Chapter Six
Gage glanced around, forcing his nerves to settle. Or rather, trying to do that. Hard to manage settled nerves after coming so damn close to dying.
But there was no death here at the moment, thank God.
They’d gotten damn lucky with only having minor injuries. Not just for the adults but especially for the kids, too. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. Because this should have never happened. Not to those kids. Not here in this facility.
In contrast to the hell that’d gone on in the hangar just two hours earlier, the Crossfire Ops briefing room was the picture of control. Cool, ordered, and humming with quiet efficiency.
The lights were bright and steady, the massive digital display on the far wall looping through system diagnostics and compound schematics as techs worked in the background.
The long glass-topped conference table gleamed beneath the overheads, scattered with tablets, comm headsets, and a few untouched mugs of coffee that smelled burned from sitting too long.
Gage sat on the edge of the table, bare from the waist up, while Beck Culver stitched his arm. The combat medic looked calm as ever, hair pulled back, eyes steady behind his glasses, but his movements carried the practiced rhythm of someone patching up battlefield wounds long past exhaustion.
“Careful,” Gage said through gritted teeth. “You planning to sew me up or upholster me?”
Beck didn’t even glance up. “If I were upholstering you, Kellan, I’d pick better material. Stop twitching.”
Gage snorted, but held still as Beck pulled the thread tight. “You always this gentle with your patients?”
“Only the ones who won’t shut up.”
Across the room, Owen was getting a few stitches of his own, ribbing the medic who worked on him, while Rena sat at a separate table with a bandaged arm.
The fluorescent light caught the edge of her hair, the faint tension around her eyes.
She looked steady now, but Gage had seen the tremor in her hands earlier.
The way she’d powered through it anyway.
Noah stood near the main display where he was talking quietly with Ruby, who looked none the worse for wear despite being half covered in grime and gunpowder residue.
They were no doubt strategizing, because that’s what people like them did.
Patch the holes, rebuild the defense, figure out what the hell had happened and move on to the next fight.
Beck tied off the last stitch and cut the thread. “You’re good,” he said. “No heroics for a few days. Let it heal.”
“What if heroics come looking for me?” Gage asked, flexing his arm, testing it.
Beck flashed him a grin. “Then duck.”
From across the room, Rena’s laugh slipped out, quiet, weary, but real. Gage caught her eye for a heartbeat. The flicker of connection steadied something deep in him that the pain hadn’t touched.
They should’ve been dead. Every one of them.
That thought kept looping through his head, sparking a slow, seething burn that no amount of painkillers could dull.
They’d been ambushed inside their own damn home, surrounded, cut off, kids screaming while trained killers stalked through the dark.
Crossfire Ops was supposed to be untouchable. Untouchable.
And yet tonight had nearly turned into a massacre.
His jaw tightened. The burn in his arm was nothing compared to the heat crawling under his skin. He wasn’t just angry. He was fucking furious. Whoever had pulled this off had planned it too well, known too much. That wasn’t random. That was targeted.
And if the targeting assholes thought this was over, they were dead wrong.
Across the room, Crossfire Creek’s Sheriff Arden Chase ended a phone call and moved toward Noah and Ruby.
The sheriff carried herself like she still wore a uniform.
Shoulders back, eyes sharp, no-nonsense in the way only a former soldier could be.
Late forties, short blonde hair cropped to regulation length, she looked like she’d fit right in at Crossfire Ops rather than a small town sheriff’s office.
The badge on her belt might say law enforcement, but the way she moved said she knew how to clear a room with more than words.
“Perimeter’s secure,” Sheriff Chase reported. “I’ve got deputies sweeping the fields, and the feds are en route for evidence collection.”
Gage sat back in his chair, the dull ache in his stitched arm pulsing in rhythm with the quiet hum of the servers behind him.
Isla Prescott, Crossfire’s head tech, stood nearby, a tablet in one hand, dark circles under her eyes.
She looked as if she hadn’t blinked in hours, scrolling through lines of data and schematics while muttering to herself about security logs and power grid overrides.
If anyone could trace the breach, it was Isla.
Gage shifted his attention to the wall of monitors that threw a cold blue glow across the room, a wash of digital light that made the world outside look distant, almost unreal.
Each screen streamed a different view of the compound.
Security feeds, drone footage, body cams from the deputies stationed at the perimeter.
But at the moment, one screen drew everyone’s attention.
It showed the gates of Crossfire Ops, floodlights cutting through the darkness, vehicles lined up as parents came to collect their kids.
There were hugs, tears, flashes of relief caught by the cameras.
Gage watched as a medic guided a teenage boy with a bandaged arm toward his mother.
Another girl leaned against an EMT, wrapped in a thermal blanket.
Minor injuries. Shaken, bruised, terrified but alive. A lot of little miracles had gone into that happening, and some of it had been luck. There’d been dozens of shots fired, and any one of them could have hit the kids.
Yeah, damn lucky.
He shifted his attention to Lily who sat at the end of the briefing table, wrapped in her blanket. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor showing the other kids, but she didn’t move, didn’t ask to go. Her decision, Noah had said. She wanted to stay for the debrief. To understand.
Riley Burke, Lily’s sister and one of Crossfire’s tech interns, sat beside her, one arm around Lily’s shoulders. Riley looked pale and exhausted, but her presence was steadying. Beck was glad Lily had it.
Noah kept glancing at his nieces, and Gage knew that stance. Control layered over guilt. It didn’t matter that they’d saved lives, what mattered was that the attack had happened at all. That it had happened here, on his watch, with his niece in the middle of it.
Gage’s focus drifted back to the monitors. Parents were driving away now, taillights fading into the Texas dark. The compound gates swung shut again, sealing Crossfire Ops back into its uneasy calm.
He pushed back his chair and stood, the muscles in his arm tugging against the fresh stitches. The smell of antiseptic and burned metal still clung to his clothes, but sitting still was worse than the pain. He needed to move, needed to check on Rena.
He crossed the room, stopping beside her chair. “How’s the arm?”
She glanced up, the corner of her mouth twitching. “It’s fine. Missed anything vital.”
“Yeah, well, you still bleed prettier than most people.”
Her brow arched. “That your idea of bedside charm?”
“Depends. Is it working?”
That earned him a small smirk, which was a hell of a lot better than the haunted look she’d had in the hangar. She set down her coffee cup and leaned back, eyes sharp but amused. “You’re fishing.”
“Maybe,” he said, then sobered a little. “But seriously, you saved my life back there on the rafters.”
Rena waved it off, light but not dismissive. “Guess we’re finally even. You pulled my ass out of that crash two years ago.”
Before Gage could respond, Noah’s voice carried from across the room. “No one’s keeping count.”
Both Rena and Gage turned toward him. Noah was watching them with that mix of stern authority and weary affection.
Rena shot back without missing a beat. “We are.”
“Definitely keeping count,” Gage added, grinning.
That drew a low chuckle from Noah, the first hint of levity all night. “Fine. Just make sure you two don’t rack up any more points.”
“Working on it,” Rena said dryly.
Gage looked at her then, really looked. There was a ghost of a smile on her lips, the kind that told him she wasn’t okay but she was standing. Breathing. Fighting.
And right now, that was enough.
Ruby ended her latest call with a crisp “copy that,” and slid her phone into her pocket. Her expression had that razor-sharp calm when she turned toward Noah.
“You’ve got Maverick Ops for as long as you need us,” she assured him.
Across the room, Owen was still talking quietly on his own phone, but at that, he looked up. “Strike Force, too,” he said, ending his call. “We’re in this together.”
Noah nodded, the gratitude clear in his eyes even if he didn’t say it out loud.
At the table, Lily looked up from her coffee, still pale but steady. “I want to be like you,” she said to Ruby, her voice soft but certain.
Ruby’s expression softened for the first time all night. “That’s kind, sweetheart, but I think you’ve got plenty of fight of your own.”
Lily smiled faintly, and Gage couldn’t help himself. “For the record,” he said, “I want to be like Ruby Maverick, too. You looked like a warrior from hell when you came through that corridor.”
Ruby shot him a wry grin. “That’s one description I’ll take.”
“Seriously,” Gage went on, “the full body armor, the goggles, the smoke rolling in behind you… if I hadn’t known it was you, I’d have surrendered on the spot.”
Ruby chuckled low in her throat. “You give me too much credit. I got lucky. The second the attack started, I was already moving toward headquarters. Managed to slip inside before the locks went down.” She nodded toward Isla, who was still at her station, fingers flying across the tablet screen.
“Found Isla in the command center. While I suited up, she was already unjamming doors and restoring power. Once the systems came back online, she stayed with the kids while I went to help.”
Isla glanced up long enough to give a short nod, the look in her eyes saying Don’t make a fuss.
“Still,” Gage said, leaning back against the table, “you showing up when you did probably saved all our asses.”
Ruby gave him a look that was half-amusement, half-warning. “Don’t start handing out halos, Kellan. We’re not out of this yet.”
That was true enough. Gage felt the weight of it in his chest. They’d survived tonight, but he had a really bad feeling that this was just the first round.
“Thank you,” Noah said. “All of you. You saved lives tonight, and that matters. But we’re not done.”
He reached for the remote on the table and turned toward the massive wall of monitors. A few clicks later, the live feeds vanished, replaced one by one with photographs, faces filling the screens until the glow of a hundred mugshots lit the room.
Gage recognized some of them immediately.
A few were old ghosts from ops gone sideways, people he’d hoped never to see again.
Others were familiar from Crossfire’s database, former operatives, discharged soldiers, mercs who’d taken the wrong contracts.
And some were personal, men and women Gage had crossed paths with overseas, who’d vanished into the underbelly of war and resentment.
The farther the wall filled, the heavier the silence grew. By the time the last photo appeared, the entire surface was a mosaic of potential enemies.
Over a hundred faces.
Noah’s jaw was tight, his expression a mix of fury and focus. “I had Isla pull every file tied to threats against Crossfire Ops. Me. Maverick Ops. Strike Force. Anyone who’s ever had reason to come for us.”
Gage could feel it, the collective shift in the room as everyone took in the scope of it.
“That’s one hell of a list,” Owen muttered.
“It is,” Noah agreed. “And at this point, we’re going to work with the theory that whoever orchestrated this is still alive. That either they escaped in the helicopter or possibly weren’t even on scene.”
Noah stepped closer to the wall, the glow from the monitors cutting hard lines across his face.
“We’ll go through every name, every file, every rumor until we find the one who did this.
” He turned back to the room, voice dropping low but steady.
“Someone out there tried to kill us. Tried to kill my niece. Tried to send a message.”
His gaze swept over each of them. Ruby, Owen, Rena, Gage.
“Let’s send a message back,” Noah growled. He pointed at the wall of faces, hand steady. “Let’s find the bastard who tried to kill us.”