Mark
Fuse
Crew doesn't waste time on speeches. "Iris. Talk to me."
"Working on it." She's got her laptop balanced on her lap, fingers moving fast, eyes locked on the screen.
A line of code scrolls past too fast for me to read any of it.
"Triangulating off the last three pings, not just the one—gives me a tighter radius."
A pause, her jaw tightening. "Last ping off Lucas's known burner was eleven minutes ago. Industrial stretch off Route 9, near the old grain depot."
"That's Viper territory."
"Was. Half abandoned now. Makes sense as a hole to disappear into."
"He's not moving," she adds, eyes still locked on the screen. "Phone's been stationary six minutes. Either he thinks nobody's coming, or he wants us to find him."
Nobody likes the second option. Nobody says so out loud.
Bishop paces a tight line by his bike, jaw working, hands flexing open and closed, hunting for a target to hit. Emma could have gotten taken again, too. He hasn't said it out loud yet, but it's written across every line of him.
"We roll in loud, we lose any advantage," Holt says, already pulling a second set of keys off his belt. "I'll take Ash and two prospects around the back side, cut off any exit toward the highway. You three go straight in."
"Done." Ash is already on his bike, helmet on, engine running before anyone's finished planning. "Say when."
Crew looks at me once, steady, the kind of look that asks a question without needing words for it. "You good?"
"I'm good."
I'm not good. I'm somewhere past good, colder and more focused than I've felt in years, every instinct I spent a decade building narrowing down to one single purpose.
No room left for anything else. No room for fear, no room for doubt, the math of getting from here to wherever they're holding her as fast as physics allows.
"She may be his blood," I say, mostly to myself, mostly to hear it out loud one more time before we ride. "But she's still mine."
Nobody argues. Nobody even blinks.
Crew swings onto his bike. "Then let's go get her."
Brothers scramble around us, everyone clear on their role. This club doesn't fall apart in a crisis. It locks into place, every piece sliding where it belongs, decades of practice making the machinery run smooth even when the stakes are a five-year-old girl instead of a shipment or a turf line.
I check my own gear once, twice, hands steady even though nothing else in me feels steady right now.
My knuckles find the paper crown still stuffed in my jacket pocket, the one that slid off Rose's head an hour ago and I picked up without thinking.
She laughed and made another. This time with more sparkles.
Small thing. I leave it there. Don't need a reason to remember what I'm riding toward, but I'll take one anyway.
The ride to Route 9 takes eleven minutes that feel like eleven hours. Wind screaming past hard enough to sting, engine vibration climbing up through my hands until my grip on the bars is the only steady thing left in me, every mile marker a small relief and a fresh wave of dread in equal measure.
Bishop rides beside me, Crew ahead, the three of us cutting through empty backroads at a speed that would get any one of us arrested on a normal day. Cold air burns going into my lungs. I don't slow down for it.
This isn't a normal day.
The grain depot comes into view exactly where Iris said it would, a rust-streaked hulk of a building sitting alone against the treeline, one truck parked near the loading dock that doesn't belong to anybody legitimate.
We kill the engines a quarter mile out. Walk the rest.
The gravel swallows sound better than I'd like—every step of ours too quiet, which means anyone waiting inside gets the same courtesy.
Crew signals two fingers toward the east side, Bishop already peeling off without a word exchanged beyond that, years of working together making conversation unnecessary.
I fall in behind Crew, every sense locked onto the building ahead, cataloging exits, windows, the single door propped open like an invitation nobody sane would accept.
The light cuts thin across the gravel lot. No movement near the truck. No guard posted at the door that I can see, which worries me more than if there had been one—either Lucas is careless, or he's confident enough not to bother, and neither option sits easy in my gut.
Somewhere behind that door, if the pings are right, is a five-year-old who checks under the bed before she'll close her eyes. Who renamed a stuffed dog just to make me say goodnight to it. That thought doesn't slow me down. It sharpens everything down to a single clean edge.
"Holt copy?" Crew says into his phone.
"In position. Ash and the prospects have the back covered."
"On my mark."
I don't think about Nora right now, carrying my unborn baby.
Can't afford to. If I let myself picture her face, the way she looked standing in that yard surrounded by abandoned balloons, I'll lose the cold clarity I need to walk through that door and come out the other side with Rose still breathing.
So I think about nothing instead. Just the door. Just the next ten seconds. Just the math.
"Mark."
We move.