Finn hits him from the side. The sentence ends against the hood of the SUV, Finn's forearm across the back of his neck, his body bent forward over the metal. Rex pulls the younger one out of the driver's side. The kid comes out swinging and Dawson puts him on the ground in two moves, his face pressed into the frozen asphalt, Colt's boot on his neck.
I open my own door. The third man doesn't move to stop me.
Knox looks at me. His face is blank except for the vein in his temple, the one I've seen pulse twice in seven years—once when the clan scouts photographed Sarah, once now.
"You good?"
I step out. The cold hits me and the forest smells like pine and wet earth and the ocean crashes against rock somewhere below the headland. My legs hold.
Knox grips my shoulder. The same hold he gave me the night I patched in, the night he saidwelcome home, brother,except this time he digs in hard enough to bruise and he doesn't let go for five full seconds.
He steps back.
I walk to the front of the SUV.
Finn pulls the older man upright. The smile is gone. Blood runs from a split in his brow and his jacket hangs open. The pleasant, conversational mask has cracked apart to show what sits underneath: a man who sells fighters and picked the wrong stretch of highway to drive them on.
I stand in front of him.
The fists that carved a hummingbird from black walnut wrap around his throat. The violence the pit built into me, used on my own terms, for my own people.
He grabs my wrist. His fingers don't reach halfway around it.
"You spent years calling me a number." My voice comes out low, flat, the rumble that vibrates through the ground under our boots. "You came for me when I was ten and you came for me again and you used the woman I love as a bargaining chip."
His feet leave the ground. I lift him one-armed the way the handlers lifted me by my horns when I wouldn't stand after a fight—except they had leverage and tools and I have nothing but the body they made and the choice they never gave me.
I set him down.
His knees buckle. He hits the asphalt and stays there, coughing, clutching his throat.
I kneel. My face level with his.
"This is the last time anyone from the Kuznetsov family enters Nightfall Cove." Each word costs me the way all words cost me, dragged up from somewhere deep, and I spend them because they're worth spending. "Next time, nobody drives home."
I straighten and turn to Knox. His face cracks for half a second, pride and relief breaking through, and I open my mouth to say something I've never said to him before—
The shot splits the night.
My ears ring. I spin. Beside me, Colt stands with his Glock levelled and smoke curling from the barrel, his face flat, his aim locked on a point behind me.
The older man is on the asphalt. His pistol skids across the frozen ground and stops against the front tyre. Colt put a round through his chest. His eyes are open. His mouth works once, twice, and then it stops. A pool of blood spreads underneath him.
Colt lowers the weapon. His arm doesn't shake.
"He was going to shoot you," he says. Matter-of-fact. The voice of a man who's made the call and will sleep fine tonight.
Knox looks at the body. Looks at Colt. Nods once.
Finn hauls the younger one out of the car. The kid's face is grey, blood from his nose smeared across his chin, his whole body shaking so hard his teeth click. He stares at the man on the ground and I can see the moment it registers—the older man, his partner, his mentor, dead on a coastal highway because he bet on a bullet being faster than a brother with a clear line of sight.
Rex steps in front of the kid and blocks his view.
"Look at me." Rex waits until the kid's eyes find his. "You're going to drive south. You're going to find whoever sent you. And you're going to tell them that Number Seven is retired, that the Feral Sons MC has claimed Nightfall Cove, and that anyone who comes looking for Garrett Maddox will leave the same way your friend just did." He tilts his head toward the body. "You understand?"
The kid nods. He can't speak.
Colt opens the driver's side door. The kid folds himself back behind the wheel. The third man is already in the back, pressed against the far door, staring straight ahead like a man who has decided he never saw any of this.
