13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mustang
The gate went first. Steel and rebar and two hundred pounds of reinforced hardware, and it folded like paper when the black SUV hit it at forty miles an hour.
I was already moving before the hinges gave way, my hand finding the Glock on my hip while the sound was still traveling across the courtyard—metal screaming, gravel spitting, the deep hollow thud of something heavy impacting something that wasn’t supposed to move.
The tree line erupted before the gate finished swinging.
Muzzle flashes, orange and sharp against the gray pre-dawn, and the crack of rifle fire cutting through the compound like someone had dropped a glass table.
I counted four positions, maybe five, spread along the eastern perimeter where the pines grew thick enough to hide a man and his weapon.
The guard tower’s spotlight jerked sideways, sweeping the tree line in a blind arc before it went dark—either the prospect inside had dropped or he’d hit the deck, and I was betting on the latter because Wicked Mayhem didn’t hire stupid.
“GUNS OUT!” My voice carried across the courtyard, flat and hard, the same tone I’d used in two decades of commanding men who knew better than to hesitate. “EAST SIDE TREE LINE, MULTIPLE CONTACTS! COVER AND RETURN FIRE!”
Brothers poured from the clubhouse door in various states of dress.
Some in cut-offs and boots, some in yesterday’s jeans with sleep still crusted in their eyes.
It didn’t matter. They moved the way trained men move when the shit hits—no panic, no wasted motion, just bodies flowing toward the weapons locker inside the main door like water finding its level.
Rifles came out. Ammo belts. The clatter of magazines being seated, bolts being worked, the mechanical symphony of violence getting ready to happen.
The compound layout revealed itself through the chaos the way it always did—not as a diagram but as the ground we fought on.
Gravel courtyard, fifty yards across. Chain-link inner fence topped with razor wire running the perimeter, the gate now buckled inward at a fifteen-degree angle where the SUV had left its mark.
Covered bike bay to the west, concrete pillars supporting a rusted corrugated roof where twenty Harleys sat in neat rows under canvas covers.
The clubhouse itself—two stories of weathered brick and reinforced windows, the Wicked Mayhem emblem painted above the door in fading crimson.
To the north, the guard tower, its spotlight dark now but its silhouette sharp against the lightening sky.
Ace was already on the left flank. I caught the flash of his VP patch as he crossed the courtyard at a crouch, rifle low, his salt-and-pepper stubble catching the first weak light.
He didn’t look at me. Didn’t need to. His left hand went up, two fingers extended, and he whistled,a sharp, piercing sound that cut through the gunfire,and two prospects broke from the main group and sprinted toward the guard tower without being told twice.
Ace followed, rifle coming up to his shoulder, and the first controlled burst from his weapon answered the tree line with something that sounded like punctuation.
I took the concrete pillar of the covered bike bay.
Good cover, clear sight line to the gate, which was now half-open and hanging from one hinge, the SUV’s front end crumpled against the inner fence where the driver had stalled out or been shot or both.
My Glock came up in a two-handed grip, and I fired two rounds at the nearest muzzle flash in the tree line.
The recoil traveled up my arms, familiar and solid, brass ejecting to my right and hitting the gravel with a soft ping.
I fired again. Two more rounds. The muzzle flash winked out.
Either I’d hit something or the shooter had moved, and in the chaos of a firefight, the difference didn’t matter as much as the result.
Movement in the clubhouse doorway pulled my head around.
Hannah.
My gray flannel hung off one of her shoulders, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, the hem hitting mid-thigh over bare feet I could see from thirty yards away.
Her red hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in a tangle that caught what little light there was, and her green eyes were wide, fixed on the courtyard where men with rifles were trading fire with men in the trees.
“GET BACK INSIDE AND STAY ON THE FLOOR!” The command left my throat raw, louder than the gunfire, and I didn’t wait to see if she obeyed.
My body was already adjusting, half a step left, angling my shoulder toward the gate, putting the concrete pillar between her and the tree line without breaking my firing rhythm.
Two more rounds. Brass. The smell of cordite thick in my nostrils, mixing with the dew and the pine sap and the sharp metallic tang of fear that hangs over a gunfight no matter how many times you’ve been in one.
She didn’t go back inside. I caught the movement in my periphery—she dropped to a crouch in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, her eyes tracking the fight with a focus that shouldn’t have surprised me but did.
Nine days in a cabin with a man who cleaned guns at the dinner table had apparently been an education.
She wasn’t running. Wasn’t screaming. Was watching, the way she watched everything, and something in my chest tightened around the knowledge that she was still here, still breathing, still mine to protect whether she’d asked for it or not.
The gate moved.
Two men came through the gap on foot, tactical gear, rifles low, moving with the coordinated efficiency of people who’d done this before.
The first one cleared the buckled steel and brought his weapon up toward the clubhouse door,toward Hannah,and I put a round through his right shoulder before his finger found the trigger.
The impact spun him, rifle clattering to the gravel, and he went down hard on his side, screaming in a way that told me the bullet had found bone.
The second one was faster. He cleared the gate behind his partner, rifle already tracking, and I was moving before his barrel settled.
Three long strides across open gravel, and I hit him low, my shoulder driving into his sternum with enough force to lift his feet off the ground.
We went down together, his rifle discharging once into the sky before it flew from his grip, and then it was hand to hand on gravel that scraped skin raw on contact.
He was good. Trained. His elbow caught me under the jaw hard enough to make my vision blur, and his knee came up toward my groin with the kind of precision that said he’d done this drill a thousand times.
I rode the knee, took it on the thigh instead, and drove my palm into his nose.
Cartilage gave way with a wet crunch. Blood sprayed across my knuckles, hot and sudden, and he roared through the mess, one hand clawing for my throat.
I didn’t give him the chance. My knee found his spine, drove down hard, and his body arched beneath me, the fight going out of him in a strangled gasp.
I rolled him onto his stomach, knee still planted between his shoulder blades and reached for the strip of zip tie I kept folded in my cut pocket.
Three seconds to bind his wrists behind his back, the plastic pulling tight against skin still slick with blood from his broken nose.
He was alive. Conscious. Breathing in ragged, wet pulls through what was left of his nasal passages, and that was exactly what I needed. A body that could talk was worth ten bodies that couldn’t.
I stood. The courtyard had gone quiet, or quieter—brothers held the perimeter, rifles trained on the tree line where the muzzle flashes had stopped.
Ace was at the north corner, one hand raised in a hold signal, his eyes doing a methodical sweep of the tree line that told me he’d accounted for every shooter and found none of them willing to continue.
The SUV sat dead against the inner fence, its engine ticking as it cooled, a dark shape behind the wheel that I didn’t need to examine to know was finished.
Two prisoners. One dead driver. The compound still standing.
I looked down at the man at my feet. Mid-thirties.
Tactical gear, decent quality. A burner phone still clipped to his vest, screen cracked but intact.
His eyes were open, blood pooling beneath his face on the gravel, and they held a combination of rage and calculation that men like him always had when the plan went sideways.
Good. Rage made men talk. Calculation made them trade what they knew for what they thought they could get.
I crouched beside him, one hand on the back of his neck, and felt his pulse hammering against my palm. Alive. Conscious. Useful.
“Let’s have a conversation,” I said.
I dragged him by the collar across twenty yards of gravel.
His boots left twin grooves in the stone, and the blood from his nose painted a thin, dark line between them.
Brothers closed ranks as we reached the center of the courtyard—not a formal circle, nothing theatrical, just men with rifles settling into positions that covered every angle while keeping their weapons lowered but present.
The kind of formation that happened without being called, the product of twenty years riding together and knowing, without discussion, how to hold a perimeter while something ugly went down in the middle of it.