Chapter Twenty-Nine
TATE
We move in the dark.
Four vehicles, two from each club, anonymous and untraceable, the kind of transport Cable had sourced through channels I don’t ask about and don’t need to. No cuts, no patches, nothing that identifies us as anything other than men moving through the Mexican night toward something that needs doing.
The hacienda sits twenty-five miles outside the city.
Cable is in my ear.
“Three minutes to the perimeter.” His voice is completely calm, the focused stillness of a man doing what he does best from two thousand miles away in a Vegas back room with four screens and a burner phone. “Outer security rotation is at the far east corner. You’ve got the window.”
Quill is in the seat beside me, Hawke behind us, already focused, already reading the dark outside the window the way he reads everything, methodically and without missing anything.
I look at Quill.
He gives me a single nod.
In the vehicle behind us, Rhyder, Torch, and Trigger sit in the focused silence of men who have been waiting for this for a very long time and are done waiting.
“Smoke on my mark. Outer ring goes down first. Quiet.”
I check my weapon.
“Mark.”
The smoke grenades go in through the east wall blind spot, three of them, low and precise, professional grade, and the outer security goes down in under two minutes, some neutralized completely, others zip-tied where they fell, none of them loud about it.
The eleven-minute window.
We move through it.
The north wall blind spot opens onto a service path that runs along the back of the main building, with terracotta tile, low lighting, and the sound of the ocean beyond the rear wall doing its constant thing.
Moving with Luke on my left and Flame on my right, Quill two steps behind me and Hawke beside him, the focused calm arrives that always comes when everything planned for months collapses into the single point of right now.
“Main building, second corridor, third door on the left. All three of them. They’ve been in there for forty minutes. Meeting’s still running.”
All three of them, Clemente, Lawrence, and the unknown figure Cable had been tracking for weeks.
What we’re walking toward is still uncertain.
Only that it needs to end.
We split at the corridor junction, Rhyder going right with Torch and Trigger behind him, moving toward the east wing where Cable had tracked Lawrence’s secondary location before the meeting started. The instruction is simple. Find him. Finish it.
Quill and I go left with Luke, Flame, and Hawke, toward the meeting room, toward Clemente.
The door opens fast, one movement, and Luke’s boot and the frame splintering, and then we are inside. The room is exactly what Cable’s intelligence told us it would be. A table, chairs, a laptop open to one side, the ordinariness of a powerful man conducting business in his own home.
Three men.
Clemente is on his feet immediately, that instinct of a man who has survived this long by never being caught sitting down when danger arrives, his dark eyes moving fast across the room, calculating and assessing.
Lawrence is beside him, older and heavier than remembered, with the look of a man who has been living well on borrowed time and has just run out of it, his face going white the moment he sees us.
And the third man.
Standing at the far end of the table, with a dark beard, an expensive shirt, and that way of holding himself, contained and controlled, the stillness of someone who has been trained to stay calm in situations that aren’t calm at all.
Something tugs at the edge of recognition, but there is no time for it.
What happens next happens fast.
The third man moves first, not toward us or away from us but sideways, crossing the room in three strides toward the woman who has been standing near the window.
He takes her arm and pulls her with him toward the door on the far side of the room, a woman with long dark hair and a face white with something that isn’t entirely fear.
“Stop them. Flame, Luke, go…” They go.
Flame and Luke move without hesitation, but the third man doesn’t run. He walks fast and deliberately with the woman’s arm in his grip and her feet moving willingly, and pushes through the far door and disappears into the corridor beyond.
Clemente tries to run, one direction then another, the desperate recalculation of a man whose exits are closing one by one, and then he is moving toward the rear door.
Already moving to cut him off, we meet in the middle of the room with a hand at his throat, his back against the wall, and a weapon at his temple before he has finished deciding where he is going.
He goes still.
Those dark eyes, sharp, cold, and calculating even now, find mine.
“Don’t.”
He doesn’t.
Cable’s voice comes through the earpiece. “Rhyder has Lawrence. East grounds. Moving fast.”
Keeping the weapon at Clemente’s temple, I feel Quill come up beside me with Hawke flanking him, the two of them moving like the unit they always are.
“Quill.”
“I’ve got him.”
Stepping back and letting Quill take position, I watch his face as he does, those blue eyes finding Clemente’s with the weight of everything the Blood Brothers have been through because of this one man sitting in every line of his expression.
Outside somewhere, a single shot.
Then silence.
Rhyder.
Lawrence.
Done.
Quill presses his weapon to Clemente’s forehead, and for a moment, the room goes very still. Clemente’s jaw is tight. Whatever he’d expected when this moment came, it clearly wasn’t two motorcycle clubs in his own home with his security down and Lawrence already gone.
“You have any idea…” Quill says, “… what you’ve put my men and their families through.”
Not a question.
Clemente says nothing, smart enough to know that nothing he says is going to help him now.
Quill’s finger moves to the trigger.
“Quill.” Hawke’s voice comes from directly beside him, calm and certain. “Don’t.”
Quill doesn’t look at him.
“He deserves—”
“I know what he deserves.” Hawke’s hand comes to Quill’s shoulder, steady and present, the certainty of a man who has been beside his president through everything and knows exactly when to speak and when not to.
“And he’ll get it. Just not from you. Not tonight.
Not away from Jasmine. Not away from your kids. ”
A long moment passes with Clemente breathing hard against the wall, and Quill’s hand is completely still.
Then the door behind us opens, and Sam Reeves walks in.
Never met him in person before, only know the face from the news broadcast, that composed, measured authority of a man who runs things from the top.
In person, he is taller than expected and considerably more tired, carrying the exhaustion of someone who has been running something enormous for a very long time and is only now seeing the end.
He takes in the room in one sweep, his eyes darting to Quill, whose weapon is on Clemente and Hawke standing beside him.
The Mexican federal police follow in behind him, professional and purposeful, moving toward Clemente with handcuffs already out.
Not FBI. Mexican authorities. Sam’s coordination had been running longer than any of us had known.
“Stand down,” he says to Quill, directly and without ceremony. “We have everything we need to put him away for the rest of his life. Multiple counts, multiple jurisdictions.” He holds Quill’s gaze. “Don’t do this. Don’t spend time in a cell for him. Not away from your family.”
Quill looks at Clemente for a long moment, at the man who had trafficked Lexi, sold women like inventory, and run the operation that had taken Tracker from all of them.
Then he lowers his weapon.
The federal police move in, and as they pull Clemente’s hands behind his back and snap the cuffs on, as this man who had considered himself untouchable for decades feels the cold metal at his wrists for the first time, Quill leans forward slightly.
“Every day you spend in that cell…” he says, “… remember that we came for you. Remember that we found you. And remember that the people you hurt are still standing.”
Clemente says nothing.
They take him out.
Sam looks at me across the room, and I look back, two men who had been orbiting the same secret for months from completely different directions, him protecting it from the Bureau’s end and me carrying it from the club’s, standing in a hacienda in Mexico at the end of something enormous.
He gives me a single nod, and I give him one back.
Finding Trigger in the east corridor, sitting against the wall with Torch crouched beside him, one hand is pressed against his shoulder, jaw tight, and blood seeping through his fingers with the steady insistence of a wound that isn’t fatal but isn’t done making itself known.
“How bad?”
“Through and through,” Torch says. “He’ll live.”
“I’m fine,” Trigger says through his teeth.
“You’re bleeding.”
Crouching beside him, I tell him, “We’ll get you out. There’s transport waiting.”
Trigger looks up with those steady eyes. “Lawrence?”
“Done.”
Something moves in his expression, deep and settled, the relief of a man who took a bullet for something and has just been told it counted.
“Good.”
Cable’s voice comes through the earpiece again. “Tate. North villa. Luke and Flame have someone contained. Something’s not right.”
“On my way.”
Hearing them before reaching the villa, voices low and tense, Luke and Flame by the sound of it, and someone else who isn’t arguing or fighting but talking in a low, steady voice that can’t be made out from the path.
Pushing the villa door open, Luke and Flame have him against the far wall with one arm each, the professional grip of men who know how to hold someone who doesn’t want to be held, except he clearly doesn’t want to fight, standing completely still between them with his hands open at his sides and his head slightly lowered.
The woman from the meeting room stands a few feet away with her arms wrapped around herself.