Chapter 19 The Ambush
The shot hadn't come from Voss's men, who scattered as startled as Cain's own crew, a wild card neither president had accounted for.
Cain's instinct took over before thought could catch up, shoving Diesel behind a stack of pallets, turning to do the same for Tomas, a young patch barely two years into his cut who'd frozen at the sound of gunfire.
The second shot caught Cain in the shoulder as he pulled Tomas to safety, a burning wrongness spreading through his arm as he hit the ground hard. The world narrowed to his own ragged breathing and Diesel's voice shouting his name from somewhere that felt very far away.
They'd learn later the shooter was a rogue Vultures associate acting outside Voss's orders entirely, a hothead trying to force an escalation his own president hadn't sanctioned. Voss handed him over within the hour.
Forty minutes away, Wren was closing up the shop when her phone rang with Diesel's number instead of Cain's, and she knew, with the same sick certainty she'd felt about her father, that whatever came next was going to change everything again.
"Wren." Diesel's voice was rough, urgent. "You need to get to Iron Falls Memorial. Right now. It's Cain."
Tomas, still frozen against the pallets even after the shooting stopped, stared at Cain crumpled a few feet away, blood already soaking dark through his shirt, and felt something break open in his own chest that had nothing to do with the bullet.
"He pushed me. He saw it coming and he pushed me instead of himself.
""Put pressure on it," Diesel barked, already at Cain's side, hands slick with blood, voice raw.
"Cain. Cain, stay with me. Ambulance is coming. Stay with me."
Cain's eyes were open, glassy, finding Tomas across the chaos. "You good, kid?""I'm good. You shouldn't have."
"Wasn't a decision," Cain managed, voice thin.
"Don't ever let anybody tell you it was a decision.
There wasn't time for one." His eyes fluttered, and Diesel's grip on his shoulder tightened, keeping pressure, keeping him talking, keeping him present through the longest six minutes of Diesel's life until the sirens finally, finally became audible over the ringing in everyone's ears.
The ambulance ride passed in fragments for Cain, the paramedic's hands working fast and sure above him, Diesel's voice somewhere close, repeating his name like an anchor line thrown into rough water.
He thought, in the disjointed way a mind works when the body is busy simply trying to survive, about Wren's face the day of the broken window, about the specific fear in her eyes that he'd promised, then, never to leave her wondering about again.
He thought he might be about to break that promise in the worst possible way, and the thought terrified him more than the bullet did.
Wren would learn, much later, secondhand from Diesel, about the particular chaos of those first minutes, the way Tomas had frozen and then, once Cain went down, had somehow found the presence of mind to drag him behind cover while Diesel returned fire toward the tree line, the specific, terrifying speed with which an ordinary afternoon of tense negotiation had become something neither club would fully recover from without real cost. She would be grateful, hearing it all secondhand, that she hadn't had to witness it directly, and guilty, in the same breath, that her gratitude came at the expense of everyone who had.
Voss himself, standing frozen for one long moment amid the chaos before his own instincts caught up, would later admit to Diesel, in the strange, uneasy peace that eventually formed between their clubs, that watching Cain move to shield Tomas without a flicker of hesitation had been the single moment that shifted his entire private assessment of the man.
"Figured him for exactly the distracted, weak president I needed him to be," Voss said.
"Watched him take a bullet for a kid two years into his patch instead, and had to admit I'd read him wrong the whole time.
Diesel would carry the weight of that afternoon for years, the particular helplessness of watching his oldest friend go down and being unable, in the chaos of the moment, to do anything beyond apply pressure and wait for sirens that felt like they were taking an eternity to arrive.
He never fully spoke about it, even to Cain, the specific texture of those six minutes remaining a private wound he processed in his own time, in his own way, understanding that some experiences simply didn't translate cleanly into words shared even with the person they'd happened to.