back. Whatever it cost. Whoever stood in my way.
I would burn the whole desert down if that's what it took.
Church convened the next morning, after a full day of forced rest that Rosa had mandated for the wounded and that I'd spent pacing my room like a caged animal—counting the hours, cleaning weapons that were already clean, pressing Tyler's jacket against my face until the scent of him blurred and I couldn't tell where comfort ended and torture began.
The chapel felt wrong—too many empty chairs, too much space around the table where bodies should have been.
But it was fuller than I'd feared. Hawk sat at the head, his wounded arm immobilized in a sling that Rosa had fashioned from a strip of clean linen, his face carved from granite.
At his right, Axel occupied the VP's chair with a stillness that radiated authority even through the exhaustion and the bandaged shoulder.
The rest of us filled in the gaps: me, Declan, Vega, Santos, and half a dozen other patched members—some from the warehouse, some who'd held the clubhouse during our absence.
Ghost sat at the far end, his crutch against the wall, his young face harder than it had been a week ago.
Outside the chapel doors, prospects kept watch on the perimeter, maintaining the security rotation that hadn't stopped since we'd ridden out.
Irish leaned against the wall behind Hawk's chair, arms crossed, weight shifted off his injured leg. He'd insisted on being present. Nobody had argued—the look in his eyes made it clear that trying to keep him out would cost more energy than anyone had to spare.
Blade's chair was empty. Rosa was still with him in the infirmary, fighting a battle measured in heartbeats and blood oxygen levels.
Hawk opened without preamble, his voice carrying the flat authority of a man who'd already processed his grief and moved past it into strategy: "Tyler is alive. Cross didn't take him to kill him—he took him because he wants him. That gives us time, but not much."
My hands curled into fists beneath the table. The stitches in my shoulder pulled. I barely felt it.
"Cross has resources." Hawk leaned forward, his gray eyes sweeping the room.
"He was running the Wolves' pharmaceutical operation through Henderson—distributing product through legitimate channels, laundering the profit through shell companies.
And he wasn't doing it alone. He's got corrupted federal agents backing him, same playbook as Michelle Chen's trafficking ring.
Agents on the payroll, marshals turning a blind eye, people inside the system helping the product move and making sure investigations go nowhere.
The pharmaceutical operation isn't just the Wolves—it's a joint venture between the club and whoever's pulling strings inside federal law enforcement. "
"Which means he's got eyes and ears we can't see.
" Axel's voice was measured, the VP parsing the problem the way he parsed everything—systematically, without emotion getting in the way of logic.
His eyes flickered to me, and I saw something there that wasn't logic at all.
Concern. Compassion. The understanding of a man who knew what it felt like to almost lose the person who mattered most.
"We have Sarah." Hawk placed both hands flat on the table.
"She knows Cross's operation better than anyone.
She helped Tyler escape him in the first place, she organized the FBI support that took down Chen, and Cross tried to have her killed for it.
She's been recovering here since the extraction, and she's ready to help us end this. "
"Then get her in here." The words ground out of me like metal on stone. "Get her talking. Every minute we sit here—"
"Every minute we sit here is a minute we spend not riding into another ambush.
" Hawk's gaze locked onto mine, steady and unyielding.
"You saw what happened at the warehouse.
Cross knew we were coming. He knew about the drainage pipes, knew the exact route of our insertion.
He was ready and waiting. If we ride out blind, we die, and Tyler dies with us. "
The truth of it settled over me like a weight.
I wanted to argue, wanted to flip the table and put my fist through something, wanted to be on my bike heading into the desert with nothing but rage and Danny's knife.
But Hawk was right. The warehouse had been a trap, and we'd walked into it despite the warnings.
"We do this smart, brother." Axel, his voice low, meant only for me. "For Tyler."
I unclenched my fists. Nodded once.