13. Dante
DANTE
The roar of my Panhead echoes off the sheer granite walls, the only sound in the suffocating stillness of the Cascades.
The engine heat bleeds through my leather chaps, but Savannah’s hands on my waist are like ice.
She doesn't cling. She doesn’t wrap her arms around me like a girl looking for a thrill.
She hooks two fingers into the loops of my Kutte, her touch barely there, yet I feel the tension radiating off her like a live wire.
I bank the bike around a hairpin turn where the pavement gives way to rotted gravel and pine needles.
The logging road is a ghost, reclaimed by ferns and shadow.
Behind me, she doesn't flinch as the back tire fish-tails over a patch of wet shale. She sits pinned to the seat, her head swiveling in a slow, mechanical arc. She isn’t looking at the view.
She’s checking for muzzle flashes in the tree line.
I pull the bike to a stop where the trail chokes out at the edge of a ravine. I kill the engine. The silence that rushes back is heavy, thick with the smell of damp earth and cedar.
"They don't use the main roads," she says. She slides off the bike before I’ve even kicked the stand down. Her boots hit the gravel without a sound.
She walks to a cluster of stones near the ledge, her eyes tracking something invisible in the dirt. I follow, watching the way her shoulders stay square, her hand hovering near the small of her back where her blade is tucked.
"Look at the moss on that trail marker," she says, gesturing to a rusted iron post fifty yards up the slope.
I squint. It looks like standard mountain rot. "What am I seeing, Cruz?"
"The scrape on the left side. It’s fresh.
Someone dragged a heavy equipment crate past it three days ago.
Probably mortars or high-yield explosives.
" She moves to a cedar tree, her thumb tracing a shallow, jagged notch in the bark.
"This isn't a territorial mark. It’s a waypoint. It means the transit station is within a three-mile radius. There’s an old ranger station over the next ridge, isn't there? "
"Yeah. Abandoned since the eighties."
"It’s not abandoned anymore." Her voice is flat, devoid of the horror it should contain. "They’ll have a spotted-dog look-out on the roof, two-man rotation. They use the elevation to relay radio signals because the valley kills the digital encryption."
I look at her—really take my time. She stands in the shadows of the pines, mapping out a war with the cold efficiency of a general. She knows the weight of their crates, the frequency of their radios, and the shape of their cruelty. Every detail she gives is a scar she’s wearing on the inside.
"You didn't just see this," I state, my voice low. "You lived it."
She doesn't answer. She just looks toward the ridge, her eyes reflecting the cold, grey sky like a predator scenting blood on the wind.
I lean against a moss-covered boulder, watching her eyes track the horizon. The wind picks up, whistling through the pines, but it doesn't mask the rot of the situation. I’ve lived in the gray for too long not to smell the sulfur.
"Rodriguez didn't pick this place for the tactical advantage, Savannah," I say. My voice feels like grinding stones. "He didn't give you to us because we’re the best protectors in the Pacific Northwest."
She turns her head, the movement sharp and avian. "He said you were the only ones equipped to handle the blowback."
"He lied." I spit a mouthful of bile toward the ravine.
"He gave you to us because we’re expendable.
If the Sombra Cartel burns this mountain to the ground to get to you, the Feds don't have to fill out any paperwork for dead agents.
They just lose a few outlaws and a witness they were tired of hiding. Two problems, one fire."
Savannah’s lips purse until the muscles jump in her cheek.
The wood scrap in her pocket snaps—a sharp, dry sound.
"Ammunition," she spits. The word comes out laced with a sudden, jagged heat that cracks her mask. "That’s all we are. You’re a clip they’re ready to empty, and I’m the casing they’ve already dropped in the dirt. "
She paces the small clearing, her movements erratic, her hands trembling with a rage she can’t quite swallow.
"Eight years. I gave them eight years of my life to bury those animals, and they’re waiting for me to be inconvenient enough to let me die.
They treat people like something you use until the edge goes dull, then you throw the blade in the river. "
"They do," I say quietly.
She stops, her chest heaving, her eyes burning into mine. "And you? You just accept it? You built a fortress just to wait for the executioner?"
"I built a fortress so we didn't have to die for their lies anymore.
" I step toward her, closing the gap until she has to look up.
"Hell Court isn't a club. It’s a graveyard for men the government tried to erase.
Delta, CIA, black-bag contractors—every man wearing my patch was discarded the moment a mission went south or a politician needed a scapegoat.
We aren't outlaws by choice, Savannah. We're outlaws because the systems we bled for demanded our loyalty, then denied our humanity. "
I look out over the valley, my kingdom of rusted iron and broken men.
"I stopped believing in flags and agencies a long time ago. Now, I only believe in the person standing next to me in the dark."
The mountain air turns thick, carrying the sharp tang of pine and the bitter ghost of wildfire smoke from the eastern ridges.
It’s a heavy, honest heat. At last, the jagged edges of Savannah’s posture soften.
She doesn’t look like a weapon waiting for a trigger pull.
She looks small against the vast, indifferent green of the valley.
We stand in the silence of two survivors who have stopped running because there’s nowhere left to go.
I recognize that slump in her shoulders.
It’s the weight of a thousand days spent holding your breath, waiting for the floor to fall out.
My own bones ache with it—a shared weariness that passes between us without a single word.
The tactical assessment is over. The war is still there, but for a heartbeat, the wind is just wind.
"I look at my hands sometimes," she says, her voice barely a notch above the rustle of the needles. "I see the calluses. I see the way my fingers twitch for a safety that isn't there. I try to reach back, into the time before the blood, and there’s nothing but a hole."
She turns her face toward the sun, eyes hooded.
"I don't remember her name," she whispers. "The girl I was before they called me Savage. She’s dead. Buried under a brother who didn't make it and a father who couldn't protect her. I'm just the thing that crawled out."
Something in my chest, something I’ve kept under lock and key since the day I burned my uniform, finally cracks. It isn’t pity; it’s recognition. I reach out before I can talk myself out of the risk. My fingers find her jaw, my skin rough against hers.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't reach for the blade at her hip or count the exits. She leans into the friction of my palm, her exhale a long, shuddering sob that never breaks the surface.
I step into her space, my shadow swallowing her whole.
I can feel the heat radiating off her skin, the frantic, bird-like thrum of her pulse under my thumb.
The world shrinks until it’s just the smell of cedar and the gravity pulling us together.
I lower my head, my breath mixing with hers.
We’re balanced on a razor’s edge, a hair’s breadth from a collision that will change the architecture of this entire mountain.
The static kills the moment before it can breathe. It’s a jagged, electronic scream that tears through the mountain air, snapping the thread connecting us. My radio chirps—a series of high-pitched alerts that signal a breach.
"Cerberus, come in. We’ve got shadows on the North rim," Gideon’s voice gravels over the speaker, distorted by the terrain but unmistakable in its urgency. "Four vehicles, heavy armor, coming up the old logging vein. They aren't scouts this time, Dante. They’re coming for the throat."
The warmth of Savannah’s skin vanishes. Before I can even draw a full breath, she’s gone, stepping back three paces as if she’s been burned.
The vulnerability I saw in her eyes a second ago is replaced by a cold, amber frost. She doesn't just put her walls back up; she builds a fortress in the span of a heartbeat.
She checks the slide on her handgun, her movements fluid and devoid of the tremor that shook her moments ago.
I grip the radio handset so hard the plastic groans.
My knuckles are white, my pulse thrumming with a mixture of adrenaline and a savage, mourning ache for what just slipped away.
I want to reach for her, to pull her back into the quiet, but the air has already curdled with the scent of an approaching fight.
"Copy, Judge," I grit out, my voice returning to the low, strategic rumble of a commander. "We’re five minutes out. Divert the prospects to the secondary fallback points. Don't let them pin you in the valley."
I look at Savannah. She isn't looking at me anymore. She’s staring through the trees, already calculating fields of fire and wind speed. The woman who nearly let me see her is buried deep beneath the sniper who only sees targets.
"You heard him," she says, her tone as sharp as a razor. "The terrain favors a bottleneck at the bridge. If we don't move now, they’ll have high ground before we clear the ridge."
I kick the Panhead to life. The roar feels like a war cry.
As she swings her leg over the seat and locks onto my Kutte again, her touch is different—utilitarian, cold, braced for impact.
We aren't two people on a mountain anymore. We’re two weapons being aimed.
My heart remains on that ledge, trapped in the silence we lost.