Chapter Sixteen #2
The gavel comes down once, and the room goes quiet.
“You all know why we’re here. We’ve been building intelligence on Clemente’s operation for several weeks. Cable’s going to lay out everything we have.” A pause. “This affects all of us, which is why you’re all in this room.” I nod to Cable. “Go.”
Cable opens his laptop and turns it so it faces the full table.
The satellite image fills the screen, and the room reacts, Blood Brothers leaning forward almost as one, Hawke’s eyes moving methodically across the image, Torch already calculating, Trigger studying the access road.
Quill’s expression goes carefully still in the way it does when he is absorbing something significant.
Rhyder doesn’t move. He just looks at the screen, as if memorizing it.
Cable walks them through everything, including the location confirmation, the shell companies, the financial trail, the hacienda itself, including the walls, structures, and security presence.
Thorough and unhurried, he answers every question as it comes, and they come fast from both sides of the table.
“How current is this imagery?” Hawke’s eyes don’t leave the screen.
“Updated three days ago.”
“Access road, is it the only one?” Torch leans forward.
“Only confirmed one. There may be a secondary track on the north side, but it hasn’t been verified yet.”
“The blind spot on the north wall.” Torch continues studying the image. “Fourteen yards. What’s the ground like, open or covered?”
“Scrubland. Low brush. Enough cover for two men moving carefully.”
Torch nods once and sits back, filing it away behind those steady eyes.
“Security rotations.” Luke cuts in. “How complete is your mapping?”
“Partial. South and east perimeter confirmed. North and west are still being built. That’s why we’re not ready to move yet.”
More good and sharp questions come from both sides of the table.
Letting it run, I watch the room and feel something settle in my chest. This is what I’d wanted when I’d made that call to Quill, two clubs in one room, both sets of eyes on the same problem, both clubs with the same reason to want it solved.
Then Cable says, “There’s something else.”
The room goes quiet in a different way.
He pulls up the second set of images, traffic camera footage, grainy and washed out, a figure moving through the hacienda gate.
Letting the room look at it for a long moment, he touches the screen again.
The image fills the screen—the build, the height, the way he moves, one hand in the pocket of an expensive jacket, the other loose at his side.
“Two separate sightings. Different dates. Three weeks apart. The footage isn’t clean enough for a confirmed identification.” A pause. “But the build is consistent. The height is consistent. The movement pattern is consistent with—”
“Lawrence.”
Rhyder’s voice.
Flat. Quiet. Absolute.
And the room goes completely still.
Cable looks at me. Giving him a single nod, I watch the confirmation land around the table.
“Consistent with Lawrence.”
Rhyder explodes out of his chair, the feet hitting the concrete floor like a shot, cutting through the silence.
He’s up before anyone has fully registered he is moving, both hands flat on the table, jaw set, every line of him pulled tight with a fury that has been building for over a year and has just been handed somewhere to go.
“That motherfucker.” Low, controlled, and more dangerous for it.
“He ran straight back to Clemente, and we’ve been—”
“Rhyder.” Quill is already moving.
Around the table in three strides, both hands on Rhyder’s shoulders, firm, the grip of a man who knows exactly how strong the other man is. Torch is on his feet from the other side, the two of them forming a wall between Rhyder and wherever he was about to go.
“I hear you.” Quill’s voice drops to something private and absolute.
“Every single word of it. And I promise you that man does not walk away from this. Not this time.” Holding Rhyder’s gaze until he feels the tension shift, not gone, just contained.
“But right now, I need you to sit down and let Cable finish. Can you do that?”
A long moment.
Torch’s hand is steady on Rhyder’s back.
Rhyder looks at Quill, then he reaches back, rights his chair, and sits.
“Continue…”
Cable turns back to his screen.
Sitting at the head of that table, the anger moves through me in a long, slow wave, not at Rhyder, never at Rhyder, but at myself.
Because I had shot Lawrence. Had stood over him and emptied Ryan’s gun into him and watched him fall, but I had not gone back to confirm it.
In the chaos of the fire, smoke, and Tracker bleeding in my arms, I hadn’t gone back, and this room, this table, that footage on the screen, this is the cost of that.
The cost of not going back to confirm the kill.
That is what I am going to carry for a long time.
Maybe always.
But I am going to fix it.
Cable finishes. Entry points, blind spots, communication patterns, everything he has and everything still needed.
“How long?”
“Two weeks.” Cable meets my gaze. “To complete the security rotation mapping, confirm all entry and exit points, and identify the cleanest approach. If we move before that, we’re going in with incomplete intelligence.” A pause. “And we all know what that costs.”
Nobody needs him to elaborate on that.
“Two weeks.” My eyes move around the table, both clubs, every face. “Cable completes the mapping. No movement until it’s done. Then we reconvene and finalize the plan before anyone goes anywhere.” A pause. “We do this right. We do this once.”
Looking Rhyder directly in the eye, I make sure he hears the next part. “When we go in, Lawrence does not walk out.”
Rhyder holds my gaze.
Quill nods once.
The gavel comes down, church is finished..
Finding Rhyder outside, I cross the lot to where he is standing alone at the edge of it, a beer untouched in his hand, looking at nothing with the stillness of a man who has too many things running through his head.
Standing beside him, I let the heat press down around us both before speaking.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to bring them both down… Clemente and Lawrence. That’s from me to you, directly.” I take a moment and continue, “I should have confirmed the kill. That’s on me. And I’m going to make it right.”
Rhyder is quiet for a long time, with the clubhouse noise behind us muffled through the walls.
Then he turns. “I know you will.” Something in his face goes deeper than the fury, something that had lived underneath all of it for a long time and had never quite found its way to the surface until now.
“But Tate, I need to be there. Right beside you when it happens. Need to look that man in the eyes and be the one who pulls the trigger.” The words sit between us in the heat.
“For Lexi. For everything she went through. I need to see it for myself.”
Looking at him, I feel the weight of that promise settle into me the way important ones do, not lightly, not with any uncertainty.
“You’ll be there. I promise you that.”
He finally lifts the beer and drinks.
Standing beside him in the heat, I do the same, and neither of us needs anything more than that.
***
Flame fires up the grill around two.
The smell of it drifts through the clubhouse and out into the yard, and the whole atmosphere shifts. The yard fills up slowly, tables come out, music floats through the open clubhouse doors, and noise level climbs back toward something that resembles an ordinary evening.
When the yard begins to fill, I call Sophia.
Two rings before she picks up, her voice carrying that quality it gets in the afternoons when she’s been working for hours, slightly distracted, coming back from somewhere in her own head.
“Hey.”
“Hey. How’s the day been?”
“Good, actually.” I hear the sound of her chair shifting and papers moving. “The meeting with Victoria Chen went well. She loved the concept direction. We’re moving forward.” A pause, and the smile is audible. “Trevor called after. He was pleased.”
“Good.” And I mean it.
“How are things there?”
“Good. Blood Brothers are here. We’ve been in meetings most of the day.” There’s a pause. “How do you feel about coming to the clubhouse tonight? There’s food. Quill’s here.”
A silence, and the quality of it tells me everything. She wants to say yes and is working out how.
“Quill’s there?” she softly questions.
“Yeah.”
A shorter silence before, “I’d like that,” and the softness in her voice when she says it does something to the air in my chest that I don’t examine too closely.
“I’ll get Remy to pick you up. Six, okay?”
“Six is good.” A small pause, softer than the ones before it. “Tate?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for calling.”
Standing there in the yard after we hang up, the phone loose in my hand, I let that sit for just a second before going to find Remy.