I tell her.
I tell her about Hartley. The firm. What I did for them in the years before Lubbock. What they want me back for. The forty-eight hour timeline.
She listens without interrupting.
When I'm done, she takes a slow breath and her chin comes up and she looks at me with the steadiest eyes I have ever seen. "What do you need me to do?"
I bring her into it.
I tell her the code word. *Lubbock.* If she hears me say it on the phone or in person, she takes Nash and Diesel and goes to Thunder's cabin immediately. Not the bunkhouse. Not the main house. Thunder's cabin, because it sits farthest from the front gate and behind the tree line, and there's an underground bunker underneath it with an access tunnel toward the back of the property with getaway vehicles.
Phantom set it up over a decade ago in case shit ever went awry here during a fight. So the women and children could get out.
An attacker would reach every other building on the ranch before they reached Thunder's. That gives her the most time and the most warning.
I show her the burner phone I have in a drawer in the kitchen—a different one from the Hartley burner—and tell her my number is the only one programmed into it.
I tell her how to get to Thunder's bunker and the tunnel. How the bunker will hold up to sixty people, if necessary. It has water, food, beds, a radio, and an armory.
I tell her the order of brothers she trusts in any emergency. Banshee first because he's at the gate. Thunder second because he is the most tactically capable man on this ranch besides me. Blaze third. Spur fourth.
She repeats all of it back to me. She has it after one pass.
Then she steps in close and puts her hand on my chest, flat over my heart.
I bend down and press my mouth against her forehead. I keep it there for a long moment.
* * *
Phantom calls in the late afternoon. I take it on the front porch. "Rogue, how's my ranch?"
"Standin'. Banshee turned Todd away at the gate this mornin'. Hartley called me direct. I've got forty-eight hours."
The pause on the line is the pause of a man recalculating his arrival. "I'm at the hotel in College Station. We pull out at first light. I'll be at the gate by suppertime tomorrow."
The word sits a moment. Phantom doesn't rush. "You want backup?"
"Yeah. Holt and Roan if they can roll out by mornin'."
I lean against the porch rail with the phone at my ear. The sun is dropping over the west pasture.
"I'll call 'em as soon as we hang up. They'll be at the ranch by tomorrow afternoon. Each of 'em bringin' two patched brothers."
The relief moves through me slow. Eight Shotgun Saints riders on my road by tomorrow afternoon. "Thank you, Prez."
He's quiet for a moment. I can hear something through the line—a TV in the background of his hotel room, the soft sound of Marlena saying something to Cal. The world he's been in for five days. "Rogue."
The shift in his voice makes me straighten off the rail. "Yeah?"
"Tonight."
"Yeah."
"Take care of her. Take care of the boy. Whatever happens tomorrow, you got tonight. You hear me?"
"I hear you, brother."
"I'll see you at the gate."
