Chapter 6
Steel
The formation closes behind Knox's bike, and I count my brothers the way I count anything that matters—by whether they're all still here.
Knox rides point. Finn on his right, riding close enough that their mirrors nearly touch.
They've always ridden like that. Colt behind Knox's left shoulder.
Bruiser beside Colt, the Harley underneath him looking undersized.
Chain next, then Diesel—still adjusting to road order after earning his patch, his spacing tight on turns but steady on the straights.
Hunter and I ride the middle column, and Rex runs sweep a hundred yards back, watching everything behind us.
Nine bikes. The lot held ten this morning, but Garrett stayed at the compound with Jax and the two Cascades allies.
I shift my weight on the seat and feel the saddlebags adjust. My kit straps are doubled and buckled against the vibration—gauze, suture material, hemostatic packs, a combat tourniquet, the portable splint I modified for orc bone density.
Everything in its place. I checked it twice before dawn and once more in the lot while the engines warmed, and the routine settled me the way routines always do.
Hands busy, mind somewhere I can control it.
The highway opens into the mountain corridor, and the column threads a pass where the road narrows to two lanes and the timber closes in overhead.
The air changes. Cooler, thinner, carrying pine resin and granite dust and the absence of salt.
The coast falls away behind us, and with it the fog and the low sky and the woman who stood in my apartment last night with her hand flat against my chest.
I kissed her forehead.
The thought won't leave. She put her hand on my heart and told me to come back in one piece and made a joke about Finn's species identifications, and I leaned down and pressed my mouth to her forehead before I could decide not to.
Two seconds of contact. The warmth of her skin, the smell of her shampoo, the soft give of her temple under my lips. I can still feel it.
The road climbs. We ride for two hours without stopping, through switchbacks that tilt the sky sideways and straightaways that open into valleys so deep the river at the bottom looks like a thread.
My thighs ache from the angle of the climbs.
My hands cramp on the grips, and I flex them one at a time, left then right, working blood back into the joints.
Hunter pulls alongside me on a flat stretch where the road widens.
He rides with his pack strapped high on his shoulders, the same bag he's carried for years, the one that held everything he owned when he first rolled into Nightfall Cove.
The straps sit cinched tight against fabric that hangs loose, the canvas no longer bulging at the seams.
He holds beside me for a mile before he speaks.
"You good?"
I don't answer. The engine noise fills the space.
"That's a no, then." Hunter adjusts his grip. The wind pulls at his collar. "For what it's worth, waiting doesn't make it easier. It just makes the time you wasted hurt more."
I look at him.
He shrugs. "I'm an expert on wasted time."
He accelerates past, slotting back into the column ahead of me. I watch his pack—the straps cinched tighter every visit, the bag lighter every time he rides through. A man unpacking his life one trip at a time, leaving the important parts at a bakery twenty minutes from the compound.
We stop once. A gas station at the base of a pass where the road bends north and the mountains rise ahead like a wall.
Finn fuels Knox's bike first, then his own.
Chain stands at the pump island with his phone to his ear, one hand on the back of his neck, and his mouth softens in a way it only does when Morgan's on the other end.
Diesel stretches his back by the air compressor and rolls his neck against the stiffness.
I check my phone. No messages from the compound.
Knox stands beside his bike at the edge of the lot, facing the mountains. The Bloodstone range runs north-northeast, granite peaks above the treeline, the valley between them hidden from here. Knox grew up in that valley. Trained in those mountains. Left over twenty years ago and never rode back.
He's riding back now, and the set of his shoulders carries it—not fear, not hesitation, but the weight of a thing put off too long.
Finn walks to him and stands beside him without a word.
Knox nods once, and we mount up.
The encampment fills the valley floor.
Tents stretch from the base of the eastern ridge to the river.
Hundreds of them, hide and canvas, some new, some patched and restaked, smoke rising from forge fires that glow orange in the late afternoon.
Orcs move between the rows. Armed, scarred, carrying the marks of three factions tearing each other apart over who rules next while Drogmar dies slow.
I count cook fires and estimate the camp at six hundred, maybe more.
Knox leads us down the switchback into the valley at road speed, no faster. The column tightens. The sound of nine engines echoing off the granite walls announces us before the first sentry raises his head.
Dravik meets us at the camp's edge.
He stands in the road with his arms at his sides, braids shot through gray, built like a man who grew up in sparring pits.
Knox pulls his helmet. Drags a hand through his hair. The two of them look at each other, and then Knox clasps Dravik's forearm and Dravik clasps his.
"They're gathered," Dravik says. "All three factions. Varak brought fifty from the eastern camps. He's been talking about his brother's blood right since he arrived."
Knox nods.
"And my father?"
"Alive." Dravik's mouth tightens. "He asked to see you."
Knox doesn't answer that. He turns back to the bikes, and the brothers fall in behind him. Finn at his right shoulder, Colt at his left, the rest of us filling in without discussion. We fall in behind him the same way we ride behind him. Nobody needs to be told where to stand.
The orcs in the camp watch us pass. Two minotaurs and seven orcs in leather cuts, road-dirty, smelling of exhaust and sweat, walking through a camp of warriors who spent the past year killing each other over who sits next on a throne that isn't empty yet.
I keep my kit on my shoulder and my eyes on the faces around us—curious and hostile in equal measure, and more than a few too young to hold an opinion and too armed to need one.
Knox walks straight through without looking at anyone. Finn walks beside him.
Dravik leads us to the center of the camp. A cleared space, packed earth, a fire pit ringed with stones. The faction leaders sit on three sides. Their men stand behind them. Six hundred orcs in a valley, and the silence when Knox stops in the center of it hits harder than the engines did.
Knox speaks in Orcish. I don't understand the words.
The language runs guttural and clipped, built for commands, and Knox's voice drops into it like he's pulled on a coat he left behind and found it still fits.
Dravik translates for us under his breath, and what he translates is this: Knox is invoking single combat.
Ancient orc law. A challenge to the disputed succession, settled by blood, witnessed by the clans.
Varak stands from the eastern delegation.
He's younger than Knox. Broader through the shoulders, his tusks uncapped, deep scars running both forearms from wrist to elbow.
Torgan's brother. The man who carved his claim to his dead brother's seat through a year of violence, and it shows in every scar.
He accepts the challenge with a word I don't catch and a gesture that needs no translation: a fist raised.
The arena sits above the camp on a flat stone shelf cut into the ridge face. A circle marked with symbols older than the camp, carved deep into the granite, filled with moss and rainwater. The factions file up the path and ring the edges, and six hundred orcs go quiet at once.
Knox strips his cut.
He shrugs the leather off, and the Feral Sons patch comes free in his hands. He holds it out to Finn.
Finn takes it. His fingers close on the leather, his throat works and his eyes go bright. Knox grips his brother's shoulder with one hand and holds him there. They don't speak. Finn's chin lifts.
I take my place at the ring's edge. The kit opens on the stone beside me.
I've run the scenarios. Knox takes a body blow that fractures ribs—I have the wrap and the palpation sequence.
A joint dislocation: the reduction technique for orc bone structure differs from human and minotaur, and I drilled the technique until my hands could do it without thinking.
Blood loss gets hemostatic gauze, direct pressure, the tourniquet if it's arterial.
Blunt trauma to the skull I can't fix here, but I can stabilize long enough to buy time.
I made a deal a long time ago. With the part of myself that knelt on asphalt in the dark and couldn't get the ambulance door open fast enough, couldn't reach her fast enough, couldn't stop the bleeding with hands that shook so hard the gauze tore in my grip.
I made the deal on my knees with blood on my palms, sirens in my ears and Rachel's pulse fading under my fingers.
Be ready. Every time. No matter what. Nobody dies on your watch.
The terms haven't changed.
Knox steps into the ring. Varak rises to meet him.