Chapter 10
Tourniquet was already moving before the crash finished echoing—combat instincts snapping him from sleep to action in the space of a heartbeat. Paige was beside him, awake just as fast, her body rolling off the bed and into a crouch without conscious thought.
Helmand reflexes. Thank God for them.
"Get to the med station," he said, already pulling on his cut. "East corner of the main building. I prepped it two days ago."
"I'm not hiding while—"
"You're not hiding. You're setting up triage." He grabbed her shoulders, met her eyes. "Brothers are about to get hurt. You know field medicine. I need you functional, not fighting."
Her jaw tightened. But she nodded.
"Go," he said. "I'll find you when it's over."
He kissed her—hard, fast, a promise and a claim—and then he was through the door, weapon in hand, moving toward the sound of chaos.
The compound was alive with motion. Brothers pouring from the bunkhouse, weapons appearing from hidden caches, the organized fury of men who'd trained for exactly this scenario. Permafrost's voice cut through the noise, directing positions with cold authority.
"Tourniquet! East fence—they're breaching!"
He ran.
The gate was destroyed—a heavy truck had rammed through, crumpling the reinforced steel like paper. Bodies moved in the pre-dawn darkness, too many to count immediately. Professional movement. Tactical spacing.
This wasn't construction workers playing soldier.
This was Greer's real muscle.
Gunfire erupted from the main building—Whiteout on overwatch, his rifle cracking in measured intervals. Each shot dropped a target. But more kept coming, pouring through the breach in the fence line, fanning out with coordinated precision.
Tourniquet counted ten. Twelve. More behind them.
A man stood at the back of the assault force, directing traffic with a clipboard mentality—pointing, gesturing, sending teams toward predetermined objectives. Organized. Methodical.
Owen Beale. Greer's operations coordinator.
The man who scheduled intimidation campaigns and turned acquisition targets into actionable timelines.
Tonight, he'd scheduled an assault.
Tourniquet dropped into cover behind a generator housing, weapon up. Two of Beale's men moved toward the main building, assault rifles sweeping the compound. He put them down with four shots—center mass, clinical, the same triage logic he'd used in Kandahar.
Threat eliminated. Move on.
Tundra appeared from the darkness, rifle in hand, mountain warfare fury compressed into efficient violence. "They hit the east and west simultaneously. Coordinated."
"Beale's running it."
"I see him." Tundra's eyes were cold. "He's mine."
"Negative. I need you on the west breach. Ironside's pinned."
A flicker of resistance. Then Tundra nodded and melted into the shadows.
The battle at the gate was brutal. Tourniquet fought and assessed in alternation—two rounds downrange, then hands checking a brother's bleeding arm, then back to the rifle. The dual role he'd been born for.
Coldstart went down with a round through the shoulder. Tourniquet was there in seconds, applying pressure, shouting for covering fire while he packed the wound with hemostatic gauze.
"Through and through," he said. "You'll live. Stay down."
"Like hell—"
"Stay down."
He was moving again before Coldstart could argue.
The assault force was taking losses. Whiteout's precision fire had dropped four.
Ironside's counterattack on the west had scattered another team.
But Beale kept sending men forward, kept directing the assault with that clipboard calm, treating the compound like a construction project that just needed the right scheduling.
Tourniquet worked his way toward the breach point.
Bodies littered the ground—some Greer's men, some brothers bleeding from wounds that would need attention when this was over. The smell of cordite and blood filled the cold November air.
Through the chaos, he caught a glimpse of the main building.
Paige.
She'd set up the med station exactly where he'd told her—east corner, defensible position, clear sight lines.
But she wasn't just waiting. She was working.
A brother he couldn't identify from this distance lay on the table, and her hands moved with the steady precision of someone who'd done field triage under worse conditions.
Pride swelled in his chest. Fierce. Possessive.
My woman.
A bullet cracked past his head, and he dropped back into combat focus.
Beale had moved forward, directing the remnants of his force toward a final push on the main building. Eight men left, maybe ten. Enough to overwhelm the defenders if they hit simultaneously.
Tourniquet intercepted the flanking team.
Three men came around the generator housing, expecting clear ground. They found him instead.
The first dropped before he could raise his weapon. The second got a shot off—wide, panicked—before Tourniquet put two rounds through his chest. The third tried to run.
He didn't make it.
The compound fell into a brief, terrible silence.
Then Beale's voice, shouting orders, trying to rally his scattered forces. But the assault had broken. The coordinated precision was gone, replaced by desperate men fighting for survival against defenders who knew this ground intimately.
Tourniquet moved on the breach point.
Beale saw him coming. The operations coordinator—the man who'd scheduled destruction like project milestones—raised his weapon with hands that had probably never fired under pressure before.
Too slow.
Tourniquet closed the distance in seconds. His first shot took Beale's weapon hand, shattering bone and metal together. The coordinator screamed, clutching the ruin of his fingers.
"Greer sent you to do his work," Tourniquet said, advancing. "Where is he?"
"Fuck you—"
"Wrong answer."
He'd spent four deployments learning exactly how bodies failed. Where the joints weakened. Where the arteries ran close to the surface. Where pressure produced pain without permanent damage, and where it produced the other kind.
A combat medic who understood where bodies held together knew exactly where they came apart.
Beale broke in under a minute.
"Virginia," he gasped. "Greer's in Virginia. Project office. He never comes to—" A wet cough. "He never gets his hands dirty."
"Tonight he did." Tourniquet straightened. "By proxy."
Owen Beale looked up at him with eyes that had finally understood the difference between scheduling violence and experiencing it.
"Please—"
Tourniquet thought about Paige's shop, destroyed. The safehouse, surrounded. The compound, assaulted. All of it coordinated by the man bleeding at his feet.
"No," he said.
The final shot was clinical. Efficient.
Mercy, in its own way.
Dawn was breaking by the time the compound was secured.
Tourniquet moved through the aftermath, assessing damage with eyes that had done this too many times. Bodies dragged to the gate for disposal. Wounded brothers gathered at the med station where Paige still worked, her hands steady and her focus absolute.
Twelve attackers dead. Three wounded and secured for questioning. Owen Beale among the fallen.
On their side: Coldstart's shoulder wound, already stabilized. Ice had taken shrapnel to the leg—painful but not critical. Two prospects with minor injuries.
No deaths.
It felt like a miracle. It felt like a warning.
Greer had sent fifteen men and his operations coordinator. His next move would be worse.
Permafrost appeared beside him, surveying the carnage with cold eyes.
"Beale talked before he died?"
"Virginia. Greer's project office. He's been running this from behind a desk."
"Then we know where to find him."
"Not yet." Tourniquet shook his head. "He's got at least one more lieutenant. The Duluth muscle—Karl Janney. Professional enforcer. Beale was logistics. Janney's the weapon Greer deploys when logistics fail."
"You think he'll come himself?"
"I think he'll send Janney first. Test our defenses again." Tourniquet looked at the breach in the fence, the bodies being cleared, the compound that had held against a coordinated assault. "We hurt him tonight. Killed his foreman and his coordinator. He's running out of people to hide behind."
"Good." Permafrost's voice was ice. "Let him run out. Then we end this."
Tourniquet nodded and moved toward the med station.
Paige looked up as he approached. Blood on her hands—not hers—and exhaustion in her eyes. But she was standing. Functional. Exactly what he'd asked her to be.
"Casualties?" she asked.
"Coldstart's shoulder. Ice's leg. Nothing fatal." He stopped in front of her, close enough to touch. "You did good."
"I did my job." But something in her expression softened. "You're not hurt?"
"Not this time."
She reached up and touched his face, her bloody fingers leaving streaks on his jaw. He didn't flinch.
"The brothers who saw me work the station," she said quietly. "They're not looking at me like a woman under protection anymore."
"No. They're looking at you like the compound's second medic."
"Is that what I am?"
He caught her hand, pressed his lips to her palm. The same gesture she'd made in the med bay, turned back on her.
"You're whatever you want to be," he said. "But tonight, you earned your place."
Around them, the compound stirred back to life. Brothers securing the perimeter, old ladies emerging to help with cleanup, the machinery of survival grinding into motion.
The assault was over.
But the war wasn't finished.
Somewhere in Virginia, Mitchell Greer was learning that his coordinator was dead and his assault had failed. Somewhere, Karl Janney was waiting for orders.
Tourniquet pulled Paige close, felt her heart beating against his chest.
For now, she was safe.
For now, that was enough.