Epilogue #4
Hannah should pull away. Should remind him about boundaries and consent and the dozen reasons why letting a man who'd just killed two people touch her face was insane.
She didn't move.
"I've been handling this on my own for three months," she said. "I can keep handling it."
"Your clinic is destroyed. You've got a black eye. And whoever these people are, they're done asking nicely." His thumb traced the edge of her bruise, gentle in a way that didn't match the violence she'd witnessed. "You're smart enough to know what comes next if you stay here alone."
She was. That was the problem.
"So what, I just... go with you? Hide at your compound while you handle everything?"
"You share what you know. You let us protect you while we hunt these bastards down. And when it's over, you rebuild." His eyes held hers, dark and intense. "I'll make sure of it."
"You can't promise that."
"I can promise whoever did this to you is going to regret it.
" His hand dropped from her face, but he didn't step back.
"I can promise no one's going to touch you again without going through me first. And I can promise that when we find them—and we will find them—they're going to die the same way their product killed your patients. "
Hannah's breath caught. She'd grown up around hard men. Moved eleven times as an Army brat, watched her father deploy to places he couldn't name, learned to read the language of violence in shoulders and silences.
She'd never met anyone who spoke it quite like Legion.
"This is insane," she heard herself say. "I don't even know your real name."
"You know what matters." He pulled out his phone, checking something on the screen. "Brothers have the scene cleared. We need to move."
"I haven't agreed to anything."
"You haven't disagreed either." That almost-smile again, sharp and knowing. "Grab whatever you need from the back. We leave in five."
"And if I refuse? If I tell you I can handle this myself?"
Legion looked at her for a long moment. The club sounds faded. The ruined clinic disappeared. There was just him, silver and scarred and more dangerous than anyone she'd ever met, watching her with eyes that saw too much.
"Then I'd tell you that stopped being your decision the moment they put their hands on you." His voice was quiet. Final. "You're coming with me, Hannah. The only question is whether you walk to my bike or I carry you."
She should be furious. Should be screaming about autonomy and choice and every feminist principle she'd ever held.
Instead, something hot and complicated twisted in her chest.
"Five minutes," she said, and hated how much it sounded like surrender.
Legion nodded once, satisfaction flickering in his expression.
"Four and a half now. Move."
She moved.
Chapter 3
The chapel fell silent when Legion walked in.
Seven men around a scarred wooden table, cigarette smoke curling toward exposed rafters, the weight of decades of combined combat experience filling the room. His brothers. His responsibility. The family he'd built from operators the Army had used up and thrown away.
"Church is in session." Legion took his seat at the head of the table. "We've got a situation."
Ghost leaned back in his chair, Delta-quiet and watchful. "The bodies Forge just made disappear?"
"Those were symptoms." Legion pulled out his phone, brought up the photos he'd taken at Hannah's clinic. "This is the disease."
He passed the phone around, letting them see the destruction. The smashed equipment. The scattered files. Hannah's black eye, captured in a shot she didn't know he'd taken.
Forge's jaw tightened when he saw it. "Someone did that to a woman?"
"Someone did that to our woman." The words came out harder than Legion intended.
He saw the looks exchanged around the table—curiosity, surprise, the beginning of something like amusement.
He ignored all of it. "She runs a PT clinic near Liberty.
Specializes in veterans. Three of her patients have overdosed in the past three months. "
"Overdoses happen." Static's voice was careful. "Lot of brothers come home broken. Pills are easy."
"These weren't accidents." Legion laid out what Hannah had told him—the phone calls, the pattern, the targeted approach. "Someone's using her patient records to identify marks. Veterans with chronic pain conditions who are already in the system."
"Hunting ground." Ghost's flat affect didn't change, but his eyes went cold. "They're using her clinic as a target list."
"And when she started asking questions, they sent muscle to shut her up."
Silence around the table. These men had seen worse—had done worse, in places that didn't appear on official maps. But this was different. This was home. This was their people being hunted on ground they'd bled for.
"I've heard rumors." Ghost pulled a cigarette from his pack, lit it with steady hands. "New pipeline running product through the veteran community. High-quality stuff, pharmaceutical grade. Word is there's a pain clinic involved—legit front, dirty operation."
"Which clinic?"
"Still working on that." Ghost exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. "But the overdose pattern matches. Someone's targeting vets who are already managing chronic conditions. Offering them alternatives that turn out to be death sentences."
Cargo spoke up from the far end of the table. "My cousin's boy. Philip. Twenty-two, Ranger tab, fucked his back on a training jump." His voice went rough. "Overdosed six weeks ago. His mama said he was doing better. Said some doctor called him about a new treatment."
The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
"Same thing happened to Trooper's neighbor," Forge added. "Old Airborne sergeant, been managing pain since Vietnam. Someone got to him with promises of cheaper meds. He's dead now too."
Legion let the anger build around the table. These weren't statistics. These were their brothers, their families, their community. Someone was hunting in their territory, and they'd been too slow to see it.
Not anymore.
"Here's what we know." He kept his voice controlled, the way he'd learned to in briefings where the stakes were measured in body counts.
"Professional operation, possibly connected to larger distribution networks.
They've got medical access—either a crooked clinic or someone inside the system feeding them patient data.
They've got muscle, at least enough to send two contractors after a civilian PT. "
"Had muscle," Trooper corrected. "Past tense now."