Page 19 of Crossfire Creek Siege

The lights were bright and steady, the massive digital display on the far wall looping through system diagnostics and compound schematics as techs worked in the background. The long glass-topped conference table gleamed beneath the overheads, scattered with tablets, comm headsets, and a few untouched mugs of coffee that smelled burned from sitting too long.

Gage sat on the edge of the table, bare from the waist up, while Beck Culver stitched his arm. The combat medic looked calm as ever, hair pulled back, eyes steady behind his glasses, but his movements carried the practiced rhythm of someone patching up battlefield wounds long past exhaustion.

“Careful,” Gage said through gritted teeth. “You planning to sew me up or upholster me?”

Beck didn’t even glance up. “If I were upholstering you, Kellan, I’d pick better material. Stop twitching.”

Gage snorted, but held still as Beck pulled the thread tight. “You always this gentle with your patients?”

“Only the ones who won’t shut up.”

Across the room, Owen was getting a few stitches of his own, ribbing the medic who worked on him, while Rena sat at a separate table with a bandaged arm. The fluorescent light caught the edge of her hair, the faint tension around her eyes. She looked steady now, but Gage had seen the tremor in her hands earlier.

The way she’d powered through it anyway.

Noah stood near the main display where he was talking quietly with Ruby, who looked none the worse for wear despite being half covered in grime and gunpowder residue. They were no doubt strategizing, because that’s what people like them did. Patch the holes, rebuild the defense, figure out what the hell had happened and move on to the next fight.

Beck tied off the last stitch and cut the thread. “You’re good,” he said. “No heroics for a few days. Let it heal.”

“What if heroics come looking for me?” Gage asked, flexing his arm, testing it.

Beck flashed him a grin. “Then duck.”

From across the room, Rena’s laugh slipped out, quiet, weary, but real. Gage caught her eye for a heartbeat. The flicker of connection steadied something deep in him that the pain hadn’t touched.

They should’ve been dead. Every one of them.

That thought kept looping through his head, sparking a slow, seething burn that no amount of painkillers could dull. They’d been ambushed inside their own damn home, surrounded, cut off, kids screaming while trained killers stalked through the dark. Crossfire Ops was supposed to be untouchable. Untouchable.

And yet tonight had nearly turned into a massacre.

His jaw tightened. The burn in his arm was nothing compared to the heat crawling under his skin. He wasn’t just angry. He was fucking furious. Whoever had pulled this off had planned it too well, known too much. That wasn’t random. That was targeted.

And if the targeting assholes thought this was over, they were dead wrong.

Across the room, Crossfire Creek’s Sheriff Arden Chase ended a phone call and moved toward Noah and Ruby. The sheriff carried herself like she still wore a uniform. Shoulders back, eyes sharp, no-nonsense in the way only a former soldier could be. Late forties, short blonde hair cropped to regulation length, she looked like she’d fit right in at Crossfire Ops rather than a small town sheriff’s office. The badge on her belt might say law enforcement, but the way she moved said she knew how to clear a room with more than words.

“Perimeter’s secure,” Sheriff Chase reported. “I’ve got deputies sweeping the fields, and the feds are en route for evidence collection.”

Gage sat back in his chair, the dull ache in his stitched arm pulsing in rhythm with the quiet hum of the servers behind him. Isla Prescott, Crossfire’s head tech, stood nearby, a tablet in one hand, dark circles under her eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t blinked in hours, scrolling through lines of data and schematics while muttering to herself about security logs and power grid overrides. If anyone could trace the breach, it was Isla.

Gage shifted his attention to the wall of monitors that threw a cold blue glow across the room, a wash of digital light that made the world outside look distant, almost unreal. Each screen streamed a different view of the compound. Security feeds, drone footage, body cams from the deputies stationed at the perimeter.

But at the moment, one screen drew everyone’s attention.

It showed the gates of Crossfire Ops, floodlights cutting through the darkness, vehicles lined up as parents came to collect their kids. There were hugs, tears, flashes of relief caught by the cameras. Gage watched as a medic guided a teenage boy with a bandaged arm toward his mother. Another girl leaned against an EMT, wrapped in a thermal blanket.

Minor injuries. Shaken, bruised, terrified but alive. A lot of little miracles had gone into that happening, and some of it had been luck. There’d been dozens of shots fired, and any one of them could have hit the kids.

Yeah, damn lucky.

He shifted his attention to Lily who sat at the end of the briefing table, wrapped in her blanket. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor showing the other kids, but she didn’t move, didn’t ask to go. Her decision, Noah had said. She wanted to stay for the debrief. To understand.

Riley Burke, Lily’s sister and one of Crossfire’s tech interns, sat beside her, one arm around Lily’s shoulders. Riley looked pale and exhausted, but her presence was steadying. Beck was glad Lily had it.

Noah kept glancing at his nieces, and Gage knew that stance. Control layered over guilt. It didn’t matter that they’d saved lives, what mattered was that the attack had happened at all. That it had happened here, on his watch, with his niece in the middle of it.

Gage’s focus drifted back to the monitors. Parents were driving away now, taillights fading into the Texas dark. The compound gates swung shut again, sealing Crossfire Ops back into its uneasy calm.