9. Rogue
Chapter Nine
ROGUE
They come on day ten.
I knew they would. Devlin Marsh doesn't bluff. Vargas was right about that. The Crest has been building numbers in Memphis for a week, pulling members from Nashville, staging in rented houses across the river in West Memphis. My contacts tracked their every movement. I knew it was coming.
What I didn't know was when. And the answer turns out to be four in the morning on a Tuesday, because Devlin Marsh is a psychopath with a flair for drama.
The first sign is the security camera feeds cutting out. Gage installed the system three years ago. Twelve cameras covering every angle of The Forge and the surrounding block. They go black all at once, which means someone killed the power to the junction box on the building's east side.
I'm awake before Gage's call comes through. Instinct. The animal part of my brain that registers silence as threat.
I'm out of bed, into jeans and boots, Glock in hand, in under ten seconds.
"Margot." Sharp. Command voice.
She's already sitting up. She wakes fast, like me, like someone trained by years of unpredictable emergencies. "What is it?"
"Get in the bathroom. Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone except me. Not Colt, not Sully, not anyone. Just me."
"Rogue..."
"Now."
She goes. I hear the bathroom lock click and I'm already out the bedroom door, moving down the hall toward the main room. The building is coming alive. Doors opening, boots hitting concrete, the metallic sounds of weapons being checked and charged.
Gage meets me at the hall's end. He's carrying a shotgun. A Mossberg 590, the one he keeps behind the bar. And his face is set in that flat, ready expression that means combat.
"Ten minimum," he says. "Coming from the east side. On foot. Bikes are staged somewhere else close by."
"Where's Rook?"
"Roof. Got his rifle up there."
Good. Rook and his marine training and the Remington 700 he keeps zeroed at three hundred yards. That's our elevated advantage.
"Sully?"
"Arming up. Brick's got the back door. Donovan's on the river side."
I move through the main room. Dark, the bar lights off, everything in shadow. Through the front windows I can see movement in the lot. Dark shapes. The moonlight catches leather and chrome.
They're not subtle. Devlin doesn't do subtle. He does overwhelming force. Show up with enough men to make resistance look like suicide. It works on most people.
I'm not most people and he fucking underestimates me.
"Hold positions," I say into the radio. "Nobody fires until I call it."
Because there might still be a way out of this that doesn't involve a body count.
A way that doesn't bring MPD to our door and turn this into a siege.
I've got civilian neighbors. The loft conversions a few blocks down, and the restaurant on the corner a few blocks past them.
This isn't a remote compound. This is Memphis.
The front door rattles. Then a voice, loudly.
"Rogue. Let's talk. Send the woman out and we drive away. Simple as that."
Devlin. I recognize the voice. Deep, smooth, the kind of voice that sounds reasonable right up until it's telling you how you're going to die a horrible death.
I signal Gage. He moves to the left of the door. I take the right. The Glock is warm in my hand and my heartbeat is steady. The same as always in combat. My father's gift.
I raise my voice. "She's got nothing, Devlin. She didn't see shit. And even if she did, who's she going to tell? You think she'll testify against me?"
"Not my problem. I don’t play odds, I eliminate the variables. You know that."
"Come through that door and find out what else gets eliminated."
Silence. Then, "Have it your way."
The front windows explode.
Not gunfire. Something thrown. Heavy objects, rocks, maybe, or pieces of broken concrete, shattering the glass. Then they're coming in through the gaps, dark shapes pouring through the broken windows, and everything is noise and violence and the animal calculus of survival.
I fire. Two shots. First hits a Crest member in the shoulder, spinning him. Second misses as another one dives behind the pool table. Gage's shotgun booms, deafening in the enclosed space, and a man screams.
The room becomes a war zone. Muzzle flashes in the dark, the smell of cordite, bodies moving fast and low.
I'm counting. Counting enemies, counting shots, counting my brothers.
Sully's here now, his .45 barking from behind the bar.
Brick comes in from the back hallway with a baseball bat.
Out of ammo or never loaded, it doesn't matter because a bat in Brick's hands is just as lethal.
A Crest member rounds the corner of the bar and I take him down. Two center mass, clean. He folds. Another comes from my left and I pivot, fire, miss, fire again. Hit. He drops.
"Rook!" I radio. "Count outside!"
"Four still in the lot. Two trying to flank south. I've got them pinned." His voice is calm. Combat-calm. Marine-calm.
Then I hear it. From the hallway. From the direction of my room.
I run.
Down the hall, past the numbered doors, toward the room where Margot is locked in the bathroom and where two men, Crest cuts visible in the emergency lighting, are trying to kick in my bedroom door.
The first one doesn't see me coming. I put a round in the back of his knee and he goes down screaming.
The second spins, fires. The shot goes wide, punching into the wall beside my head.
And I close the distance, grab his gun arm, and break his wrist. The weapon clatters.
I slam him into the wall once, twice, and he goes limp.
I'm through my bedroom door. It's intact. The lock held. Thank Christ. I press my hand to the wood for a moment and force my breathing to slow. The lock held. She's safe.
I cross to the bathroom. My hand is shaking. The first time in three years. The first time since Dad. Not from fear of the fight. From fear of what I'd find if that door hadn't held.
"Margot. It's me."
The lock clicks. The door opens. She's pressed against the far wall of the bathroom, breathing fast but controlled.
No panic. Those brown eyes find mine and hold.
Her hands are steady and she's holding the ceramic lid of the toilet tank like a club.
Ready to fight. Even locked in a bathroom with gunfire outside, she was ready to fight.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
"Yes. You're bleeding."
I look down. A graze across my left arm. Shallow, burning. I didn't feel it until she said it. "It's nothing."
"It's not nothing, but it can wait." She steps forward. Touches my face. "Go finish this."
I take her face in my hands. Kiss her once. Hard, brief. Then I'm back in the hallway, stepping over the man with the broken wrist who's trying to crawl away.
It takes another fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of room-clearing and gunfire and the brutal efficiency of the Dead Saints defending their home. We outnumber them slightly, and we know the building. Every corner, every shadow, every angle. Our advantages are their downfall.
When it's over, there are eight Crest members on the ground. Three dead. Five in various states of broken. Our side. Brick took a knife to the arm. Donovan's got a split scalp from where he caught a pistol butt. And Rook.
"Rook is down!" Gage's voice from the roof access stairwell.
I take the stairs three at a time. Rook is propped against the roof access door, his hand pressed to his left side. Blood between his fingers. His face is pale under the moonlight but his eyes are clear.
"Caught one," he says through clenched teeth. "Low-caliber. Didn't punch through the vest completely. I think it's in the muscle."
"Let me see." I kneel beside him. Move his hand. The wound is in his flank, just below the Kevlar's coverage. The gap between the vest and his belt. It's bleeding but not pumping. No arterial involvement.
"I'm getting Margot," I say.
"The nurse?"
"Stay awake. That's an order."
I get her. She comes up the stairs barefoot, in sleep clothes, and drops to her knees beside Rook without hesitation. Her hands move over him with the practiced efficiency I first saw on my own knuckles. Assessing, decisive, sure.
"Penetrating wound, left lateral abdomen," she says, clinical and calm. Like she hasn’t just been locked in a bathroom hearing gunfire. "No exit. Bullet's still in there. I need light, gauze, anything to pack this. He needs a hospital."
"Can't do hospitals," Rook grits out. "Gunshot reports."
"Then I need supplies. Real supplies." She looks at me. "Can you get me a surgical kit? Forceps, hemostats, local anesthetic if you have it. I can get this bullet out if it's superficial."
"We've got a kit. Gage. Downstairs cabinet, the green bag."
Gage moves. I hold the flashlight while Margot works. She talks Rook through it. Calm, professional, commanding in a way I've never seen from her. This is her territory. Her competence. She's as dangerous in her domain as I am in mine. I’m fucking addicted to her competence in this moment.
She gets the bullet out. It's small-caliber. .22, embedded in the oblique muscle. No organ involvement. She packs the wound, applies pressure, directs Colt to hold the gauze while she checks Rook's vitals.
"He'll need antibiotics. The real kind, not fish-mox." She looks at me. "And I’ll be monitoring for the next twenty-four hours."
"Done."
Rook looks up at me, pale and sweating. "She's good, Pres."
"Yeah." I look at her. Blood on her hands, my blood on her face from where I kissed her, kneeling on a rooftop at four in the morning, saving my Sergeant-at-Arms with steady hands and fierce focus. "She is."
Below us, the Memphis PD sirens are distant. Someone reported the gunfire. We have maybe fifteen minutes to make this look like nothing. To clear the bodies, the casings, the evidence. To disappear the violence the way we always have.
But right now, watching Margot work, I make a different calculation. Not about the club. Not about the war. About her.
She's not leaving. And I'm done pretending I'd let her.
Not because she's a witness. Not because she's leverage. Because she's mine. And I'm hers. And whatever comes next, Devlin Marsh, The Crest, the law, the world, comes through me first.